Time For The Sketch Saturday Challenge Again!

I've managed to make a card for this week's Sketch Saturday

This week my effort is on time!!!



I used a glass painted butterfly, and some lovely bright coloured ric rac. The flowery backing paper is from a pack of Origami paper I bought a couple of years ago!

Make-Over Time! And Another Card . .

I have finally managed to design my very own blog background!!!! I am so unbelievably pleased with myself, I really enjoyed doing it as well once I knew what to do!

I hope you like my new look!

Carrying on with the glass-painted card theme, here is another made in the same way:

I mixed the glass paints with irridescent medium to make pastel colours with a lovely glimmer!

My First Attempt at The Sketch Saturday Challenge!

I have decided to try and do some of the fun card-making challenges in blogland, I think they will give me some much needed inspiration and motivation!

So here is my effort for the Sketch Saturday challenge:

It's nowhere near as good as the other entries, but I enjoyed doing it! I used one of the free stamps from this month's Cardmaking and Papercraft magazine, stamped it onto acetate then went over the lines with relief outliner and coloured it in with glass paints.

A Summery Flowery Bag - inspired by Cath Kidston!

I bought Cath Kidston's book - "Make!" a while ago, and felt inspired enough by it to make some bags as Christmas presents. I got a job lot of cotton shopping bags from Ebay, and spent hours cutting out piles of flowers! And even longer sewing round them once I had ironed them on!


Some of them had less flowers on than this, in a diagonal stripe across the front, because I was running out of time and got fed up of cutting and sewing! But it worked quite well like that too.

A Cute Little Fish Mobile

Another busy day crafting for me today!

A friend of my Nan's is related to someone who works at a very poor orphanage in Russia. They do a great job looking after the children who either have no family or whose family cannot look after them, but they have very limited funds. For quite a few years my Nan's friend has been sending out big packages to the orphanage, which we have contributed to. My Nan knits loads of bright, cheerful jumpers for them, my Mum knits, crochets and also makes them patchwork blankets. And we buy bits and pieces, clothes etc to send to them too. They are so pleased to get these parcels, they always email loads of photos of the children trying the jumpers on, sleeping under the blankets etc. It is heart-warming!

Well, anyway, I was flicking through the Cardmaking and Papercraft magazine yesterday and there was a gorgeous mobile to make in it, using die-cut circus animals. You might have seen it? And I thought, wow, it would be lovely to make some of those for the little Russian children.

And here is my first attempt, with lots of fish and starfish on it!


I am planning to make a few different ones, but this has taken me all day!!!! I had to make the fish templates for my robo to cut first, then cut it, then stick it all together. But I am really pleased with it!

Cupcake Paintings

We have recently decorated our kitchen, and one of the walls looked a bit bare but we didnt have anything suitable to put there. So I decided to get creative and paint my own pictures!


I found some pictures of cupcakes on the internet to use as a guide (I can copy but not paint from real-life or memory!)and painted them with acrylics onto thick acrylic paper.

In the meantime I covered some squares of MDF with a dark cream emulsion (I got a tester pot of the colour I liked). Once this was dry I marked out a border and painted this dark brown with acrylics. I probably should have used masking tape to get a neater edge, although I quite like the slightly uneven look, kind of rustic!

Once the cupcakes were dry I outlined them with a black colouring pencil, cut them out and stuck them to the boards with PVA glue. A few coats of clear varnish and they were done!

Anyway, apologies again for the poor quality pictures, still no batteries for my camera! But I will be swapping these pictures for better ones once I get it sorted!

Cards with felt

Just a quick post this time, to add pictures of the cards I made on Sunday with felt flowers on them. I love felt at the moment! It is so nice to use something with a different texture on my cards.

I have heard that you can cut felt with a sizzix / big shot machine - I havn't tried it yet but I think I will have to give it a go! My big shot has been a bit redundant since I got my lovely robo, so it will be good to find a use for it again!

Hmmm, I need to get to grips with this blogging stuff, the pictures won't do what I want them to do (eg sit next to each other instead of underneath). I have seen some lovely backgrounds on other blogs too, I will have to investigate how to do that as well!

Anyway, the green and purple card is my favourite of the two, I am usually a pink lover but I just love the way greens and purples go together and look so spring-like!

A productive weekend - cards, quilling and of course cupcakes!

I have been busily making a few cards today. I am planning to give them to a local charity shop to sell once I have a nice big pile as I am not selling anything myself at the moment.

Firstly, I had made some cute little quilled fish but I needed a suitable home for them! I printed out a fish bowl shape, gave it a quick wash of colour with my gorgeous twinkling H2Os, and they soon settled in!

(Sorry, the pictures arent brilliant, I had to use the camera on my phone as my "proper" camera has run out of batteries and I didnt have any replacements!)

After the fish had been sorted out, I came across a partly quilled cupcake that I made a while ago, and matched that up with paper and ric rac to make a quick but pretty card. Ooh, forgot to say, I made the spotty blue paper myself too in Paint Shop Pro, I always feel especially proud when I use background paper that I have created myself!

I also made some cards with felt flowers on, but I think this post is getting a bit long so I will add them tomorrow!

Chinese Brush Calligraphy . . it's harder than it looks!

Today I have been lucky enough to have a go at the ancient Chinese art of brush calligraphy. In the east, calligraphy is viewed as an art form which unites body and mind, and the strive for artistic perfection is seen as a never-ending learning curve.



It looks so effortless, but it is amazing how difficult it really is to form each character correctly! We used watered down black acrylic paint, printer paper and common garden kid's paint brushes and the results were pretty effective, if nowhere near perfect!



Unfortunately I managed to smudge mine while it was still wet so I dont have a picture of my happiness symbol to show you, but to give you an idea this is an example of the Chinese character meaning beauty, and googling brings up hundreds of others if you are interested!






I think there are seemingly endless opportunities for Chinese characters to be used in crafts - mounted on cards, made into backing papers, I can even picture an idea for a lovely calligraphy mosaic. And above all, it is relaxing, absorbing and a very pleasant art to participate in.

A new blog is born . . .

Well, this is my very first blog post and I am quite excited!

I am hoping that this will be somewhere I can show off my creations, ramble about all things crafty and hopefully connect with lots of mad, crafty people who share my interests!

I will start by sharing a photo with you of the mosaic table I made as a Christmas present for my sister. It wasnt perfect but I thought it was pretty good for a first attempt! I cant wait until the garden furniture hits the shops again as I have a couple more tables planned but can't get hold of any cheap garden tables at the moment!