WOYWW - 493

Sorry I was missing again last week.  I had forgotten how fast Wednesdays come round.  My desk is still a mess.  In fact the whole room is a mess.  Christmas is definitely in progress here with 50 cards completed (one or two still need envelopes).  Several of the ones completed are parchment designs so I will be cautious who those go to.

These three were started at Paul Church's workshop last Saturday at the Crafters Companion store at Evesham.  Those of you who went to the NEC may recognise the designs as being from the talented Linda Williams.  The blue one on the left is based on the design that was chosen for the Clarity Make and Take for the show.

This photo shows the class at Evesham with most of the Bromsgrove Parchers group taking part in the class.  We went mob-handed as you can see.  A really good day among friends.

Now I need to do the mass production fast ones to complete the pile.  I have done some using the fantastic new Fresh Cut Dies from Clarity, cutting the design from the centre of the card and, using double sided sticky paper and a variety of suitable backing papers, filling the blanks with the subtle glitter.  As usual, the glitter does not really show on the photos but it is there and does not shed either.

Fortunately, these are quite quick to do in a mass production system.  The pieces just fall out of the dies and once everything is cut, it is easy to assemble.  

Since I took the first photo on this post, my table has deteriorated dramatically as you can see, so some clearing up is required before tomorrow's attack.  In fact, the table is worse than this right now.

I have been through my card list and pruned it severely.  The cost of postage is too high to continue sending to everyone.  There are several whose current address is not in my book so, if they have not seen fit to tell me, then they have been dropped.  I have also been through my stash of almost completed cards and many of them will be finished off soon and donated to charity as I will never use them all. I am also sorting stamps etc and getting rid of anything that is not Clarity as I am just not using them.  I desperately need the space.  One day, I might actually get back into my craft room????

Time to finish now and get this posted before the dog groomer comes.  Hope to visit as many as possible of the Wednesday gang over at Stamping Ground, the home of our leader, Julia.  For anyone who has no idea what WOYWW is, it is a long running group who meet up every Wednesday to show what state our desks are in and what we are doing on them.  No special tidying up is allowed.  Just take a photo, and post it with a short explanation, and link in to Julia's post.  then you can go round and see what everyone else is doing.

Have a good week, everyone.

Mix up those plates.

All you Groovi addicts out there, some of you will have seen bits of this already.  I love just sitting and playing with a few plates to create a mixed up design.  This is one of those.  All it needs now is a suitably sized base card.

This is a mix of different designs and sizes from Linda Williams' beautiful plates, overlapping each other.  This is so easy to do with the lovely see through plates.  Once I had drawn it out, it sat around in my folder for ages.

Once I got back to it, I decided to keep the colours to a limited palette and fairly soft, with some gentle embossing.  Then, it was down to the perforating.  I used two different tools for that, the two needle fine, and the two needle split which is finer still.  With the split you have to be careful to only perforate VERY lightly otherwise you get the messy split.   I used the split tool for perforating within the circles, like the honeycomb pieces.  Everything else was done with the fine tool.

Then, I went round again with the single needle fine to ensure I had good holes to snip.  You cannot get good picot edging if your holes are not good.  All perforating should be done with the needle tools held perfectly upright.  Anything else and you will end up with oval holes instead of the desirable round ones.