Too early to think about Valentines Day....

Well, as most of the shops have already started to display creme eggs and bags of mini eggs, I guess it can't be too early to be thinking of Valentine's Day makes.

Just before Christmas I bought the Crafter's Companion Sweet Treats boards and CD-Rom.  Therefore, at Christmas most people got their presents in a very quickly designed box using the board, but I designed the papers in Craft Artist 2.  I was thrilled with the results, particularly the bow templates that come on the CD-Rom.

So....I wanted to play with the boards a bit more and came up with this small milk carton box.  I designed the papers in Craft Artisit 2 (Cupid digikit) and printed a free patchwork heart digistamp from Handmade Harbour (http://handmadeharbour.blogspot.co.uk/).  I originally imported the stamp into Craft Artist 2 and added it to the papers, however this wasn't very well thought out as when it was printed the hearts were not in the right place on the sheet to be seen on the box.  As this would take copious amounts of calculations and measurements I took them off.

I just printed the heart off and embossed the lines with a versamark pen and gold embossing powders and then coloured the heart with flexmarker - Tea Rose. I add highlights with a Wink of Stella pink pen (I don't have the brush nib ones, just the hard nib pens).  I have to say I love the Wink of Stella pens, they add just the most delicious amount of glint that just makes you look twice at the project.  If you can only get one of these pens go for the clear as you can use it on top of any other pencils or pens that you have and it adds that subtle glitter.

I found some free thickies stickers for the lettering which I coloured with a flexmarker (Sorbet) and added them to the bottom.  With some pink ribbon (I don't buy that much ribbon, I normally use the ribbon you find in ladies tops that should be used to secure the clothes to the hanger).  Over all I think this is a very effective little gift box, just the right size for 6 medium sized cookies or a medium sized bottle of perfume.

I would be interested to hear what you think of it.

New Year

Well I hope you all had a lovely Christmas and New Year.  We did, it was manic as usual as we travelled with the two girls to three or more places to visit various relatives.  We stayed at my Mum's and had Christmas day with my dad, his partner and my brother and his family.  It was a really good to catch up and spend time with my family.

After spending a few days with my family we travelled up to Saddleworth to stay with my husbands family.  Our niece was one on the 31st, and the girls had a great time with all of my nieces friends and relatives.  Unfortunately I had a splendid cold by this time and figured that 6 sets of parents would not appreciate this seasonal 'gift'.  This left hubbie fending for himself amongst the crowd.  But from what I understand, he thoroughly enjoyed himself.  Fortunately, knowing me as well as he does, he came home with cake.  Homemade hedgehog chocolate cake.  Fantastic!

As Christmas has passed, I wanted to show you the cards that I made at the request of my sister-in-law for her family.  In return she sent us two amazingly beautiful hand-stitched cards, one gold Christmas tree and one silver.

Here are the cards I made for her family.  The first two I used a stencil I got free with a magazine and the papers that came with the stencil.  I used versamark inkpad and stamped the image and heat embossed with gold/silver embossing powder.  The sentiment came from another set of stamps.  I then layered on to black and silver card or gold and white card and printed an insert from Craft Artist 2.

Jessica's card was made using papers I got from Create and Craft.  Using the Tonic shape cutter system I cut the oval out and fitted a plastic dome from Hunkydory.  I used a Martha Stewart punch to create the snowflakes and the bits left over I put in the dome along with some glitter.  The lettering came from Craft Artist 2.

The stripy card used papers from My Paperstash and American Crafts card stock and was a simple case of matting and layering the images and sentiments.  The last card was created with papers from Create and Craft and an origami technique I found on the internet.  I was really pleased with the result as it added texture and depth to the card.

Thankfully my sister-in-law was really pleased with the cards .... and nothing fell off!

I also made some small cards for my daughters school friends.  These were very cost effective to do.  I used  Craft Artist 2 and digikits from daisytrail.  The images were small enough to fit four cards on to one A4 page and then I used a kwiki glue pen to add glitter for detail.  In total each card cost 20p to make - including the cost of the digikits, card and paper to make the envelopes.

Lastly I wanted to show you the present we got from my dad for Christmas.  My brother got a similar one.  It is a bird house - a huge bird house (please note the fruit bowl to the side).  Now, I am all for encouraging wild life into our garden and caring for our native birds.  However, with this bird house we will probably need planning permission before we can fix it - that is if we can find a large enough tree and the means to fix it.  As I said to my brother 'I think it is time we started looking for that old peoples' home'.