Hello!
Yesterday I finished off my (new) batch of Christmas cards made to send to the Caring Hearts Drive. What a chore I made of it for myself this year!
I had realised last week that most of the cards I had ready to send were not the required size, but fortunately I found a forgotten stash of PTI card bases, (A2 sized). So yesterday I started...
I pulled out suitable weight card stock, inks, stamps, dies...you name it, as my mind wafted off on a flurry of indecision as I tried to think out what I wanted to produce...something smart enough to send to strangers, simple enough to be able to make a few of them, but interesting enough not to bore my socks off while I got them made.
Now it was very fortunate that I had already viewed Therese from Lost in paper's recent video where she produces six cards, all different but utilising the same items in their construction...(The first in a series so keep an eye out for the remainder). So I was able to stop the mindless avalanche, put everything I had just hauled out back away, grab a coffee and think it through more carefully.
I asked myself these questions...What materials did I have that were Christmassy and in sufficient quantity? What technique did I want to utilise? What colours did I want to include?
I haven't used my embossing folders much at all in the past few months, and I have a nice one from Craft Concepts called Secret Garden that I always think of as suitable for a Southern hemisphere Christmas, i.e. vaguely mistletoey but not wintery. I had a partial sheet of SU gold card stock and some nice weight Bazzill marshmallow card, plus the PTI card bases...I was good to go.
Yesterday I finished off my (new) batch of Christmas cards made to send to the Caring Hearts Drive. What a chore I made of it for myself this year!
I had realised last week that most of the cards I had ready to send were not the required size, but fortunately I found a forgotten stash of PTI card bases, (A2 sized). So yesterday I started...
I pulled out suitable weight card stock, inks, stamps, dies...you name it, as my mind wafted off on a flurry of indecision as I tried to think out what I wanted to produce...something smart enough to send to strangers, simple enough to be able to make a few of them, but interesting enough not to bore my socks off while I got them made.
Now it was very fortunate that I had already viewed Therese from Lost in paper's recent video where she produces six cards, all different but utilising the same items in their construction...(The first in a series so keep an eye out for the remainder). So I was able to stop the mindless avalanche, put everything I had just hauled out back away, grab a coffee and think it through more carefully.
I asked myself these questions...What materials did I have that were Christmassy and in sufficient quantity? What technique did I want to utilise? What colours did I want to include?
I haven't used my embossing folders much at all in the past few months, and I have a nice one from Craft Concepts called Secret Garden that I always think of as suitable for a Southern hemisphere Christmas, i.e. vaguely mistletoey but not wintery. I had a partial sheet of SU gold card stock and some nice weight Bazzill marshmallow card, plus the PTI card bases...I was good to go.
The first group all recieved full matting with the embossed gold card stock. I just used different sentiment banners to change it up a bit...the white and black are heat embossed with gold, the third has a clear heat embossed Archival black inked sentiment and a 1/8th inch double sided tape border covered with peeled paint distress glitter...
The second group used the Bazzill Marshmallow card as the embossed panel, again two with heat embossed gold, the third with clear embossed black Archival ink. The small white panel was the remnant from another card in the next photograph...
By this time I was running out of gold card and so used up the scraps in these three cards. With the centre card, i was luckily able to align the embossed pattern on the gold with the white frame embossing. The SU gold striped vellum mat on the first card was using a remnant. It is the same gold as the embossed panel. I bought these some time ago and rarely use gold, so it was good to be able to use them...
On the first card I tried colouring in one vine with my Derwent Coloursoft pencils...I didn't really like the effect but decided to use the panel anyway...rouge Liquid Pearls add the little red berries. The second panel I smooched with Versamark, dusted with Perfect Gold Perfect Pearls and spritzed with gold Heidi Swapp spray. A couple of little tags contain the sentiments
I had great fun with these four panels, smooching across the embossed image with different Distress inks and then spritzing with the Heidi Swapp gold spray. The second card from the right has been buffed with a fairly dry Delicata gold ink pad, not DI's. These all have a lovely glow and glimmer...I used various shaped sentiment banners to complete these cards.
Yesterday I received these three lengths of gorgeous braid from a friend who recently travelled to Canada and Alaska. She bought them in a tiny quilters shop in a tiny town somewhere in Alaska...she does no sewing ever and I think this was the first such shop she has ever entered...aren't friends wonderful?
I recently viewed a You Tube video by Leslie Bockenstette who was advising on how to clear up your paper stash, especially the scrap bin...it hit home with me as I have no less than four bins, I am sorry to say, nicely colour coordinated but even so...I often go to find a piece I think I know is in one of them and after wasting some time in scrabbling through, decide to go to the new paper bins rather than spend the time searching. (I have two of those, one local Australian A4 manufacturers, the other is for the eight and a half by eleven sized sheets such as Neenah, PTI, Bazzill, etc).
The scraps tend get a bit dog eared, as they include odd shapes left over from the eClips or Brother projects, well, I'm sure I don't really need to describe the result. There must be others out there who know what I mean.
So, over the weekend I spend a long time sorting through one bin...the browny/orangy/yellowy one...slicing up the paper pieces into usable standard sizes for matting. I now have a box of lovely paper pieces ready for the use of. It was such a boring and lengthy job that I was able to discard any "rubbish" with a very blythe spirit indeed. I found a surprising amount of good black card pieces in there as well (black, white and grey have a separate bin supposedly), and I popped all of those into another small box to use as sentiment banners.
I will be doing the same to the other bins over the next couple of days, but I won't be saving the smaller pieces that Leslie recommended. Easier just to have larger pieces and cut down if necessary. The original idea she recommend came from an oldish video by Sandy Allnock. Again, the sizes are imperial, but I just sized my scraps to suit myself and my metric Cutterpillar that did all the hard work.
The scraps tend get a bit dog eared, as they include odd shapes left over from the eClips or Brother projects, well, I'm sure I don't really need to describe the result. There must be others out there who know what I mean.
So, over the weekend I spend a long time sorting through one bin...the browny/orangy/yellowy one...slicing up the paper pieces into usable standard sizes for matting. I now have a box of lovely paper pieces ready for the use of. It was such a boring and lengthy job that I was able to discard any "rubbish" with a very blythe spirit indeed. I found a surprising amount of good black card pieces in there as well (black, white and grey have a separate bin supposedly), and I popped all of those into another small box to use as sentiment banners.
I will be doing the same to the other bins over the next couple of days, but I won't be saving the smaller pieces that Leslie recommended. Easier just to have larger pieces and cut down if necessary. The original idea she recommend came from an oldish video by Sandy Allnock. Again, the sizes are imperial, but I just sized my scraps to suit myself and my metric Cutterpillar that did all the hard work.
From this....
To this...
The angelica is candied and ready for Christmas...the only thing around here that is!
Bye for now,
Di
Di
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