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.

 Info

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,

 

 

All because he Loves ....... Maltesers!

 

   hi there

Yes! Another a midweek blog post - are you shocked?

Once again I'm heading back to February for this birthday card made for my Malteser-loving hubby.  

Honestly the things I let myself in for! Especially as I had to make this with him in the same room as we share the study and he's working from home of course!

 I won't even try to explain how I made this as it was very much a "Let's give it a try and see what happens" kind of thing!

It's got a pop-up 'box' inside it, and although its  not a box but a flat image, I cut the lid shape carefully so that it lifts up to reveal a Maltesers image underneath.

 

 

Basically, its a lot of layers and plenty of printed images.

Hopefully the pictures will give you the idea of how it works.

 

 

Materials:

Glossy photo paper for printing images 

 White, Black and Kraft card

Alphabet die set

 

 That's all for today, thank you so much for visiting, I hope you'll leave a comment, You've no idea how happy it makes me when someone leaves a message, and I'd really love to know what you think of this one!!

Happy Crafting, and Stay Safe,

Bend Me, Fold Me

On the Daring Cardmakers blog this week, it's my turn to set the challenge:

Another Dimension 

  not Time Warps, Little Green Men from Mars, or anything else "other-world"

  I just don't want to see any flat, regular sort of cards this week - instead I'd like to see lots of interesting folds and shapes; Stepper cards, Card in a Box, Pyramids, Flip-it type cards..... Anything goes as long as the finished, standing-up card is more 3D than 2D. 

This is your chance to try out all those techniques and tutorials for unusually shaped and folded cards that you've been saving!  Yes. we all do it, don't we?

My first thought was to do another "card in a box", but I had a feeling someone else might go down that route (and I was right) so then I was all set to do a pyramid card - but I've done those before and although they are fun to make and I've not done one for ages, what I really wanted was to try something new.
So, searching through my "must try this sometime" list I came across a Bendy-fold" tutorial from Splitcoaststampers.
I love cards that stand out all over the place when on display but will fold at least relatively flat to go in an envelope - it makes it so much more fun, doesn't it? The card-in-a-box, and the pyramid ones do that, and this curvy card does it too - although how flat depends on how much "stuff" you stick on hehe
The magic bit is all done with slits and tabs.

I used a whole raft of odds and ends of card and paper for this so I'm not even going to try and list that sort of stuff
The little summerhouse is all just hand cut,with the "wood" planks drawn on - it's supposed to look a bit ramshackle, honestly!
The bushes, some bits of grass and stems were also hand-cut
For the flowers I used a few ready-made flowers plus quite a lot of punches  (Tonic) and dies from Spellbinders, MFT Die-Namics, Memory Box and Marion Smith. The tree is by Memory Box
Also used: Stickles, Card Candy, Liquid Pearls

You can find the tutorial for making a bendy-card HERE

This took far longer to make than it should - I got a bit carried away with the flowers - not helped because the little flower-shaping gadget and new dies from Marion Smith arrived on Wednesday and were screaming "play with me....NOW"  so, some of the flowers were made with those.
Anyway, that's my card for this week and you can see some fantastic fancy folds and dimensional cards over on the BLOG

That's all for this time - except to wish you a Happy Easter
Thanks for visiting

A Box Full of Flowers

I've been itching to make one of these "card in a box" cards for ages and at last I've done it!  Actually, I did a prototype the other day, but that was just to check how it worked.  I really wanted to use the limited "Mother of Mine" set of papers as I knew the flower design would be perfect to cut in different sizes and use to fill my box
This collection is only available for a couple more days, so if you've not got yours yet hop over to the Funky Hand website and get them PDQ!

As I so often do I printed the things I needed directly onto white Bazzill card.
An A4 piece printed on both sides for the box, then other bits and pieces to make the flowers, grass,decorative panels etc
I printed the flowery paper out in a couple of different sizes and then cut out lots of the flowers to use- some are attached on thin pieces of scrap green card, soem on lengths of wire so that they bounce around.
I cut the "grass" on my Silhouette machine and the butterflies were cut with my brand new Spellbinders "Flutters" die (the large ones) and a little punch for the small ones.

Papers: Funky Hand "Mother of Mine" download

Spellbinders labels 26(?), and Flutters butterfly ide

Wire, Stickles

Download Info:
There are three versions (Mum, Mam or Mom) of the download to choose from - each has the 6 gorgeous papers and both a ready coloured image and a plain one for you to colour yourself


Click HERE to go straight to the right page to grab a set for just £2.99

That's it for this time, I hope you like my little card
Thanks for visiting
 

Printing and Pyramids Tutorial

I've not got a Daring Cardmakers card to share this week - hopefully that will be along later as I really hate having to miss making my card for the blog.  This week Miri is celebrating the birthday of one of he Grimm brothers by asking for cards inspired by Fairy Tales.
The team have come up with some fantastic ideas, so please visit the blog to see them - and test yourself to work out which fairy tale they were inspired by

Sometmes, life gets hectic and something has to move down the queue - this week it was my DCM card :( With a bit of luck though, I'll be in Fairy Tale mode over the weekend!

One thing I'm trying to do just now is collect up and add side-bar labels for tutorials I've made and blogged.  The reason for this is that I often go to make something and then spend ages looking for where I've put the instructions.  Even when I blog them I forget to add the link in the sidebar, hopefully this will mean I don't spend hours wading through photos just to give me an inkling as to when I made something and help me find my instructions.

This is a tutorial that first appeared on the Funky Hand "Get Funky and Craft" blog and shows how I prepared the designs for printing and making a pyramid shaped card

  Funky Hand Pyramid Card

If you've never made a Pyramid  card before then here's a great way to use your Funky Hand downloads and have a go at one straight away.

I made one of these for the first time a few weeks ago using Bazzill card and then adhering patterned paper to decorate it.  I usually use much thicker card for my card blanks but this style of card is quite bulky when folded.  Part way through making it I had an "A-ha!" moment and realised that using my Funky Hand downloads I could print the first "layer" directly onto card and create a thinner and easier to fold pyramid card base,  

Of course you could simply print your chosen Funky Hand designs directly onto the card without any tweaking at all, but I thought you might be interested to see how I get the most from my sheets of card, as by doing it this way you're left with lots of space on each sheet which you can then print more designs on to use in decorating your card.

 I use an old version of Paint Shop Pro to do pretty much any sort of photo or graphics tasks, but I'm sure that other programs, such as PhotoShop have the same sort of tools.  I thought the best thing would be to do a series of screen shots so that you can then have a look around your own photo-editing program for the similar menus, tools and commands.  

So here we go - you can click on the pictures for a better look!

Step 1

Select the design you want to use - in this case the pink chevron design from 
"I Love You Sew"

Use the tool marked with no. 1 and drag the grab-lines to a rough square shape as indicated in the picture.

Now click on CROP to get rid of the excess "paper"

Step 2

Now you need to find the tool that allows you to RESIZE the image and click on it to open up the resizing window

Step 3

You want to create a square which is about the right size for your project, so go for the ACTUAL SIZE option - this is a fab tip for printing other things like photos and other images just the right size too, btw

* Make sure that it's all set to resize all layers/dimensions at the same time - where I've drawn asterisks on the picture.  I Never touch this section of the box - I just know I'd have a disaster on my hands if I did

* Set to pixels/cms in the box marked no 2 or inches if you prefer to work in Imperial measures

* It's the box marked with no 3 that you change the numbers in rather than the ones marked height/width so as I want a square of around 14cms I changed the number in the RESOLUTION box until the number in the height box were about right 

Remember, I just guessed at the original square shape, the height turned out to be a bit shorter than the width so it's the height I need to get the right size for before printing

Step 4

Check all is well before printing by using the PAGE SET UP command.  It brings up a new window with a picture of how your image will look on the page - like the one below

Step 5

You just need to check you printer settings now

You need to use a thin card (about 160gsm) for this particular project to reduce the bulk and make it easier to fold.  I need to use the REAR TRAY to feed this through, and I need 3 copies

Then click print and you're done.

Once you've printed your three squares, don't cut them out straight away.  Measure how much white space you have below the square and use the resizing method above to crop down some of the other designs, and fill the white space with those designs.  
You're not finished yet as you can print on the reverse of the 3 sheets too. 

 If you want to leave the inside of the pyramid "legs" white, just print on the reverse of the "other end" of the card ie not on the back of where the squares are.  Remember that the inside of the legs will show, so if you don't want them plain white, print each of the three pieces with the same paper design on the reverse of the squares.  

I hope all that makes sense!

Making the Pyramid

Cut out your 3 squares accurately and fold each in half diagonally

Take the first 2 squares and adhere the edge of the upper one to the fold of the lower one matching the points and edges really carefully.  

The edge of the 3rd square is then adhered to the fold in square 2

Hopefully the photos will help make it clearer!

I've used a white square in this middle and clipped the 3 squares together just to show how they all fit - it's not as complicated as it sounds, is it?

Once they are glued together the pyramid just falls into shape of it's own accord really, the two end triangles overlap and are glued together and the base shape is formed. 

 

At this point you need to squash and fold one "face" in half  inwards so that the card can be flattened to go in an envelope

Now you can use all the extra bits of card you printed out to decorate it - just remember to keep the folded-in area fairly simple or it won't fold up!

In true Blue Peter spirit, here are more photos of the one I made earlier!

I really hope you'll have a go at this - it's sure to impress as it looks sooooo much more complicated than it is ;)