Whether the Weather....

Daring Cardmakers Day today and its Jo's turn to set our dare. So we can blame her for our waking up to a rainy one instead of the sunshine we've had lately hehehe
Actually it has its compensations as with luck I won't need to go out to water the veg plot and the various pots today - and even better, it might mean a calmer hayfever day too - although if the pile of tissues I've already got through this morning is anything to go by.....

So, just in case you hadn't surmised from that, Jo's challenged us to make cards on a theme of "Weather".

I asked if it was ok if I used my rainy one from the "Wet Wet Wet" dare of a couple of weeks ago and got a short, sharp "No" - huh, you can go off people, you know! lol lol lol
Not really - Jo's a sweetie and a great friend so I know I can pull her leg a bit.

Still, it did stump me as to what I could do that was different. I couldn't decide what sort of weather to put on my card and I couldn't figure out what sort of purpose it would be for. In the end I decided to go with one of my favourite little rhymes and put various types of weather on the card!
Everything fell into place then. Using the same pop-up card I've made a couple of times lately seemed the perfect way to add the verse and all the springy weather icons - and most of those were pretty quick to do as I already had the die cuts or Robo templates ready.
The umbrella is from my "Wet Wet Wet" card, but I paired it with wellies from one of Leo's old Crafty templates sets, The sun is a new template but was really quick to make and the snowman is a QK die cut.
The "hello" letters are a new template but very basic so not much tweaking was needed.

The card itself is my UK sized version of THIS fantastic You Tube video tutorial. It looks complicated but it really isn't and once you've got the hang of how it works I think this is one that offers great scope for all sorts of cards. If you'd like to see the other cards I've made using it, and see my instructions for making a version equal to a 14cm square card, click HERE please come and let me know if you have a go, I'd love to see your cards.

When it's flat it looks like this - all ready to go into a regular envelope

I took this photo with the card half-opened so you get a better idea of how it works. The maind part of the card with all the folds in it sort of squishes down to make a box shape and the flat piece with the words on is revealed.

I think the spotty paper is by Piggy Tales, The snowman is cut from glitter card and the other bits are all scraps of Bazzill. The faux zigzag stitching is a pretty good copy of how my machine zigzag looks - I can't sew a straight line for toffee. lol. No flowers and no Glossy Accents - there's a shock, eh?

The DT have made some fantastic cards to share on the DCM Blog this week, so please check them out - and you can meet our fabby new Guest Designer too. We are very lucky to have the lovely Pascale joining us for the whole of June, she's been a regular DCM darer for quite a while so it's especially fab to welcome her onto the DT. We're always on the lookout for guest designers and joining in with the dares is a great way to get noticed!

Right, I've got loads to get one with today, so I'd better stop waffling and make a start. Thanks for popping by, please leave a comment before you leave.
Happy Crafting

Bubbly Stuff and More Photos

As we were away last Thursday I didn't do anything for my usual slot on Bubbly Scrumptious blog, but I'm back this week with a card project that uses the new June kit from Bubbly Funk.
The kit is based around the lovely Andrea Victoria collection from My Mind's Eye which is full of beautiful designs and a lovely, unusual colour scheme of greys, white and golds.


I wanted to get ahead and make a card for my aunt's best friend, who is also a customer of mine - she orders special cards from me for other people, so I thought that as she has a special birthday coming up it would be nice for her to be on the receiving end for a change.

All the info and instructions for this card are over on the Bubbly Scrumptious BLOG, and the June kit is available now from HERE

Now a few more photos from our Northumberland jaunt.
We didn't spend as much time on the coast this time as we usually do so if you'd like to see some of our photos from last year you can click here
Anyway, here are some of the new ones - some are mine but the best ones are Hubby's and he was having a lovely time playing with his new Canon 40D, bought the day before we left!

The first three were taken in and around Blyth

The beach huts is one of mine - I know that because I can see hubby over there on the sand deciding what angles he wants to play with!

This one is Hadston Sands - a huge beach near my favourite Druridge bay - which we didn't get to this visit. boohoo :(

Next one of Hubby's arty shots, taken up the coast at Budle Bay

St Mary's Lighthouse is on a tiny island - there's a causeway that you can walk over at low tide

I'd never been to Seaton Sluice before - well not that I can remember. It's hard to believe that somewhere with such an ugly name could actually look so pretty!

And eventually, on the last evening we even made it across the road from my Aunt's house to Newbiggin prom. That's a disgraceful admission, but we were so busy this trip that we almost didn't get a walk along my "home" sands!

I'm going to sort out photos with a "Roman" theme for next time.

Hope you're not getting bored with my piccywics yet!
Thanks for popping by, don't go without leaving a comment - I do love to see them!

Castles and Craft

I'll show the Accordion album I made for Aimee's 18th in a minute, but first another batch of pics from our recent trip to Northumberland - today is all about castles!

I love castles, I guess its not surprising as I grew up in Northumberland which is stuffed full of them! My most favourite is Warkworth Castle - I spent so much time there when I was little - being only a few miles from home it was the perfect playground for us kids - there's a fantastic, fairly intact Keep with lots of rooms to explore, there are towers and tunnels and all sorts of nooks and crannies - no trip "home" goes by without a visit to Warkworth - occasionally we don't even go inside - just sit in the car park and check on it from there -I know that sounds a bit mad, but I need my "fix" even if there's not time to head inside. We've been members of English Heritage since we got married so we get in all their properties for "free" and there are so many fab places to visit - especially "up north". Our holidays and weekend aways tend to start with checking out the EH guidebook to see whats on offer in the area.
Anyway, nop photos of Bamburgh Castle from this visit - we drove through the village a couple of times on our way up the coast and honestly, the place was STUFFED! I know it's lovely there, but who wants to be like a sardine in a tin when there's so much more coast and countryside that you can get pretty much to yourself? We didn't even stop the car....
First - and especially for Ruth, Prudhoe Castle;
Right up towards the borders is little Etal Castle - we had a picnic lunch here and it was soooo peaceful. Last time we were there, a guy was doing a falconry display and it was fab - he flew two birds at the same time and watching them swoop over the castle walls and down over our heads was amazing. This time Hubby and my Uncle spent ages trying to catch photos of the swallows that are roosting in the castle ruins
Even closer to the border (I think) we visited Norham Castle for the first time - hard to believe that there are still castles I've not been to up there! Norham's a bit TOO close to the Scottish border for my taste - I just don't go there - it ALWAYS, without fail, throws it down with rain whenever I do. I'm not exagerating either! lol

I saved the best for last - and I've managed to hold myself back - only three photos!
I'm preety sure that between us we've taken more photos at Warkworth than of any other single place - it's funny but nearly all of our Warkworth photos have fab skies too - a few years ago we were there in December - there was a thick frost on the ground and it was perishing cold - but the sky was beautiful and we took some of our favourite photos on that occasion.
As it's so close to "home" Warkworth tends to be our Sunday morning venue - just time to get there and back, and have a little explore while my aunt is cooking Sunday lunch! The other good thing about going then is that there are fewer other visitors and there's more chance of getting people-free photos!
Beautiful, isn't it?

I'm really struggling to get my crafty mojo going since we got home - and I really need to as I've got loads to do.
As I've failed to show the book I made for Aimee despite mentioning it a few times I'm going to do that now, before I forget again!
I made this for Beckie Dreyer's Bumbleberry Crafts Limited Edition kit - it's full of the bruight and funky 3 Bugs "Butterfly Kisses" papers, plus perfectly matching card (some is coredinations), ribbons, brads and buttons etc

It's an Accordion Album and sturdy enough to stand up on its own to display the photos Aimee will be able just to slot in under the flaps, corners and ribbons.
This is the front of the book
This is one side of pages
And this is the other side

The back of the book looks like this:

It's a really lovely kit and I think there are still a couple available - you can find out more HERE and contact Beckie there or via Bumbleberry Crafts.

Right, I've procrastinated long enough. I need to go and find that mojo.....or maybe I'll just make a coffee first....or I could do another load of washing.....or....

Belsay Photos

We were up in Northumberland for a few days with my rellies last weekend/ I promise I won't bore you with zillions of pics but here are a few of Belsay Hall, gardens and castle.
The rhododendrons were in flower and looking glorious as were the various acers (a fave tree of ours - though the ones on our own garden are a little bit smaller!) - the walk through the craggy gardens from the Hall to the old castle was a real treat - and, when we arrived there - another treat to find suspended from the rafters the fabulous Crystal Horse by Stella McCartney back at Belsay, hanging from the rafters on fine threads and looking magnificent - over 8000 Swarovski crystals went into making this!
That's ooooh, at least a few more than I've got in my bead collection....lol

Just Take Five!

Every now and then, rather than one of the team thinking up the challenge for the Daring Cardmakers, we all put our heads together and come up with some ideas to use as "Team Dares". This week we've decided to make use of one of these ideas and have a challenge called "Take 5" for you.
All you need to do this week is make sure you have five of something on your card; it could be circles, brads, tags, candles, elephants, whatever you like is fine - just as long as there's five of them. Surely you can't get much easier than that?

I've just come back from a few days up in Northumberland with my rellies, so didn't have a lot of time to get my card done - so I decided to use the latest sketch on my Sketch File Blog (I'd love to have you join in with the sketches on there, btw!) to help me out here - a double hit as I'd not got round to making a card for that sketch before I loaded it.

Obviously, for me it had to be five flowers, didn't it?......and as I'm still loving making "distressed" poppies that's what I chose to use on my card.


It also took the chance to use some of my new Cosmo Cricket papers - I know they aren't a new range, but for some reason I've never got round to buying this set despite looking at them zillions of times. When I saw them in the Scrap Revolution shop last week at a reduced price - well, I had to buy them, didn't I?
I just adore the colours of this "Love Notes" collection - they are similar to the BG Fusion ones which are some of my all-time favourites, so not surprising really that they've always appealed.

I used my one and only Fiskars edging punch to cut the scalloped edge in the base paper, then matted the second paper between.The oval shapes are cut with Nesties - not really getting the hang of these yet, for some reason... I cut two slits at the end to tie the ribbon through which meant I could just glue the long piece on nice and flat.
To make my five flowers I punched two sizes of circle, I didn't bother with the distressing tool this time - spritzing with water and crumpling them up seemed to do the trick - I didn't ink the edges either as the white core helps the flowers stand out on the card.

I used a mixture of two and three circles for the flowers and added a tiny gem in the middle. I bought another Anita's gem wheel while I was away, this time with the 3mm gems in it. Got that, some posh black brads and a couple of Cats Eye Queues at fab prices at Boundary Mill - didn't get anywhere near any other craft-type shop during our trip though. I think it was a conspiracy!

The words are Robo cut in two different fonts - I can't remember what the first one is, but "wishes" was cut from the Liorah font. I thought I'd write a seperate blog post to say how I do my Robo words - It's in the post directly below this one - I hope someone will find it useful.

Anyway, please pop over to The Daring Cardmakers Blog and see what other members of the Team have made this week - we're a bit depleted this week due to holidays, house-moving and other stuff that Real Life tends to throw at us from time to time, but the cards are still just as lovely and hopefully just as inspiring as usual!

Making Robo Words in PSP

Not sure if this will be helpful to anyone, but I thought I'd take a few minutes to write down how I make words for cutting with my Craft Robo.

I use Paint Shop Pro to make my words.
Open a large new page (about 1000 x800 pxls depending on what I'm needing).
Type the word, change the letter size to as large a number as will allow the word to fit on your page.
Reduce to 2 colours (B&W) and save as a gif.
Now you can tweak the saved copy so that it cuts as required.
For a joined up word I'd use the "magic wand" to join up the letters,. then paintbrush tool to neaten up the joins - either in black to make the lines longer, wider etc or in the white to take away any bits I don't want.
I then select the whole thing and expand the selection as much as I can without distorting the letters too much - usually by 10 for joined up words.
Fill the expanded area with black using the Paint Can (Fill tool) and check for any tiny white dots that sometimes appear as Robo will cut anything you leave white).
Save again as a gif
It may seem a bit of a faff - but once you've saved them you start building up a "library" of words and letter styles so you'll soon have quite a few that will be ready for use whenever you need them. I try to remember to save mine using the font name and the word itself, so that I don't find myself making the same word in the smae font twice!

Now you can open a new page in Robo, and use the Get Outline button to bring up a new window, click Load Image in the File menu and load your gif
Click on "Convert to Outline", then "Paste then Exit"
Your word should appear on the page and you'll be able to rexize it as required:
With the mouse over the word, right click and a new menu will pop up, right at the bottom of the list you'll see "Position Settings", click on that.
The width and height options are the second set of boxes - you'll probably know how wide you want your word to cut so fill that measurement in - remember these values are in milimetres not cms.
You can choose to tick the "Hold Aspect Ratio" box to alter the height by the same ratio, but if you want the letters a bit taller you may prefer to change that value manually too.
I often set the value of whichever (width or height) is the most restricted for my project, then go back and tweak the other measurement by just stretching or reducing with the grab-lines on the page. You can always go ack to the Position Settings window to check what size they'll end up being when you cut.

If I'm cutting the word in card, I usually tell the Robo to cut it twice by highlighting, copy and pasting without moving the shape at all - this helps make sure the word is cut out completely.
To get more dimension for my words I'll cut 1, 2 or 3 times in card, run them through the little X shaped xyron and stick them all together. For the words on THIS card I cut a layer in card and a top copy in patterned paper.

That's it really, I hope at least some of this makes sense and is useful - although I can only use PSP I'm sure other graphics programs have pretty much the same wotsits (tech term...) to do the same things.

Aimee's Birthday Card

About an hour before we had to leave to go to niece Aimee's 18th birthday dinner I decided that the flowers on her card really didn't look "right"
So I ripped them off and added in some Primas from Creative Treasures and layered them up differently. I think it looks a bit better in the second photo - but still not totally happy with it. By then it was too late to do anything else though!
The background "stuff" is actually flocked sticky backed plastic from Wilkinson's -- yes, really! The lovely Rosie discovered it and gave me some pieces when we met the other week (thanks Rosie...). I thought it would be just the thing for an 19th card. The frame is also covered with this stuff, but in the black on black version. Rosie said they had a black on red roll too.
bet you'll all be dashing off to Wilko's now to see if its still availalbe!

The words and numbers are Robo cut, glittered then covered with Glossy Accents.

Aimee loved it, thank goodness. Next time I'll show the photos of the Accordion Photo Album I made to go along with her main present.

Another dinky little message.....

Wet, Wet , Wet

It's my turn to set the new challenge over on the Daring Cardmakers this week.

I just hope this one doesn't bring loads of wet weather in its wake! My apologies in advance if it does lol lol

This week I'd like you to do a bit of "singing in the rain" and make cards on the theme
"Wet, Wet, Wet"
I'd like to see cards featuring water of any kind, and if you can actually USE water in the making of them - then you can claim an extra bonus point lol.

So if you're ready to get splashy off you go....
Looking forward to seeing all your wonderful cards, so please head back and leave a link to your blog on the DCM message board

You can almost guarantee that every one of us struggles with the dare we've actually set - don't know why that is, but we all say it from time to time.
This was my Plan B and was greatly helped by being let loose in Scrap Revolution on Wednesday when I met my friend Sue who has a key! Don't worry though - I did BUY my new stash!

I'd already made theRobo template by then, but at the shop I saw this fab paper by My Little Shoebox" and just knew I had to make use of it for this card.
I've used a couple of the papers, plus scraps of matching Bazzill to make this one and I just adore the colours and the cheery designs. Isn't it great when everything comes together? :)
Here's a close-up of my little Puddle Jumping Chappy


I do hope you'll have a go at my dare - I'll try my very best to leave comments on your blogs if you do - but the next few days are going to be a bit hectic for me, so it may be well into next week before I get round to that - so please bear with me....

Another short one this time, thank you so much for visiting