Summer crafting

Hi Crafty Friends

What a summer we've been having! One good thing about not crafting in the conservatory is we have been able to escape the broiling heat as my rented house is relatively cool. And I get to feed the swans and ducks form my window. I'll miss them when I go home.
Look how much they've grown

Sadly, since I took this picture, 3 of the cygnets have died. I just hope the rest make it.

Here are some of the cards we've been making.
This was a simple card, everyone finished early so we could enjoy a natter. (Memo to self, must try to do this more often). I wanted to use my new lacy panel die as the star of the show. I added ribbon - a bargain roll from China, which we coloured with Colour Cloud. I real life it matches better than it looks on this pic.

Next up, a pair of tunnel cards. It was a marathon of die cutting, but everyone was pleased with the finished cards, even if some of us had to reconvene to complete the final assembly. However as that entailed wine and chocolates, it was no bad thing 😀

Not exactly a batch make for Christmas, but nice for special cards and I think these card bases will be very good for wedding cards/ anniversary cards.

After all the hard work making the tunnel cards we had an easier week, making this Christmas card, although there was a birthday version for those for whom it's too early for Christmas!!!
We letterpressed the embossing folder, and did a bit of tricky hand cutting to get the very narrow silver matting layers, but it was pretty straightforward. Loving my new poinsettia dies.

Happy crafting
Jan x

Eclipse Cards

Hi Crafty Friends
Eclipse cards, especially ones using big letter dies, are all over Pinterest, You Tube, and probably all other platforms (but I don't know how to use them!), so I thought it was time the club joined in the fun.
I got rather carried away and made loads of samples: some people picked a sample to copy, others made up their own designs.

Here are some of my samples
For this one, I just added some shading to the stamp with Colorsoft pencils

This is a lovely Stampendous stamp which I painted with Distress Inks. My generally rubbish colouring, while not great was much improved with a decent water brush.

This was inspired by Jan B, independent SU demonstrator, only not having her SU stamps (which suited being inked by dragging colour from the original stamping), I just did 1st, 2nd and 3rd generation stamping with the stamps I had.

I went a bit mad with my star stamps and all my brightest inks on this one

I wish I'd made the snowflakes a bit darker on this one, and spent ages finding a Christmas stamp, not attached to a happy, merry etc. I don't know about you, but I am reluctant to cut stamps up and masking makes it tricky.

And here are three cards made by club members. First up, Glyn with a beautiful starry card (a significant number yet to be attached)

This is Sue's take on the snowflake card, in a very classy navy

And Wendy's card for her son who had just done a bit of tree surgery for me. How good is that! She provides the workman and the thank you card. I love the colour combo.

I think I've been thoroughly eclipsed!

happy crafting

jan x

Sunny Crafting

Hi Crafty Friends

Well, here we still are, at Serendipity Towers mark 2, with no date yet for our return. Still, as this glorious summer continues it's good we're not baking in the conservatory.

Here's what we made last week.

Just a lot of die cutting and colouring with Colour Clouds. For this one I used Frosted Blossom. I inked through the  flower die like a stencil so the petals got a pretty white edge.
As it was fairly easy, I got to make one too, though I did have to spread it over both days.

 This time I chose Baked Peach, a gorgeous sunny colour ... peach not ORANGE! (for any orange-aphobes out there!!)
Sunny crafting
jxx

All Aboard

Hi Crafty Friends

I hope everyone is enjoying the rare occurrence of Summer! I have been enjoying feeding the ducks and the swans who cruise past my window.

I love making nautical or sea side cards, they seem so summery and so I came up with this. It's a DL Z-fold, because I wanted to use a pile of pearlescent card - A4 cut in half longways which I bought a couple of months ago at a show. I also had the papers which survived the fire.

I like having so many surfaces to decorate, though it is rather time consuming, and a bit of a push for the club, but everyone enjoyed it. I just provided lots of dies, inks etc and people chose their own decorations - it was good to see all the different takes on the basic idea.

Here's what it looks like opened out. I like to include little pockets for extra messages, and there's room to write on the horizontal banner.

I liked the fold so much I made several more

And there's a couple more waiting to see if I can load them up with any more bits and pieces.
Happy crafting
jan x

3 Page Card

Hi Crafty Friends
Here's a card the club made a few weeks ago. It has three pages. It's quite an easy construction but doing the die cut edges was fiddly (getting the card through the die cutter long ways was the issue.) it would have been a lot easier with a punch but I lost my lovely EK success edgers in the fire.
Luckily I'd managed to buy paper pads at a show with the same patters in different colour ways so everyone got to choose their colour. I picked yellow because it's generally the least popular so it left the faves for the group. In the event I was pleased with the lovely sunny yellow. Hearts are also a departure for me, but they are an easy shape to work with.

It needs pearls in the flowers but they'll have to wait till the next show.
love, sunshine and crafting
Jan x

Getting back to crafting

Hi Crafty Friends

I'm delighted to say that the craft club has settled into its temporary home, though there's still no sign of when we will be able to decamp. We had a break while I was in China (and no I didn't find a die factory!), but now we're back and crafting, despite the limited supplies of everything.

Here's a card we made before my holiday. Jackie very kindly donated the patterned card in the centre, and this fancy filigree rectangle die was to hand, so it came together quite quickly.

Another pre-hols card. Don't know what made  me think of doing a new home card 😉. I wanted to use the stylised tree dies and then I got a magazine with the house die on it. Serendipity, eh!

As you can see, only minimal supplies were needed - just a few dies and some DIs which  were in the conservatory so escaped the fire.  We were a bit short of brushes/ sponges though. 

wish us luck in our new crafty home

jx

a Right Mix Up

Hi Crafty Friends
Long time no blog!

Most visitors to this blog already know, but for those of you that don't, I'm sorry to have to tell you that the worst thing that can happen in craft land has happened to me - my craft room caught fire!!

The room was completely wrecked and the rest of the house has suffered extensive soot and smoke damage. I am now in rented accommodation, and likely to be here for some time, given the glacial speed of the insurance company. Here we are, 2 months after the fire and they are commissioning another report on what need to be done (i.e. is there anything they can get out of doing!)

Sadly I have not been crafting - no stash and too much other stuff to do. However, I did manage to reconvene the club last week (at my temporary place) but crafting with the random stuff which escaped has proved trying to say the least. It was lovely to see all those who could make it, though.
A massive THANK YOU to all who have helped (cleaned stuff, donated stuff, brought cake etc). Huge, huge thanks to Wendy without whom and without whose trailer nothing would have been possible. I hoping to have the club meet again this week, fingers crossed.

Before the fire we were experimenting in mixed media
Now as you know, this isn't really my forte, but I do like the look and it's fun, so we embarked on another project - this time a book cover. I chose to do a diary but everyone chose what sort of book they wanted and brought it in. The first week we just covered them with scrunched up paper and gessoed them black, ready for the fun the following week.

Here's mine

I used a mixture of die-cuts and metal embellishments. I think you can see quite a lot of Tim Holtz in evidence. It's mostly coloured by dry brushing with metallic paints, plus a bit of gilding wax. The trouble with this mixed media malarkey is that you need quite a few media to mix, and I (currently) don't have many. Still I was pleased with the effect.

We all had a grand and fairly messy time
Here's Kath, very busy

And here are some of the finished projects

Inga's. I just love the pencils (and everything else about it, come to that)

Joan's super address book

Ann C's album - a fab upscaling of a kraft album from The Works

Jackie's gorgeous notebook. I do believe there are more in the pipeline. The bug has definitely bitten!

Glyn's brilliant garden book (what a great idea) and I love the ladybird. 

And Margaret's book for her 7yr old granddaughter. Her granddaughter loves it and has already started filling it with drawings and journalling. what a lovely keepsake it will be.

There are loads more fabulous makes, but I haven't managed to snag any pics. But hasn't everyone done well!

I'm delighted too say, it was very popular and quite a few people have made several more books. It seems once someone in the family gets one, everyone else wants one too. I did start another one, but I found its charred remains in the debris. Speaking of which, I thought you might like to take note of what a faulty heat gun can do!

Hope to be back with brighter news next time
happy crafting
Jx