Into the Garden

 

Hello!

Well, I'm happy to say that we'll be handing over £400 to our local hospice after another couple of donations came in after our Pizza and Pudding Night last week! As so many people just don't carry cash atm, we had an IOU notebook available on the night, and those donations have now come in.  Pretty good result for a fairly small street, I reckon.

It hardly seems five minutes since I posted last week's card, butt here's this week's Daring Cardmakers challenge , set by our lovely Nat

Into the Garden

Over the past year in particular, gardens have become important spaces for many of us. 

Whether just being a place to enjoy some fresh air, read a book in the sunshine, dine outside, or indeed witness the seasons change.

For this week's dare: 

We're celebrating the bounty of your garden or favourite outside space.

Click here to see what we've made this week

 

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The wood effect background paper is from a lovely 6x6 pad from Studio Light

All the dies used here are from a couple of Sizzix ets and cut from various scraps of Bazzill card, making good use of my scraps boxes! I just added the flower centres with dots using a black gel pen

 The sentiment is another version of one I used a few weeks ago - if I need to make a new one I generally make two copies, maybe in different fonts or different sizes.

Thank you so much for coming by, please don't go without leaving a little message as I do love to know what you think.

 

 Happy Crafting, Stay Safe,

 

Just Checking, Pizza, Pudding and Fund-Raising!

 

Hello!

I'm late with my 'Friday' post - it's been quite busy around here for a change _ I'll add a bit more about that later! But here's this week's Daring Cardmakers challenge and my card

Just Checking!

 All we're asking this week is that you use some kind of check pattern on your cards. 
It could be stamped, embossed, patterned paper, stencilled, hand-drawn...
You could use checks as a background or as part of a design element of an image e.g. on a Chef's apron or tartan rug...
We're looking forward to checking up on your makes, but for starters here are some ideas from our fabulous design team to help inspire you
All we're asking this week is that you use some kind of check pattern on your cards.  

Click here to see what my fabulous Teamies have made this week

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I stencilled my check pattern by using a stripes stencil first vertically, then horizontally. I used a Spellbinders embossing folder to add texture to the rest of the card

The gold Scribbled Square Frames are by Tonic, as are the petal shapes I used to make the flower.  The deep aqua paper is from a Studio Light paper pad and I used some ready made black stamens and some gold micro beads for the flower centre. 

The sentiment piece elements are a pc generated check strip and Happy Birthday message with a piece of the gold card behind.

To complete I added some metallic aqua gems

 

 Well, I've mentioned before about the wonderful neighbours we have on this street, and how supportive everyone has been during these difficult months of Covid19.  Well, at one of our socially distanced Meet-in-the-Street Sunday drinks someone mentioned that they'd heard of a local Pizza Van company - I guess the kind of thing that usually parks up at festivals and other events to help feed the punters!  One thing led to another and once we were sure we could get the minimum 50 pizza orders it was booked to come and park on one of the neighbour's drive on Friday. Then the idea of adding a charity element to the event was suggested - if some people made cakes and puddings we could then have a donations bucket and maybe raise some money for our local hospice.  One of the neighbours is a wine merchant, so he decided to set up a wine table, also for donations.  Well, it all went swimmingly - almost literally as after a couple of weeks of blazing sunshine and high temperatures, of course it absolutely threw down most of Friday! Undaunted, gazebos were set up in front gardens and our garage (still pretty new and clean!) was earmarked for the pudding servery.  

In the end we were lucky as there was only some occasional drizzle during the evening, and everyone got into the spirit, collecting their freshly made pizzas from The Roaming Dough to either take away to their own gardens, or use one of the gazebos nearby for shelter.  

We had SO MANY puddings! Two trestle tables full of them and people came to help themselves and pop their donations into the bucket. We've just heard that we raised well over £350, just from selling pudding! 

Which from a street of around 30 households is quite a lot of pudding

 

 

Needless to say, there was plenty of cake and puddings left over so our garage had various visitors over the weekend popping back for more treats! I just feel so lucky to live in a place like this.

Thank you so much for coming by, please don't go without leaving a little message as I do love to know what you think.

 

 Happy Crafting, Stay Safe,

 

Cascade

 

Hello!

This one has been sitting in Blogger for a few weeks, waiting for me to get round to adding some text.

It's a cascade card, made to celebrate the 90th birthday of  brass banding gentleman.  

Cascade cards are made with two 'wedge' shaped pieces of card,  linked together so that the card folds flat, but when the folds are pulled open you get the cascade effect which is fun to decorate with die cuts etc

 You can find instructions on the basic Cascade fold card by doing a quick search on the internet so I won't give them here.

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The card for the base is blue Bazzill and I found some music notes themed download papers on Etsy which I used to cover the various panels before adding the die cuts.

I've used various die sets from Paper Discovery and DoCrafts (Xcut) for the brass instruments and the other musical notation die cuts.

 

I had a lot of fun putting this together and it was much easier to do than it looks - which is always a good thing, isn't it!

 That's all for today, thank you so much for visiting, I hope you'll leave a comment, I do love to read them!

 Happy Crafting, Stay Safe,

 

 

For a Superstar

 

 

Hello!

How are you?  Feeling tickety-boo I hope!

We had our second Covid vaccines at the end of last week, so that's good. I hope that wherever you are, you're also managing to get vaccinated and help with getting rid of this horrible disease.  In the way of these things, it took just a couple of months to start spreading across the world, but will take years to conquer.

I've not had much crafting mojo lately and  I think I need to give myself a big kick up the pants and get back into it! I do actually have projects on my to-do list and there are deadlines for them so I do need to find that mojo soon.

This week it was my turn to set the challenge for The Daring Cardmakers and after a lot of thought and rejected ideas I settled on something which turns out to hold a very lucrative vein of inspiration - I must remember this one!

Up the Flag Pole!

I find the flags of different nations so interesting - there are some wonderful designs to be found when you start looking, some simple and elegant, and some really wild and wacky ones!
So this week I'd like you to your inspiration from the flag of a country other than your own - there are plenty to choose from! or the colours...
This web-link has a huge number of flags from all sorts of interesting places which will give you loads of ideas: https://flagpedia.net/index

Click here to see what my fabulous Teamies have made this week

It was really hard to choose which flag to go for, but in the end I decided to go with the flag of Cuba, somewhere I visited a few years ago and found wonderfully inspiring on many levels. 

I adore that shade of blue, so decided to use the broad striped background from the flag design, but use more of the blue for the triangle, then supersize the star and make it gold for my 'well done' card

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I used a top fold square card, and masked off 2.5cm stripes with washi tape before inking the blue areas. I then chopped off the excess card from the bottom.  My maths is rubbish so I wanted to make those stripes nice and easy!

The blue triangle was cut from some matching pearlescent card, and then the  star made from 2 die cuts using embossed and glitter card.

Next I made the sentiment on the pc, I made a few versions as I didn't know which I'd like best once they were printed.  I'm not very decisive! 

Aster a tussle with the printer (why are they so contrary?) I managed to finish the card a day after I started it.  Which is ridiculous for such a simple design,  So to show who was boss I added an extra star punched from red glitter card.

Thank you so much for visiting today, I hope you'll leave a comment, I really appreciate it when you do!

Happy Crafting, and please take care of yourself.

Balloons for June

 

   Hello

Somehow or other I completely forgot to blog my card for the last Daring Cardmakers challenge, so as the new one is out tomorrow, I thought I'd better get on and post it quickly!

 Rizwana chose the mood board for our June Elemental Inspiration challenge

 "I've chosen a bright and Summery board with lots of Summertime treats and pleasures!
Just choose at least three elements (colour scheme counts as one element) from the picture to kick start your project."

 Click here to see this week's design team inspiration  

For my card I chose the Squares from the layout, the Balloons and the word 'Hello' as my main elements, but added some bright Summery colours in too.

 

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My base card is a smooth white square card blank stencilled with a Crafters Workshop stencil and a couple of shades of blue Nuvo Mousse from Tonic Studios. 

I then cut an aperture in the front of the card and added more blue colour to the inside where it shows through.

For the balloons I inked a few pieces of card then die cut the balloon shapes, arranging them over the aperture.  I added black and white baker's twine to the reverse. The loose ends of the twine were gathered up and the striped card glued over them to keep them in place.  To complete this card I made the 'Hello' sentiment using a similar font to that on the mood board

Thank you so much for visiting today, I hope you'll leave a comment, I really appreciate it when you do!

Happy Crafting, and please take care of yourself.