Up, Up and Away

The challenge over at Digital Tuesday this week is Up, Up and Away, hence my title today :)

Our sponsor is Bugaboo Stamps who always generously offer the design team an image each to play with, so I took them up on their offer and made a card with one of their digis.

 The image I used today is from the Kidz line and is called Girl Balloon, and you can find her here.

I coloured her with a mix of Copics and Promarkers. As I have said many times, I do prefer Copics, but I'm not too keen on most of the pinks as most of them are very bright, so I normally use Promarkers when I'm coloiring pink as they have a softer look to them.

I also added some stickles to bits on her hat and also to the highlights on the balloon.

 I think these Kidz images are quite cute :) Only problem I have is that the lines are quite thick on these images and they tend to bleed a bit when using light colours like the skin. Although that's probably just my printer. I never have problems with printer running normally, only when the image has thick dark lines, and I have tried heat setting, leaving for a few days, using cheap hairspray and all the other tricks I can think of, but it doesn't make any difference, so I just make sure to be extra careful when colouring the light bits.

However, even after being careful colouring this image and not really having bleeding, I later noticed (once the whole card was finished!) that there is a blue pencil or pen mark on the image which was defo not there when I was colouring it! I think I must of sat the card on top of one of the kids colouring pencils while I was getting my camera! I was too scared to try rub it off incase it smeared all over the image, so I just left it lol.

You can see it in the above pic if you look closely (under the balloon string).

The papers I used are ones that I got from my friend Ger (thank you hunnie, you spoil me!! :)) and I've went and put the pad away and forgot to take a note of who makes it. It might be MME but I'm not sure.

I used Coredinations to mat with and glittered all the edges with stardust stickles.

The lace and ribbon is from my stash (this was my last piece of ribbon, but Geraldine is sooo lovely and sent me a pile so I now have lots of new lovely ribbon to use :))

 The little bunting, was cut out with My Favorite Thing mini pennant dies in the same papers and I also glittered the edges, and the flowers were made from the same paper pad using a Cart Us flower die, and of course I glittered those too lol.

Oh I also used a Marianne die and a MFT die for the flourishes.

I'm entering this card into the challenge at Totally Papercrafts where the challenge this week is to make you own Embellishments (my flowers and bunting)

That's all from me for today. All 3 of my kids have been away since Friday afternoon so I have had nothing to do since then and have been soooo bored! but today we are going into town (Barry and I) to meet Liam and go kilt shopping (well looking in kilt shops for kilts that we can hire for Barry's sisters wedding which is at the beginning of March), and maybe see if I can find some shoes to go with my new dress. Anyone who knows me will tell you that I very rarely wear dresses (I sometimes wear skirts in the Summer but not very often and I only have a few) but of course I needed to buy one for the wedding and I really liked it until I tried it on, but now I'm not so sure lol, maybe I will like it more when I find the perfect pair of shoes :/ At least it's an excuse to buy new shoes right? lol

 Then we will get the bus home with Liam (I hate not having a car now!!) and pick up the girls from their Nana's in Stonehaven on the way.

So lots to do today and my piece will be shattered by tea time lol, but I've missed them all so much and am glad they are coming home today :)

Thanks so much for stopping by today.

Please leave a comment if you have the time and I will come visit you back :)

Oh and don't forget to check out the challenge and the other dt memebrs blogs. They have all done a fab job again this week! :)

A bit of shabby chic birthday ;)

This will be a long post with lots of pics, so you might want to get yourself comfy first with a cuppa before reading ;)

It's the middle of the month (already! where did October go?!!), which means I have some stuff to show you that I made for the inspiration post over at By The Cute and Girly challenge.

It's our 3rd Birthday this month and we are celebrating with a special birthday challenge and blog hop! You can see my blog hop post at the top of my blog :)

We are all using a different sponsors images/products this month as we have a lot of sponsors with lots of prizes of course (15 prizes in fact!) to help celebrate our birthday, and my sponsor is  Whiff Of Joy.

The lovely Katharina sent me a stamp to use for the challenge, which I used for my card at the start of the month, but this time I decided to buy one of her digi stamps to use on my card (I was going to buy a rubber stamp to use, but I forgot about it until the other day and by then I was too late to order it in time for the inspiration post).

Anyway, I thought it would be nice to make something a bit special since it's my challenge blogs birthday:) So I decorated/altered a plain wooden jewelry box and made a card using the WOJ image.

First here's the card I made.

 I went a bit shabby chic with this one as I wanted it to kind of match my box (it doesn't really match but it's the same kind of style lol).

The image is called "Tea For Two" and I coloured it with Promarkers, then glittered and inked the edges with stardust stickles and antique linen distress ink.

I love these images and really have to get more!;)

The papers are Prima ones and I also used some old sheet music, and matted the image and base layer with blue coredinations cardstock.

I did the white paint thing and added some paint to almost everything lol, to give it a softer feel.

The flowers I made using Mariane Designs flower dies (a large and small flower die from the same set). I made some little rose style flowers for the top and just layered up some of the flowers for the bottom flower and added a flower from Wild Orchid Crafts in the center. Of course I glittered them :)

 The flourish/swirls are made using a Marianne Die and an MFT die.

Lace was bought in a little craft shop in Stonehaven, ticket sentiment was a digi freebie that I got ages ago buit can't remember where from, pearl string from my stash ad the cute little teapot charm is from Janlynn from the "Tea Time" charm pack. They have these fab steampunk sets of charms, and I love them! :)

There is so much to choose from and you can use them for so much different projetcs. I used a flat charm, but a lot of them in the range are 3d, and they are gorgeous! 

You can check out their steampunk range here.

Oh and we have some up for grabs along with loads of other goodies from Janlynn this month over at the challenge blog.

A close up of the cute image :)

Isn't that charm cute? :)

Ok, so that's the card and here's the box. Warning, there is quite a few pics!

I wanted to give this box an old shabby feel, so I painted it with sandstone acrylic paint, then a layer of crackle medium and finished off with a top coat of white acrylic paint so that the white cracked and little bits of the darker paint shows through.

You can't really see the cracked effect very well in these pics, but it looks better in real life.

I didn't use an image for a change! (I can tell you, that really was a challenge for me!! lol), but I wanted something in the center, so I used a Prima chipboard shape instead.

The lace on top is the same as I used in my card, and the flowers were made the same way too, except I added some white paint to them and added some tiny white rose buds.

The little heart was a plain wooden one and I painted it the same way as the rest of the box, and did the same with the die cut flourishes.

The pretty metal butterfly was gift from a friend, which I added some light blue pearls to, as was the metal corner.

Finally for the outside, I added some pretty beaded trim on the drawer, but the ribbon the beads are attached to is blue and it looked a bit out of place (because the blue was a bit too bright), so I added some pretty lace over the top.

And this is the inside :)

I kept the inside quite plain because if I added loads of embellies, it wouldn't close properly lol.

So I just added some Prima paper and a wooden heart.

This isn't a very good pic, but you can see that I lined the inside of the drawer with some more Prima paper.

And finally (I promise!! lol), some close up pics so you can see the detail a bit better.

I didn't want to add loads of pics, but there is so much little bits of detail on this project.

 You can see the glitter and paint on  the flowers a bit better in this pic. I used the same Prima papers to make the flowers ad some old sheet music.

So that's it for me for today (thank goodness! I hear you say lol)

Thanks so much for stopping by and any comments that you may leave.

I love reading my comments and appreciate you taking the time to leave me one :)

Digital Tuesday Steampunk

The theme at Digital Tuesday this week was chosen by Maya (who always likes to give us a challenge!) and she chose Steampunk.

I must admit, I could of died when she told me the theme because I have never made a steampunk card and didn't have anything steampunky....or so I thought.

I do love the style though and after all the worrying, I had so much fun making this card :)

 Our sponsor this week is Spesch Stamps who is giving away 3 digital images of the winners choice, and as always Tracey let the design team choose an image to play with, so of course I had to use one because I love her images!

Sorry about the pants pic! My camera battery went dead on me after only taking three pics and this was the best of a bad bunch! lol I was just lucky to get a pic of the full card and a close up of the image as I normally take loads of the whole card first then choose the best one.

Anyway as I said, I used a Spesch Stamps image and it's called "Steampunk". Very apt for the challenge :)

I coloured her with promarkers and cut her out using a craft knife for the tiny bits.....not really a good idea with a numb hand but I managed lol.

I used some sheet music (which I inked around the edges with copper ink) for the mat as I didn't have the colour of card I wanted to use- must remember to get some!

The patterned paper is by Bo Bunny and I decided to be daring and heat emboss the edges lol. Not sure if I like it, but it was fun to do ;)

The clock is a free svg file that I found a while back and the "cogs" I found on the accent essentials cricut cartridge. I thought they looked a bit steampunky?

I heat embossed them all with bronze embossing powder.

Finally to finish off, I cut some flowers from the same papers using a Marianne Designs die (which actually embosses circles on them as well), scrunched them into a ball, inked them with antique photo distress ink and layered them together with a button and some string which was also coloured with distress ink because I only have white. Then added some die cut flourishes. The leafy one is a MFT die and the other is a Marianne Designs.

I had actually coloured my image with blues and browns, but my son Liam said that it didn't go very well and it would look better in green, so I printed out another image and coloured it up and he was absolutely right :)

Thanks so much for stopping by today. Hope you ca join in with this weeks challenge and if you haven't already popped over to the By The Cute and Girly challenge blog, you might want to take a peek ;) Lots of prizes up for grabs for our 3rd birthday celebration! We have a blog hop running alongside the challenge for the whole month (my blog hop post is pinned to the top of my blog if you haven't already seen it) and we have prizes from some great sponsors including Simon Says Stamp, Lili Of The Valley, Whiff Of Joy, Joana Sheen, Kenny K, Pink Gem and much much more! In fact we have 15 prizes up for grabs this month!! and you can have lots of chances at winning them.

You will get an entry to the blog hop prize draw if you visit each dt's blog and leave a comment and you can enter the challenge as much times as you like throughout the month (as long as each entry is with a different craft) for multiple chances to win 1 (or more) of our challenge prizes!

I'm looking forward to visiting you all to see your entries! ;) xx

A little Gem :)

It's been a while since I posted. I didn't get my Digital Tuesday card posted for last weeks challenge because I had camera trouble, but it's all fixed now and I'm back to normal....well as normal as I can be with 3 kids off on school holidays!! lol

The challenge at Digital Tuesday this week is "Child's Play" and our sponsor is Pink Gem Designs, who also offered the design team an image each to play with.

Of course I had to use one of Janet's images because they are sooo cute :) You will have to forgive me if my card is a bit wonky in any way because I'm having trouble cutting etc as both my hands are numb now :( Well my left hand and wrist is completely numb and three fingers on my right hand too, but I still have the use of my right thumb and first finger, so I can hold a pen (just about lol) to colour so that's good enough for me :) Still don't know what's causing it, but hopefully I will find out soon! Until then you will have to put up with dodgy cards :) lol....well not that's there's much difference from my normal cards anyway lol, but you know what I mean.

 The papers are all scraps so I'm not sure who makes them, but I think the 2 turquoise/teal ones are hot off the press.

All the flowers are from Wild Orchid Crafts, some ribbon, tulle and gems from my stash. The metal corner was a gift, little butterfly is a K&Co sticker which I stuck onto card and cut out and the flourishes are made with Marianne and MFT dies.

The cute image is of course from Pink Gem and is called Jodie in Dungarees and she is coloured with a mix of Promarkers and Copics.

I just had a look in the Pink Gem store to get the link for this image and noticed that she is on sale just now and only costs £1.35!! Actually, I think all the digis are on sale, so if you've had your eye on any of these cuties, now's the time to buy! :) 

Oh and I'm not on the Pink Gem design team, I just love their cute images and saw a bargain that I thought I would pass on :)

That's it from me for today, and I will be back tomorrow for my mid month post for By The Cute and Girly (the theme is fruity there this month and we have some fab prizes again this month!).

Hope to see some of you join in with the challenge at Digital Tuesday. We all have cute little boy and girl digis, so this weeks challenge is a really easy one and there's some digis from Pink Gem Designs up for grabs.

Thanks for stopping by and leaving comments :)

Cute as a Button

I have a sick little girl at home today.  I think she may have tonsillitis :( Her throat is really sore, she's finding it hard to swallow and her body is aching. Poor baby, she's only 7 and I know how sore tonsillitis is because I used to always get it as a kid. On top of that, she has a sore tummy and feels sick, so no school for her today. She's just laying on the sofa just now having a nap, so I thought I would pop on here and get my dt post done for By The Cute and Girly.

The challenge theme this month is "Cute as a Button" and as always you can enter with any craft.

 Sorry about the pants pics again, I really need to get a day lamp for taking pics as it's so dull here lately.
I used a freebie image from Saturated Canary that Krista gave away on her facebook page a few weeks back. I love Krista's images and they are so much fun to colour.
I coloured the little cutie with Copics and went with bright fun colours for a change.
The papers I have used are Hot Off The Press and I think First Edition, but I could be totally wrong about that as I got the pink one from a friend.
The ribbon was in my stash and I have no idea where it came from, think it might of been in a pack of cheap embellies I bought ages ago. It was yellow and didn't really go with my image, so I coloured it with a Copic to match my image.
I have no idea who makes the flower I used today as I bought them from a blogging friend a while back. These flowers tend to sit a bit funny sometimes, so I stuck some of it in behind the image and stuck a button on top.
Flourish was cut with a MFT die, buttons from my stash and the bakers twine is by American Crafts.

 I love this cute image and had fun colouring her, but I am looking for new colouring card/paper again as I bought x-press blending card the last time and although I do like how it blends, after a few layers of ink, the ink starts to sit on top of the paper and goes all shiny and weird. It's such a shame because I would love this paper if it took more ink.

Oh well, time to do some more paper testing lol. I think my fave so far is Neenah, although it does sometimes bleed a bit.

I've heard that Gina K's paper is good, but I can't get that here and also Cryogen white from the Paper Temptress is supposed to be great, but I have never been able to get my hands on some of that either......why is shipping costs to the UK soooo expensive!!??

Any paper/card suggestions, please let me know. Finding a good paper for markers surely can't be this hard?? lol

Thanks for stopping by.

Hope you will go check out the challenge:)

Digital Tuesday Bugs and Blooms without the bugs! lol

Well I was going to do this post yesterday but the kids decided that Mum wasn't getting on the computer yesterday! lol. I got one post done here and my challenge blog posts done yesterday so I think I was chancing my luck when I wanted to do another post! lol

The challenge over at Digital Tuesday this week is Bugs and Blooms. It was Maria's turn to choose the challenge and she wants to see bugs and/or blooms.
The sponsor this week is Robyn's Fetish and I was planning on using one of her images for the challenge, but I bought 2 digi's from Wee Stamps a few weeks back that I had never used yet, so I kinda got sidetracked and coloured those up instead lol. I have used one for my card and after I added it to the DT blog on Monday, I noticed that I hadn't even used an image that had a bug on it! oops, just as well we could use bugs or blooms, or else I would of had to start all over again!

 I coloured the little cutie with Copics, and I never do blue and red together, but I only have a few copics just now and wanted to colour an image with just copics for a change, so this is just the colours I had lol.
I had a problem finding red and blue papers to match though, because it's colours I never use together, and never buy red papers, but I found the red one in an old paper pad that I think came free with a magazine months and months ago, and the blue patterned and plain papers are from a 12x12 pad that I got in The Works a while ago (same time as I bought the white paint I used yesterday:). They are by Kit 'N Kraft and I must admit that they are not very good quality (a bit on the thin side), but at £2.99 for 25 sheets of 12x12, they were a bargain, so I got 3 different pads lol. I would of got more but there was only 3 different ones.
The flowers are all Wild Orchid Crafts except the big red rose which was another bargain buy from Hobbycraft (I know it's not a likely place to find bargains!! lol, but they were reduced to 29p per bunch!:)
I covered the all in stickles, and they look ok in real life, but it looks a bit of a mess in these pics lol. I used icicle stickles because I couldn't find my star dust or diamond ones (think my girls have gone off with them again!!) and I really don't like them! The particles are too big and it all comes out in big blobs most of the time....or maybe that 's just the bottle I have lol.
I used a Stampin Up punch for the notebook style border, some American Crafts ribbon, the flourish was made with a MFT die and I got creative with the one a Marianne border die for the scalloped matting around the image.
I don't have a scalloped square die, or a scalloped punch for that matter (I had 2 before we moved house, but none now) and I wanted a pretty mat, so I cut out some borders with a Marianne die, then chopped them in half lengthways, cut them to the lengths I needed to go around the square and stuck them on :)
I was going to use the bigger scalloped edge, but it didn't join up very well, so I used the small side and it worked perfectly...well almost perfectly lol. Two of the edges didn't match up exactly, but I just covered those with embellies. You can hide a multitude of sins under flowers and flourishes you know lol.

Isn't she a cutie? I must get more of these stamps, they are just gorgeous.

Oh, before I go, I wanted to ask all you UK girls a question..........

I am seriously running out of coloured card to use for matting and layering and I used to get all my card from the Papeterie (for those of you who don't know, it's a shop that sells paper/card that is made in the papermill next door), but I can't get from there anymore as I live too far away.

They do deliver, but it's £6.50 delivery per box (or you can get up to 6 boxes delivered for the same price, but I have nowhere to store 6 boxes...or even 3 boxes because my house is so tiny!).

Also they don't have pics of their paper/card colours on their website, so you don't really know what colours you are going to get delivered to you or what weights they will be etc. Last time I just asked for assorted colours (I bought 2 boxes of white and 2 coloured to make up for the postage lol), but most of it was colours that I would never use and I ended up giving them to the kids to draw on.

I have been looking online, but can't seem to find anywhere that does card at a decent price!

So my question is, where do you all buy your coloured (or white because I need that too) cardstock?

I don't want it in huge quantities as my house is tiny so I have nowhere to store it.

Most websites I have looked at are really expensive for shipping (I know card is heavy but the prices I seen were way over the odds) and they don't do assorted colour packs/boxes. I don't want to have to buy a pack in pink, one in blue, one in brown etc, I just want an assortment of different colours.

Surely it can't be this hard to find an assorted box of card at a reasonable price and reasonable postage......or can it??

Answers on a postcard please! lol

By The Cute and Girly- Spring Is All Around (well maybe somewhere in the world!)

It's been a whole month since I last posted on here! I've had internet troubles for the last week and a half, but to be honest, my mojo completely left me and I just haven't felt like crafting or blogging. I was considering giving up both but I didn't want to let my design teams down at By The Cute and Girly and Digital Tuesday as it would mean that I would no longer have my challenge blogs either, so I gave it a few weeks and Mr Mojo is coming back slowly :) It was my birthday on the 13th of April and I never get anything crafty, but I did get some pennies so I added some of my own money to it and bought a cricut from a blogging friend and 2 cartridges too :)

I have wanted a cricut for ages, but when I got it, it just sat there and I never used it! So I decided the other day that it was time to make some use of it and made a few cards (I will show the others I made over the next few days).

I'm not into die cut cards, like the ones where there is no stamped images or embellies etc, just all die cuts so I don't think I will ever make one of those. I just really wanted one so that I can cut basic shapes lol. I only have a few dies and only one set of nesties (the scalloped circles) and simple things like not being able to layer my scalloped circle nesties onto a plain circle drove me nuts! So I will probably only use it for matting my images and things like that, but you never know, I may get creative with it one day!

I would also like to get a fonts cart as the 2 I have are shapes, because I like the idea of being able to cut out names etc for cards to personalise them, but that will have to wait until I have some spare pennies!

Ok, so enough of my rambling. I have a card to show that I made for the By The Cute and Girly challenge. The challenge for May is Spring Is All Around, and as always you can enter with any craft. 

My card is not very Springy, but I made this one a long time ago and just never got around to posting it, and it has flowers on it, so I thought it would fit the theme.

I must warn you, this post will be long as I have a few pics to show and I haven't been able to ramble on my blog for a whole month, so I have to make up for that!! lol

Sorry for the pants pics! They all look so washed out :(

 

I was experimenting with white acrylic paint on this card lol. I really wanted white picket fence paint, but couldn't find it in any of the stores here, so while I was in The Works buying some pencils and stuff for my kids, I came across a big tube of white acrylic paint that was reduced to 99p and decided I buy it and use it sometime. Well that paint has been sitting for months never opened!! So I got it out and experimented on this card, but to be honest, you can't really see it in these pics! lol

The papers I used are My Minds Eye from the Lost & Found collection, as is the brown sparkly ribbon. I love these papers so much! I really need to get some more!

I edged all the papers with the paint and inked them with antique linen distress ink. I really wanted to use Walnut Stain so it would show up better and I know I have it somewhere, but I couldn't find that inkpad anywhere! So I just done a few layers of the antique linen instead.

I cut out a few die cuts from kraft card (the frame, leaves and bottom flourish is Marianne Designs dies and the other flourish is by MFT), then covered them with a few white paint and added some stickles :)

The flowers are of course from Wild Orchid Crafts and I also used some clear Inky Dinks from Inky Impressions, oh and some pom pom trim that I picked up when I was in Montrose a while back.

The image is of course from Saturated Canary and is coloured with Copics. I printed the image onto kraft card, then used my little score board to score a border, then sewed around the embossed border by hand. Then I put some paint on the edges, inked them and then added some star dust stickles. I would of never thought of scoring lines around my image and I have no idea what gave me the idea to do it, but I kinda like it :)  You can't really see the embossed lines in these pics, but it shows up much better in real life.

You can just about see the top line on the pic above though.

 No idea why I took a pic at this angle! lol Think I must of been trying to show the glitter on the flowers, or maybe the die cuts?? No idea! lol, but you can see the pretty flowers better in this one :)

That's it from me for now. Sorry this post was so long! I have really missed blogging and reading the comments that my lovely blogging buddies leave me :) Thanks so much for stopping by. I really do appreciate your visit and any comments that you leave. I think the only thing that has actually kept me blogging on my own blog is the lovely comments I get, otherwise, I think I may of packed it blogging long ago.

I have a card to show for the Digital Tuesday Challenge where the new challenge also starts today, but I will do another post later on today for that card. I think this post is long enough!! lol

I'm really late!!!

I am sooo late with this card!! I am positive that I scheduled a post for last Tuesday to post my Digital Tuesday dt card, but it didn't post and I can't find it anywhere!! So I am nearly a week late with my card, but thought I might as well post it.

The challenge was to make a romantic card and the sponsor is My Grafico who also gave the design team one of their digital stamp sets to work with for the challenge.
The set is called Heart Fairies and is by Stockberry Studios, and I used a few images from the set for my card.

I couldn't decide which image to use from this set, so I made a step card so I could use 3 of them :)
I haven't made one of these cards for a long time, but they are great for when you want to show off a few images and really easy and quick to make.
I kept the decoration quite simple since there are 3 images. Just used some ribbon from my stash with a little bow also from my stash that I stuck on and card candi in the centre, a Prima flower and fabric one from my stash with another card candi and some die cuts to finish it off. Die cuts are MFT and Marianne Designs and the designer paper I used is by Papermania.

The images are all coloured with Promarkers and have some stickles on their wings.
The top one I matted onto some Spellbinders scalloped circle nesties so that is sticks out on top of the card.

And a close up pic of the other two little fairies.

  And finally a side on view of the whole card.

 Sorry for all the pics but these cards are quite difficult to photograph (well for me anyway!) and to get all the elements seen properly in one pic so I had to take a few.
I will be back tomorrow with my Digital Tuesday card for tomorrows challenge (away to write up that post now and schedule it for 9am so I know that I have done it and then will check in the morning that it has actually posted!! lol).
Thank you to everyone who left me comments yesterday and gave me advice about cutters and some suggestions. Any more suggestions are welcome! :)

Thanks for stopping by and leaving such lovely comments!

Wags N Whiskers DT, a forgotten card and I need some crafty advice!

I was just intending posting my Wags N Whiskers card for this fortnights challenge which is Valentines/Love, but while I was looking for the pics, I also found I card that I made and never posted which was made for Digital Tuesday. Not sure why it was never posted on my blog, but thought I may as well post it today anyway.

So first up is my Wags N Whiskers dt card. I was getting a bit tired of making Valentines cards since all of the dt's I am on have had Valentines as a theme and I made them all over a couple of days, so I decided just to make a "love you" card for this one.

I used the WnW "He Loves Me" stamp and coloured with Promarkers. I used the rubber stamp version but if you like digi's, you can also get any of the Wags 'n Whiskers stamps in digi form too.

The papers are DCWV (I think!) and I used some paper doilies, lace and ribbon from my stash, and a pretty rose bud from Little Snippets (link in my sidebar). The sentiment is from a stamp set I got ages ago as free gift with a magazine.

 I am having trouble cutting ribbon just now as I left all my good scissors in my old house!, so I am having to use a cheap pair that are really rubbish at cutting ribbon, or anything else for that matter! and the ends of all my bows look terrible! I have ordered a pair of scissors along with my Tesco food shop so hopefully they will be a bit better and do me until I can get in town and get a decent pair!

My other card as I said is one I made for Digital Tuesday. I can't even remember what the challenge was!, but the sponsor was Spesch Stamps and I have used one of their lovely digi images on my card.

 

The papers are all scraps, I am not sure where the base one came from but the others are Dovecraft.
For the flowers, I used a SU! 5 petal punch and also a woodware punch for the smaller flowers and added a tiny pearl in the centre.
Oh and I just remembered that the challenge was "punch it out" lol, which is why I used punches for the flowers. I also used a punched border, some lace from my stash and some leaves cut with a Marianne Designs die and the flourishes which were cut with a MFT die.

 A close up of the sweet image, and that's it from me.

Actually before I sign off, I wanted to ask all you lovely crafters for some advice :)
I desperately need a new paper cutter or guillotine but have no idea which one to get! At the moment I have a horrible cheap one which I bought just to tide me over until I could afford something better after my old one broke. It is the worst cutter in the world!!! It rips some papers and when it does actually cut I have to tidy up the edges with scissors because the blade is not sharp enough to give a crisp cut (although it has always been like that since I bought it), and I can never get a straight cut with it!
To make things worse, the plastic guard thing which holds the paper in place moves around when it should stay still, so I never know what the paper will end up looking like after I cut it!! lol
So, my question is, what cutter or guillotine do you recommend??
I don't have a huge amount of money to spend on one, so it has to be a reasonable price, and I'm not bothered about it having different blades (like the ones you get with wavy cutters etc), just something that cuts straight and crisp that won't break the bank:)
Any advise would be very much appreciated.

Thanks so much for stopping by and for all your lovely comments :) I have been trying my best to get around everyones blogs, but blogger isn't cooperating and doesn't want to load up some blogs for me, but I will keep trying!

Shabby chic? Well distressed anyway :)

As promised earlier, I am back with a card that I made a few days ago for some challenges (although some of them are now finshed because I have taken so long to post it!), but as my title suggests, I'm not sure if it is shabby chic. That's the look I was going for, but I don't  make these kind of cards very often and I am never sure what to call the style it turns out to look like lol.
Anyway, here it is.

I used another of the images from LOTV, these are so handy when you don't want to spend ages colouring an image. I added some stickles on some bits of the image just to add some extra detail.

The papers are all ones I got from my dt girls and I have no idea who makes any of them, but I love the muted tones on  them and two of them are glittery :)

I distressed the edges of them all with a pair of scissors (I really need to get one of those distressing tools!) and inked them with distress ink.

The dies came out again for this card, MFT was used for the bottom flourish and the other one was with a Marianne Designs die.

The pretty pearl swirl and the butterly in the corner are both by Prima.





The pretty crotchet flowers are of course from Little Snippets, as is the pearl trimming, I added some flowers from Wild Orchid Crafts on top of the crotchet flowers for a change, and I used the crotchet flowers upside down, just because the cherry blossoms seemed to sit better on them that way.

The embroidered lace butterfly is of course from Little Snippets. I always seem to use a colour that Ger doesn't have in the shop!, but she does have white ones and spring shades listed just now and she can do any other colour you want if you just ask.

I am entering this card into the following challenges:

Papertake Weekly- Die Cute

Stampin' for the Weekend- Out with the old (I have had the prima bits for ages)

Anything Goes Challenge- Anything Goes

My Mums Craft Shop- Here come the girls

The Crazy Challenge- Lace and Pearls

Thanks for stopping by and thank you for your lovely comments. I do read them all and I will try to get around all your blogs to leave you a comment :)



A winter wedding??

I can't believe we are half way through January already! Where did the month go??!!
We have started doing a mid month post over at By The Cute and Girly since we have a bigger design team now, which means a lot of projects to show in one post! So we are now posting half of our projects on the 1st of the month and  the rest on the 15th, so now there will be two eye candy posts each month from the DT :) and of course all the same fab prizes from our sponsors.

So here's what I made for our mid month post.

 The theme at BTC&G for January is New Beginnings, so I made a wedding card.......ok that is a total lie! I made a baby card, but when I went to take a pic of it yesterday, I noticed that part of the image has vanished!! I had stamped an image a few times and decoupaged it and a branch had somehow managed to fall off and I can't find  it anywhere, so will have to fix that first! lol, so I already had this card made for another dt challenge that is not due for a few weeks yet, so I decided to use this one and make something else for the other challenge.

This is not the usual kind of colours I would use for a wedding card, but I thought I would use this cute LOTV square as my image and couldn't really find any papers to go with  it, until I found these papers that I got from my lovely teamie and dt boss Ger (she is my boss at Little Snippets and I am her "boss" at by the cute and girly lol).
They are from a Me to You pad by Docrafts, Winter Wonderland, but they are not really Christmassy (is that even a word? lol), so I think they can be used for any time of the year.

 The flowers were made using a Marianne Designs die. I just cut out a few and then made a kind of rose with them. It doesn't really work the same as the roses that you make using 6 petal flowers as these only have 5 petals but they come out ok....until I squish the petals on one while taking a photo!!

I added some flourishes made using Marianne Designs and My Favorite Things dies, then some pearl trimming from Little Snippets and I also cut off 2 pearls to put in the centre of each flower.

Well that's the card done, and I will be back later with a card I made for a few challenges.

Thanks for stopping by