A quiet month...

Well, this month we have had the builders in remodeling our kitchen, dining room and backroom.  Therefore my craft room/spare room is currently the storage room.  Thankfully, I thought ahead slightly and made my Mothers' Day cards before the work started.

However, I have learnt a rather useful (if basic) lesson.  Do not leave your cards on top of the printer, in front of direct sunlight as all your ink fades.  I got inspiration from Issue 136 of Quick Cards (p60) - triple stamping.  It is were you carefully layer three different sized pieces of card on top of each other and stamp across the borders so that the image is on all three pieces of card.  Once happy, the individual cards are matted on to contrasting paper and layered back together.  The effect is very pretty and is a way of producing your own background papers.  Admittedly, it is not so effective after three weeks in direct sunlight.

However, here are the cards I made for Mum and Mum-in-Law, they are 6x6 gate-fold cards:

Now that the girls are growing up they seem to be invited to birthday parties more and more often. It is lovely to see how excited they get, therefore, I had a couple of cards to get ready this month.

I made this card for a 3yr old using Crafter's Companion Rachelle Anne Miller Kids at Play CD-Rom and the accompanying papercrafting pack.  I used one sheet of the background card and one sentiment from the papercrafting pack to make the front of the card and printed of the decoupage, flowers and backing sheet from the CD-Rom.

I made sure the front panel and back panel were the same size and scored both sheets at 1/2 inch and 1 inch in from both sides and folded the score lines so that it forms a box frame, which would push flat in an envelope (but don't glue yet).  I cut the aperture from the front panel, and kept the square piece that came out.  I then cut the base image for the decoupage from the next sized die down from the the one I cut the aperture with.

I compiled the decoupage on to the base image and glued it onto the square I saved from the aperture I cut from the front panel.   I glued one side of the front panel to the back panel and placed the decoupage in the box frame.  After carefully lining up the image, I glued it in place and then glued the other side of the box frame.

I then decorated freely with the embellishments, adding some cosmic twinkles glitter glue to the centre of the flowers.  I was really pleased with how it came out, although I think in future I would change the colour of the card I printed the decoupage on.

The second card was made with Serif Craft Artist 2 for a 7yr old who is mad about Frozen.  I found the Frozen image on the internet and brought it into Craft Artist as a photo.  The background and materials for the mats and layers are from the Serif Christmas Card 2009 digikit, the embellishments, bow and ribbon were from the 50's Fever digikit.  I used the colour picker tool to colour match the bow to Anna's cape.  I printed it on photo paper to give it a nice glossy finish and glued it onto a A5 card blank.  I added an insert by copying  the main image onto a second page and using the transparency tool to lighten the image before printing off.

Lets just hope I understood my 7yr old's ramblings correctly and her friend really does like Frozen, as she got home made Frozen wrapping paper as well!

That's it for this month.  I am still trying to start the scrapbook for Izzy, however I am struggling to find a way of starting it.  Any suggestions let me know (I am using the Snap Studio, Simple Stories system).