Birthday cards and crafty pressies

Thought I'd share some pics of the gorgeous handmade cards and gifts that have been popping through my letterbox. They're all so fab and phtos don't really do justice to the work that's gone into them, I love them so much - a huge Thank you to you if you read this and sent a card - I'm going to get some sort of frame so I can put them up on the craft room wall, they're too lovely just to keep out of sight in a box! I'm going to leave you to see if you can figure out the makers of these cards....


































































Sue made this cute plaque for me to hang round my neck so I won't forget my name..... Gill sent this all the way from the Land of Aus(sie), it's about 4 inches square so I can get that framed and onto the wall too. And this is the beautiful piece of "stitchery" that Sharon sent, how lucky am I? Sharon, Jackie and I share a love of Greece and all things Greek and if we all lived nearer each other I think we could happily meet up and chatter on for hours about how much we love it and all the bits of the country we've visited etc - we'd probably bore everyone rigid! Anyway, I obviously couldn't posibly miss the opportunity to add one of our photos from our 2005 trip to Santorini , could I?

Charity Begins at Home

I'll be back later with birthday card and pressie pics - I've done the photos but need to do some cropping and resizing, so for now I'll stick to the really important Friday morning stuff!
The fabby Gillian Hamilton, *star* covergirl of "Australian
Paper Crafts" magazine has set our Daring Cardmakers Dare this week and she sent us out to do something we all love........ shopping!

But there was a sting in the tail of this shopping expedition - here's Gill's message:

Hi all, Gillian here this week it's my turn to dare you all, but first I'd like to welcome our latest Guest Designer - we're so pleased to have another of our regular Darers join us for the next couple of weeks as GD - this time it's the fabby and very talented Rachel Booth who's coming to play with us!
OK, here's my dare:
Let's go Charity shopping
or Op shopping (as we call it in Australia)

I DARE you to visit your local Charity Shop & make someone else's TRASH your STASH! and make a GORGEOUS card from it

You'll be amazed at the special little treasures you'll find if you only take the time to look with CREATIVE EYES

aaaaaaaaaaaagggggghhhhhh

I've not been in a charity shop since I left college - and even then I never managed to find the bargains my friends came in with - that sort of put me off, despite the fact that other people seem to find wonderful little crafting gems in charity shops. Still, a dare's a dare and they're not meant to be tooooo easy. My plan was to get myself some moral support and drag Sue on a Charity Shope tour on Tuesday but she was having non of it - she's such a posh bird ;-) the look of horror on her face when I told her my plan was priceless and I just didn't have the heart to do it!
So I was a Big Brave Girl and went alone - though I must admit I only managed one shop, they had some bits of bead jewellery, buttons and a big flowery hair-tie thing so I decided I'd have a bash with them - I could always go back and try a different shop if those failed to work, eh?
I pulled the hair thing apart and got two big feathery flowers, I've used one here, cut in half and layered to show the glittery bits on the petals.
The button I chose to use was the right size but just a boring silver colour so I tarted it up with Glossy Accents and tiny beads.
Papers are Crate, the Avenue Collection, and the spotty one is from an old SA kit, not sure which papers they are though
Big chipboard photo corners are Plain Janes from a past SA kit
The black section of the "tag" is embossed with the Cuttlebug Textile folder
Gorgeous Ribbon is from Ribbon Oasis, I discoloured the white pattern slightly with some distress ink to get a better colour match to the paper

I really hope you'll play along with this dare - it's got that extra little challenge, hasn't it? If you do charity shopping, then you'll find it easy, if you don't well - this is a real challenge isn't it?

So, do YOU dare?

We'd love to see your cards, so please join in and leave us a message when you've got something to show us.
Don't forget to check the rest of the DT cards on the DCM blog, and all the other info on the various personal blogs

Right up my Boulevard!

My new SA Kit arrived yesterday, and the papers are just fab this month - they are all from the Boulevard Collection by MME, all shades of blue and green and all double sided, patterned on one side, plain on the other.

I love them sooooo much that, shock horror, I've made a card with them already! This one's for my Uncle's birthday which is on Monday, so I've just been up to the post box with that and a stack of other stuff that was sitting waiting. Obviously if I'd been a bit more organised and got all this finished yesterday then I wouldn't have got thoroughly drenched in the downpour which started just as I left the house, would I?I've taken the photo this way so that all the chipboard bits show up nicely. Papers & Bazzill all SA Kit as above.
Chipboard square, monogram and oval thingie are from various palces, brads, ribbons and eyelets from stash

ps

is everyone else getting messages in German when they upload a blogger post?

Southwold Photos

Some photos from our trip to Southwold on the Suffolk coast, you can click on them for a bigger version if you'd like to

This is where we stayed, sorry it's not a great photo because I should have taken it in the afternoon when the sun was on the front of the house....
The cottage was out in the country and this was the view from one of the windows in our room
Lots of haymaking going on!
Southwold Pier
On the beach
And of course there are LOTS of fabby beach huts all along the very very long prom

And get this! apparently one sold a couple of weeks back for £100,000 - but sadly it wasn't hubby buying it for my birthday.....
Ah, well, a girl can but dream........

Chasing my Tail

Funny how a couple of days away and you spend the next fortnight trying to catch up eh? My "to do" list has grown like a weed yet again (at least as fast as the weeds in my garden grow) and I have masses to do and not much mojo to help me out. I will get round to sharing some of the photos of our weekend aaway, and maybe even get some photos of some of the gorgeous cards that came through the letterbox for my birthday. I was so lucky, loads of cards and presents, some beautiful crafty makes (Sharon - if you're reading this, your wonderfully thoughtful gift made my chin wobble and brought tears to my eyes - I'll be in touch asap.....)

Then of course I was good and didn't come and check the blog after I'd issued my little bit of a birthday fun challenge, so when Monday came around and I couldn't wait any longer I had just the best fun checking all your links to the fabby cards you made for me! Must admit I wondered if I'd be left with egg on my face and no cards to look at - but I should have known better!

You were just great so a huge THANK YOU to all who joined in,
you really made my birthday feel so special and it was fun to share all those cards with everyone too!
I've just written all the names of those who made a card,
chopped them up and put them in a box
shook them about a bit
and pulled out a winner:
ANNE, it's YOU!

Now, Anne, I haven't a clue what your prize will be, but I promise to think of something - can you email me (contact button is in the sidebar) with your info and I'll have something on it's way to you as soon as poss.

Met Sue for coffee and gossip this morning. She was supposed to be helping me with a task but she bottled out when she heard what it was, and kept up the chatter long enough for her to get out of it so I had to go on my own.....friends, eh?

Now what else was there? Oh yes - it's DCM Little Extra Day and this week it's a word challenge, just one word which we hope will inspire your cardmaking in lots of different ways. The word is GOLDEN and there are some cards on the DCM blog to help get you thinking.
Here's mine - made in a bit of a hurry so probably would have been a bit different if I'd had the time to think it through - or actually got round to starting it sooner, which is more the truth - one day I'll learn to be more organised and disciplined.....one day...maybe....
Vellum is by Pixie Press
The mirror card "50th" and the golden glittery frame were cut with the Craft Robo
I wrote "Anniversary" with a gold pen - I was going to make a tag but writing was quicker :-)
Blooms from a local garden centre, Brads form stash
ooooh, maybe I should have added a bit of ribbon too.......hmmmm
Well, anyway, I'm sure you'll do something more inspired than this so I can't wait to see what Golden Crafty Moments you come up with - hopefully you can help me get my mojo back, because it's run off again :-(

Birthday Card Blog Candy

Hellooooooo
This is just to let you know that my little blog candy bit of fun will close at 12 noon UK time today.

I've stayed away for the blog as long as I can manage (and phew! I see some cards were left for me so I'm off to have a look now) If you made one to the recipe you'll be in my draw and one of you lovely people will win a prize.

Thanks so much for playing :-}

Kathy Two-Challenges!

I've got TWO challenges for you today, the big one - the DCM new dare set by Rhi I'll come to in a minute, but here's a little one for you: It's my birthday on Saturday and I'd love it if you'd make me a card and show it on your blog, if you do that, and leave a message so I can come and see it then I'll put your name in a hat and draw out a winner early next week. There'll be a prize for the winner - might be stash, might be a little thing I make for you, I've not decided yet! I think a little recipe might be in order for this so I'd like you to make me a card with these ingredients included on it:

3 separate flowers (ie not 3 layers of petals)
3 different ribbons
3 different papers

easy, eh? I'm not going to check my blog till Sunday evening or maybe even Monday morning if I can hold out that long, so hopefully there'll be lots of lovely cards for me to see when I can't bear the suspense any longer! Oooooer I hope there will be some to look at now or I'll feel really really silly!

And so, on to the DCM and one of our Newly-Weds!

Rhi came back from her honeymoon in gorgeous Crete, just in time to set us the next challenge on the Daring Cardmakers Blog She said:

Use one word as a main focal point on your cards. It can be a greeting or a name or just a word, but only one main word, and no hyphenating-words-so-you can-fit-more-than-one-in either.... (As if we would!) You can use any other stuff you like, including other words and text as long as there is one focal word. You might like to use the word to inspire the rest of your card, sun, sea, sky, siesta or you might be inspired by the papers and pretty bits you have squirreled away.

I seem to be making a lot of baby cards at the moment, and this worked out quite well for Rhi's dare! I've used the Robo quite a bit on this one, I cut the letters and their mats. the scalloped frames and the circles all with it. I cut a corner off the front of the card so the letters would stand out from the main card. All the little flowers and the butterfly are cut with a Cuttlebug die. Pink and White card is Bazzill, all the other bits and pieces are from my stash. It was after I read something on someone's blog that I remembered about adding the flowers - it has been in my original plan, but then I forgot all about it and so the first draft of my card looked rahter plainer. It's ok without the extras but I'm glad I got that little reminder as I think it's better with them on there. There are some great cards on the DCM blog so please go and have a look, and we'd love it if EVEN more people joined in with the dares, it's such a great way to share ideas and inspiration and everyone is just so friendly

Alpha's Birthday

Something I'd wanted to do for years, and finally got involved with a couple of years ago was child sponsorship. It's such a good idea as our sponsor money doesn't just help the child, but also their family and their whole community.
We sponsor Alpha who lives in Senegal through World Vision - we pay a small sum by direct debit each month and it's just such a worthwhile thing to do. It's wonderful to get letters and pictures from him and it always makes us smile when we get a photo, I suspect he's not keen on having his photo taken, he always looks as if he's there under suffrance and the only way they got him to stand in front of the camera was to let him hold his football as in every photo the football is there.

Anyway, his birthday is coming up and he'll be 11, and as he's football mad I thought I'd use one of Leo's fab free Crafty Templates to make his card.
The fold is on the top, so it looks really effective when it's standing up. I googled info on the Senegal National Football shirts - though I used a lot of creative license with the design I must admit! I also found their badge, which I printed out to stick on the shirt, then cut the letters for Alpha's name out on the Robo.
It's not a complicated card, just colouring in really, but I hope he'll like it.

If you're interested in Child Sponsorship have a look here I'd encourage anyone to do it, the greatest thing is that you're giving real help to a needy child and his community, but you get SUCH a lot out of it yourself, too.

Tinned Book?

I made this book in a tin for Sue's birthday.
I've been hanging onto a couple of tins that some QK die sets came in hoping they'd "come in useful one day" - well just for once my habit of squirrelling things away came good!
I used Daisy Bucket papers throughout. Mainly from the Garden Date set, along with a couple of pieces from some others thrown in.Other stuff used on the tin: Dunelm Mills blooms, chipboard flower, DCWV posies flower, button, ribbons, fibres, brad, Stickles and Liquid Pearls from stash
The book cover stuff: Fat daisy/other paper flowers, hand made paper flower, DCWV posies flower. Glossy Accents, beads, ribbons, brad, from stash
Name cut from velvet paper with the Robo.

The Pages
There aren't many pages in the book because the tin is very shallow. I've either left them blank for a photo or made a pocket and tag for adding more bits and pieces, or little notes and messages.
You can click on the pictures if you'd like a closer look
I'd planned to make the book inside open concertina fashion, but I got myself in a muddle so it ended up a regular right side opening book instead. ah well, you can't win 'em all
Also, I should have thought more about just how shallow the tin was - I had to flatten the flower on the front of the book in order to close the tin. As you can see, my planning isn't always what it should be!

This week's Little Extra from The Daring Cardmakers is to make a card featuring both big and small sizes of the "bits" used, so if you use a big button then you need to use a little one too, use a big flower shape and you also need a little one.

I made this card using some Craft Robo downloads from the Bosskuts site. I think it's fab that lots of the lovely Bosskutz dies are now available as downloads - obviously you have to pay for them, but it's not very costly and I found it all really quick and efficient.
So here are big and little versions of the two Bosskuts Christmas Trees, cut to the sizes I wanted with the Robo - cool, eh? Wouldn't it be nice if the makers of all our favourite dies were as far-sighted as this?

Paper is from the Daisy Bucket "Wrapped Wishes" set
Green card is Bazzill
Silver card is a bit of a folder that's gone tatty and I've "recycled"
Also used; pink and silver Stickles glitter glue, pink star gems, brad and fibres from my stash.

Please join in - it's fun - honestly! :-)

Tearing Purple Holes for Christmas

It's Friday Dareday again, but before I show my cards for this week's little teaser I just want to take a minute to wish Tracie and Wayne all the best for their wedding tomorrow. I hope the sun shines on them for their special day and their lives together are filled with love and joy.

It's looking like it can't be put off any longer so time for the DCM to jump on the Christmas Card Bandwagon. It's all very hectic on the Design Team - Rhi and Tracie's weddings, Kel's new baby due very soon, and Saffa expecting twins. Gillian and Jane are both poorly girlies at the moment and Lynne lost her internet this week - yep, it's all going on round the DCM! Good job we had a "Team Dare" pencilled in for this week then. Lots of ideas were thrown into the mix and eventually this rather devious little challenge emerged:

Make a Christmas card which incorporates the following:

Some Paper Tearing

The colour Purple

AND

It has to have at least one hole somewhere in the design!

......BUT by "hole" we don't just mean the sort of hole you poke a brad through, or the holes you make for/with stitching - or even the hole you make to put an eyelet in - although you can use all those techniques too if you want.

We want you to be a bit/lot more inventive and creative than that, and we think you'll be able to come up with some wonderful ideas for making cards to fit this recipe. We'll leave it to you to guess which team member said "if I put Baby Jesus on my card, will that be "Holey" enough?"

We're very happy to welcome Paula aka Mini-book Pixie as our Guest Designer for the next couple of weeks. Paula has joined in pretty much every dare since the DCM started, and it's especially fab that she's agreed to come and be our GD as we're now in the run up to our first anniversary.

I had a really tricky time photograohing these - the little camera I use forcrafty photos really struggles with anything purple - in the end I had to call in reinforcements ie Hubby, to do some photo editing and get the colours of the pictures to match the vellum I'd used - the downside is there are pink tones on the rest of the card which aren't actually there!

I had various ideas for this dare, but most of them only got a couple of the criteria in - it was generally the torn paper that I forgot. In the end I came up with this one:

I cut the star shaped holes directky into the card with my Robo - I wasn't sure Robo would cut through the 280gsm card I like to use, but with a couple of runs it managed pretty well and I just needed to use a knife on a few tiny bits. It wasn't a "scientific" cut - I just "drew" a square in a Robo doc where I was pretty sure the face of the card would be, plonked in some stars of various sizes then removed the square and did the cuts. I used a piece of purple vellum wider than the card and tore the edge so that the torn edge would show on the fron of the card and the rest would cover the inside of the card and show through the holes.
Other details: silver thread and eyelets. stars punched from silver glitter card, stamped & embossed greeting

This is the other card I made using the rest of the purple vellum, I like the basic idea, and I might use it for some of my Christmas cards this year but I think it would be better without the torn edge.

The "holes" are the snowflakes at the bottom, cut with the Robo from a strip of card, an offcut of the vellum stukc behind then the strip was mounted onto the card with foam pads.
I tore the main piece of vellum before putting it through the Cuttlebug as trying to tear it after embossing means your tear tends to follow the pattern - a bit like having perforations, and not such a nice neat edge - if you can have a neat torn edge!
Other details: Cuttlebug Snowflakes embossing folder, tiny silver brads, inking, silver pen stitching, silver Krylon ink, white organza ribbon

Looking forward to seeing what all our wonderful darers come up with for this one - it's not as easy as it sounds and there was a bit of foot-stamping among the design team :-), but there are some fab ideas on the DCM blog to get you thinking, so please check them all out.

Stuff and Nonsense

The weather has picked up - a bit late, but iy's nice to see the sunshine and feel some warmth, too - a couple of weeks back the heating was actually coming on because the house was so chilly!
One of the fun things about this house is that we have blackberry bushes in the garden, so every couple of days I've been out there picking the next batch of ripe berries. So far I've got 2 bagfuls in the freezer and on Sunday we took a third bagful over to my bro and SIL. Picking them reminds me of going out blackberrying when we were kids, then the house smelling of jam-making as mum and Ann, who lived next door made loads of jars of jam to sell at the Churxh Bazaar.

I heard from Leo yesterday that my very first Crafty Templates design team pack is all ready for me, so I'm doing that excited/nervous shuffle thing again. I'm sure my first month's stint will be the hardest as I don't really know what to expect. I wonder if it'll arrive tomorrow?

My birthday is coming up soon, and as we'd fully expected to be in the throes of the building work by now we hadn't planned anything. Well since the planning permission was delayed, and in consequence we lost our "slot" in the builder's schedule, we've booked a couple of nights B&B in what looks to be a seriously cute little cottage in the middle of nowhere - but actually not far from Southwold - which I love - mainly because of the very long prom and it's long row of the prettiest beach huts I know of! Please let the skies be blue so we can get some good photos!

I've been pretty busy with the cutting & glueing this week, but yet again I can only show some more of those fiendish sneaky peeks, so here goes
















DCM day tomorrow, finally got my card made today, but I'm having trouble getting the ........... colour to show correctly in the photo. Hopefully Hubby can sort it out for me or it's going to look ......... instead of ..........

Soft and Fluffy Little Extra

Time for another Tuesday challenge from the Daring Cardmakers
As always it's been great to see people having fun with Lythan's challenge for this week's "main" dare - we love to see all the cards you show and there's always room for more players.
The Little Extra this week is :

"You Big Softie"
We want you to use something soft on your card
feathers, velvet paper, fluffy fibres
all that soft, strokable stuff counts for this one and that's it,
easy-peasy, lemon-squeezy!

I had the idea that feathers could be used as "petals" for a multi layered flower and I'm not sure it's worked tbh - still, nothing ventured, nothing gained!
Paper is from the July (I think) SA Kit
Flower is made from feathers, a big blue "fat" daisy, a felt flower and a turquoise "splat" flower.
Metallic turquoise eyelets are from Impress in the US

That's the card that was put on the DCM blog when the LE was launched - but then Nice Postie came bringing a box of new goodies, so I sat down and made another card and have changed the blog to show this next one instead!

So - my new stash is a pile of Daisy Bucket papers, and some velvet paper too - perfect for a Softy challenge.
Papers are from the Garden Gate and Wrapped Wishes ranges. The red circles and flower are velvet paper. I cut all the bits with the Robo and added some ric-rac for the stems.
I think I might add some sort of greeting eventually.

Please check out the DCM blog for nore fantastic cards, and do join in with a bit of soft stuff of your own - it's fun - honestly!