21st single wiper birthday card.

Hello crafty peeps and welcome to my crafty nook. I hope you've all had a good weekend. Sorry it's been so long since my last blog post, the recent hot weather made it unbearable to craft in my tiny crudy, yesterday was the first time in weeks that I've been able to make anything and even just making one card in the heat gave me a migraine (have you ever tried to colour in when you've got pre-migraine auras - it's next to impossible!) I still have the residue of the migraine so I'll keep this short. The first card I'd like to share is one I made for my God Daughter's anniversary of her Baptism - she's a little angel so what could be more appropriate than an angel card. The image is from my stash and I coloured it in using Spectrum Noir Sparkle brush markers. The second card I'd like to share is one I made for my nephew's 21st birthday. I'm uploading straight from my phone and it's not doing things the way I'm used to so the photos may be after the text not within it as they usually are. I hope you like my latest makes, the Christmas in July 5from5 challenge will be up on the next couple of days - fingers crossed! Until next time - keep crafting! Love and crafty hugs, Sarah xx xx

Starry Impossible Card

Hello crafty peeps and welcome to my crafty nook nook! I hope you are all well and looking forward to the weekend. As a rule I'm not particularly superstitious but I do tend to be a bit tense when it's Friday the 13th - it always seems to be a day when the mail contains unexpected bills or unwelcome visitors pop by (can't say I would personally choose to go visiting on Friday the 13th!) or niggling accidents happen - nothing particularly serious just enough to put me in a bad mood. Are you superstitious? Leave a comment below if you are.

Anyway whatever day of the week it is, I  find spending some time in my crudy crafting usually gets me out of my bad mood. As a precaution, I'm planning on having a bit of a craft session if I have the time.

I'd like to share a card I've made for one of my best friends, it's his birthday on Sunday and as I've mentioned before, I find men's cards to be particularly challenging. I've spent quite a few hours in the last couple of days trying to come up with something, I experimented with ink blended backgrounds (which would probably be easier to make if I had more than two distress oxides - as good as they are they still have limitations if you only have two colours lol) and though I like the results, nothing seemed to be the right thing so I decided to save my background s for another day and made an impossible card instead .

Although some of the star elements look red or gold in the photos, all the stars were diecut out using silver foiled cardstock.  Most of the stars were diecut out using unbranded dies from Ebay the exception being the largest star diecut which is a Crafter's Companion edge'ables die. It's actually a Christmas die but stars are great all year round. I teamed the silver stars with a deep blue card for a sophisticated look. I really like the look of this card, stars are great for men's cards and I think the silver and dark blue cardstock really go well together.

It's been pretty difficult to even get this post up because I'm using my phone again and it's now the fourth attempt writing this because everytime I accidentally moved my phone, it would delete the post without saving -- I'm being very careful not to move the phone as I type!

I hope you've enjoyed my latest make,as always if you have any questions or comments please leave them in the usual places and until next time - keep crafting!

Love and crafty hugs,

Sarah xx xx

Christmas in July Blog Challenge

Hello crafty peeps and welcome to my crafty nook! I hope you have all had a good weekend and that the weather isn't too much for you. It's not actually too bad here on the Yorkshire coast and in fact we've had overcast skies for a couple of days with what my husband calls mizzle (mist/ drizzle) which hangs around in the air but doesn't reach the ground,

It might not be the weather for it but July is good time to start making your Christmas cards etc if you haven't already started. A lot of the craft companies have released their Christmas collections or are about to so there's lots of gorgeous crafty goodies to choose from. Tbh I'm not planning on buying any new Christmas products this time as I have boxes of stuff from previous years and I really need to use some of it up plus it's not going to be long before the craft magazines start churning out Christmas freebies so I need to make space for those.

This month's blog challenge is perfect for anyone with an already overflowing Christmas craft stash like me because I'd like you to shop your stash and make five cards and/or tags using five Christmas craft items. You can either make five cards, five tags or a combination of both - heck if you're really inspired you could make five of each! You can use basic craft items such as card, inks and adhesive but try not to go out and buy new items but instead adapt what you have available. The more you use up, the more space you'll free up for new goodies!

I've already made around twenty cards so to encourage me to stick to the challenge and not be tempted to cheat if life gets in the way (we have to have yet another flat inspection this time the electrics which means the electrician needs access to every single socket - most of ours are covered by furniture which means emptying the crudy again plus stuff in the bedroom - argh!!!) I am going to share them now. Don't worry,  I made the cards in batches so you're not going to have to look at twenty plus photos lol. That's a point, you can either make five batch cards/tags or five bespoke ones, it's entirely up to you.

 Made last year for my great-niece who decided not to make an appearance until after Christmas Day

Although the cards are made in batches, they are still individual cards because I have used different colours of card  etc for each design. This means you can make multiples of the same design quickly while retaining that individual and handcrafted look.

I hope you like my examples of batch and bespoke Christmas cards and I really hope you'll join in this five from five Christmas in July blog challenge. The closing date is the 30th July which gives us a few weeks to get the cards made. I would love it if you joined in, if you'd like your cards etc to be added to the blog then please email me with photos and a few details of your makes by midnight on the 30th July so I can add a new blog post by the 1st August 2018. My email is craftynook@outlook.com.  If you have any questions or comments then please leave them in the usual places and until next time - keep crafting!

Love and crafty hugs,

Sarah xx

A few cards to share.

Hello crafty peeps and welcome to my crafty nook! I'm trying out my phone again and hopefully I'll be able to add photos this time. I've taken some using the phone camera and I've got to say I'm very impressed by the photo quality, of course what looks good on the screen doesn't necessarily look great on a blog post. Fingers crossed!

Well hopefully that's worked and the photos are all the same size. The photos uploaded a lot quicker than the PC but it took far longer to do everything else. I hope you like my latest makes . The cards are for my sister-in-law's partner and two of his children, both girls. The cat card is for a ten year old and the gorgeous Besties fairy is for a five year old. The cat card has a rip strip inside with money hidden under it. I was concerned that the five year old might rip the actual card opening it so I'll just add the money to the envelope. The final card is for my brother--in-law and is an impossible card made using a paper collection by Trimcraft and a shirt die set also by Trimcraft.

I hope you like my latest makes, I had a lot of fun making them and the Besties fairy card is my favourite, I coloured it in with Spectrum Noir Sparkle brush markers. I hope you have a brilliant weekend (it's Friday tomorrow!)  and as always if you have any questions please leave them in the usual places. Until next time - keep crafting!

Love and crafty hugs,

Sarah xxx

A few changes....

Hello crafty peeps and welcome to my crafty nook. I hope you had a good weekend, it was very quiet here in my crafty nook which was a good thing as it's been very noisy in the flat below us on Friday and again on Monday. No one knows what is being done but we suspect a new kitchen is being installed. We can't ask the tenant because sadly he passed away a few weeks ago. The noise from the work is atrocious, the whole flat shakes and e
ven though we were shouting at the top of our voices, my husband and I couldn't hear one
another. hopefully the work will be finished soon and things will get back to normal.

One of the changes mentioned in title is the way I'm writing thit blackog post - it's on my new "smart" phone. Tbh I'm not sure how smart a phone is when it's supposed to be an unlocked sim free phone but the only Sim that will fit it is a nano Sim card - mine is far too big to go in the slot so I've had to order a nano Sim card from my mobile provider and I'll have to add all my contacts manually which doesn't sound that "smart" to me! Frustratingly it won't read anything stored on my memory card so all my photos have vanished plus all the music I'd saved , I probably sound thoroughly ungrateful and really I'm not, it"s just I'm not great with new technology and this phone will take some getting used to.

I had hoped to add some photos to this post but they are all stored on the PC at the moment and I don't know how to take photos whilst blogging, something to try another day.  I will update this post on the PC with photos later on. Please excuse any typos, predictive text comes up with some complete gobble-de-gook!

I've managed to lose two conplete paragraphs which is most vexing but goes along way to explaining why new technology and I don't get on - plus all the buttons are on the right hand side of the phone and as I am left handed I'm holding the phone in my right hand and I keep hitting the buttons by mistake which is driving me insane and this post has taken me nearly 3 hours to write.

Crafty hugs and love from

Sarah xxx

I'm back!!!

Hello crafty peeps and welcome to my crafty nook! I'm hoping you've noticed I haven't posted anything for quite sometime - this hasn't been by choice, our broadband stopped working late on Sunday the 2nd of June and it's taken until today (the 20th) to get it sorted. We were fairly confident that the problem was with the router but our broadband provider wouldn't take our word for it and made us pay for new filters, then asked us to test and replace if necessary the face plates that the filters plug into (they were fine!), then arranged to send an engineer to our flat but didn't put the right information on the 'ticket' and the line was checked for the second time at their end. Then after a wait of five days we rang up and a second engineer was booked. He did actually turn up (yay BT engineer - our provider doesn't actually have any) and quickly decided the router was the problem (the lack of lights and our troubleshooting problem saying it was the router was a bit of a giveaway), our provider wouldn't accept his opinion and made him do countless tests which all confirmed that as we'd been saying ALL ALONG that the router was the problem. He then said he'd send in a report to our provider and they'd order a new router. By Saturday we'd still not got our router so we rang yet again to find out what was going on and we were told that they'd rung us on Thursday to see if we wanted another router sending. The mind completely boggles! No of course we don't want a new router sending what with us having perfect access to broadband without a working one (!) How stupid is that?? I would have thought it would be self evident that if someone has rung up numerous times to complain about having no internet and having an engineer state categorically that a new router is needed then one is needed to be sent - it's not like I could go online to price the damn things up what with not having any internet thanks to a broken router ffs!! I did look them up in the Argos catalogue but they don't actually sell them and in any case I don't see why I should pay extra for a new router when you can't access the internet without one and I'm paying a shed load of money to have broadband provided by my internet supplier! As you can probably tell I am far from being amused by the whole situation which should have been resolved two weeks ago and would have been if they had just listened to what we were telling them (and in all honesty if their staff knew what they were supposed to do!) *takes a couple of deep breaths* Anyway the problem seems to be resolved apart from our antivirus etc is having problems connecting to the internet to update etc but hopefully that will resolve itself - especially as I don't have a clue how to fix it if it doesn't - oh well say la vie!

Sorry this has been a bit of a rant, it's been rather frustrating not having the internet for so long and having to wait for it to be sorted out and what can I say - I'm a grumpy bum sometimes lol.

Hopefully I'll have some cards to share in the next day or two, I need to charge the batteries for my camera before I can upload them and I forgot to do it today - well as it's now after midnight, yesterday. I'll put them in to charge before I got to bed.

Love and crafty hugs,

Sarah xxx

Blog Challenge Cards and why I'll no longer be promoting the magazines I subscribe to on my blog

Hello crafty peeps and welcome to my crafty nook! I hope you are all well and enjoying the weekend. It's very hot and muggy here on the Yorkshire coast and we've had a couple of downpours of heavy rain. I've got a dreadful headache which is making me a bit grumpy - I always do when the weather's this oppressive, tbh it's probably not helped by going to bed at 3am then waking up again at 5.10am - two hours is really not enough sleep! No-one asked to join in with the blog challenge but never mind Michele has made a couple of gorgeous cards and I have some to share with you all too.

Wow doesn't Michele's card look amazing!!! I love the bright colours she used and the background paper really goes well with the theme.I love the 3D bubbles too!

 I don't actually drink takeout coffee because I like my coffee very weak (I drink a mild instant coffee usually black) and most coffee shops add shots of strong coffee to their drinks - I have to add a zillion spoons of sugar just to be able to drink it lol so stick to tea when I'm out. However this card looks good enough to drink! Michele made this using a freebie from Simply Cards and Papercraft magazine. I love the coffee bean stenciling and the faux coffee ring marks on the backing paper.

Here are my cards.

My first card uses `the dies in the usual way and I combined them with the impossible card fold and a Wizz Kids paper pack. For my second card I tried to use the dies in a different way and turned the fish bowl into a wide vase for a bouquet of flowers, I added a vellum piece to give the vase a frosted look and layered it on a black background. It looked a bit bare so I added some glittery splatters for added interest. The flowers were die cut using flower dies from my stash and the leaves were cut out using a Memory Box leaf stem die.

Michele and I have enjoyed sharing our creations using magazine freebies but this sort of blog challenge  will be the last one for a while. Michele and I like a lot of people are subscribers to various magazines and as a subscriber you have a certain expectation of the level of service you receive. In recent months a number of magazines that we both subscribe to have fallen short of that expectation. As a subscriber you expect to receive your copy of the magazine a few days before it becomes available to buy in the shops and you also expect to have exactly the same so called "FREE GIFT" that non-subscribers receive, however that really isn't the case. Copies of our magazines primarily ones published by Practical Publishing are frequently late - in one instance earlier in the year one magazine arrived TEN DAYS after it became available to buy in the shops, sometimes they arrive the day before they go on sale but it is now the norm that they turn up the day it goes on sale or a day or two later. This isn't good enough but what particularly grates on me is the fact that subscribers don't get the same so called "FREEBIES" if these gifts are indeed FREE why do non-subscribers regularly get extra ones that subscribers are denied? The latest example is the free gift with Papercraft Essentials Magazine, in last month's issue it states that the free gifts are a stamp and die set with a bonus embossing folder yet subscribers DIDN'T receive the bonus embossing folder with this month's issue. This is blatantly unfair to subscribers and I don't feel that I can continue to promote the magazines involved through my blog and as a result I will not be sharing cards made with the freebies on this blog. There is an exception to that, I'm not yet a subscriber but hope to be soon to a magazine called Making Cards - I frequently buy it direct online because their free gifts are brilliant, the magazine is about market value so not overpriced unlike a lot of Practical Publishing magazines (I've noticed the coverprices have creeped up substantially the past 18 months!) they don't charge you postage to send you their mags direct unlike moremags.com (very expensive and bloody slow! Your mag can be out of date by the time you actually get it!) and subscribers get exactly the same free gifts as non-subscribers. Plus I really like the quality of the free gifts, quite frankly about one third of the freebies with Practical Publishing are utter crap and go in the "might use if I run out of better things to use" box (most still in there!) rather than my regular stash - a lot of the freebies lack imagination and originality (I mean honestly how many butterfly/dragonfly/floral stamps does one crafter actually need?? They're even repeating themselves now - we got a dragonfly stamp and die set a few years ago and the exact design earlier in the year just slightly bigger *rolls eyes*) If there is a particularly good free gift AND it is as stated in the magazine, then I may share cards I've made on Facebook or Twitter but until things improve I'll not be sharing them here.

Hope that wasn't too much of a rant - I feel very let down by Papercraft Essentials Magazine and their parent company Practical Publishing, I have been a very loyal subscriber for years (over ten for some magazines) and I've been left feeling very unappreciated by their unfair treatment of subscribers.

Hopefully my next card share will be a lot less angry lol, I hope you all enjoy the rest of your weekend and until next time - keep crafting!

Love and crafty hugs,

Sarah xxx