WOYWW - 150

One or two people complained last week that I restricted the view of my desk to hide the worst of the mess.  I have had a little bit of a tidy up today, putting away the equipment from the cards I have just finished, so there is room to do the next project.  For those who are now wondering why on earth I would bare my desk to the nation (well, Blogland, anyway), it is Wednesday, which means the wonderful blog hop hosted by Julia, which is when we all wander round and see what all our friends have got on their desks.  If you want to join in, just go to http://stamping-ground.blogspot.co.uk/.  some of us are tidy and some of us are not.  Like all friends, you must take us as you find us.  Whatever, you will find a real welcome, especially if you leave a comment, and if you need help or just a friendly word, you will find it there.

As you can see, I have been well looked after with hot drinks today.  I really must take the dirty cups downstairs when I go in a minute or two.  You may have realised by now that the photos were taken on Tuesday afternoon to take advantage of the natural light, but I still needed my Ottlite as the rain was hammering down (I know we need it).  My project for today is a bit of zentangle.  I have not done much of that, but I thought I would have a go for a challenge.  If it works, I can use it for a birthday card with a difference.  It is a combination of the Versatile Vase kit from Clarity, and a printed sentiment, which can also be zentangled.  To the side of that is another Clarity image - the two poppy stamps which fit together beautifully.

Moving to the left, you can see my computer monitor.  The wallpaper on the screen is one of my own photos of Marwood Hill Gardens in North Devon, a beautiful and very welcoming place to visit (dog friendly, too, we were met with dog biscuits for our two).  I love the beautiful silver birch bark on those trees.  You might also spot on the desk a little pot of natural dog treats.

Above my computer is a small notice board, on which you can see the lovely tag specially done for me by Debbie, a photo of the wedding of one of my school friends, ready printed to take to our annual reunion this weekend.  There is also my Patience Strong calendar, printed out from the Joanna Sheen CD.  I managed to pull it apart a couple of months ago, but I did finally get round to putting it back together again today.

As Julia has asked us to be brief, I think I had better finish for this week, and give you time to get round a few more desks.  Could I just add one little plea?  Blogger seems to have turned on the Word Verification on a lot of blogs over the last couple of weeks.  Please could you all check if this has happened to you?  If you do have it turned on, you may find that you are not getting as many visits as you do normally.

I will apologise if I am not very quick in getting round to visit you, but I will do my best.  Like many others, i now find it impossible to visit everyone each week, and find time to craft as well.  If you leave me a comment, especially if you add your number, I will get to see you asap.  I also visit anyone whose number fits the rule I have chosen for this week.   Have a great week, everyone.

WOYWW 145

This is not my usual desk as you can see, but it is where I have spent most of my time since Sunday.Shaz Silverwolf's DH has been good enough to put together a server system for our computers and TV, and he fitted it on Sunday, but, of course, it did not go quite to plan and took longer than it should.  So since then, we have had emails with pretty screen captures flying backwards and forwards.  He gets the pleas for help and send back instruction on how to put it right.  So far, things are starting to make sense, one thing at a time.  On the desk you can see the latest sheaf of pictures and instructions on moving files to the right folders to make things work.

I did manage to do some cards this week, including one for a friend's birthday today, using snippets, and actually less than I had originally intended.  It is another card taken from my store of decoupage sheets.  This one was downloaded free of charge from another very generous crafter.  I cannot remember who it was, but when I get a chance, I will check on that and give her the credit she deserves. (*** See the end of this post for more info)

I don't know about you but when I put decoupage together, I rarely use all the layers on one card, and this one was no exception.  I actually broke it down into two sets for two different cards.  This one was the simplest and I think it worked the best.  I had actually put the topper together a few weeks ago, and then decided the only card that suited it was the Centura Pearl white.  It landed crooked and I was so taken with the position that I put it there to stay.  The sentiment is just a peel off, which I coloured coppery to match the butterfly.  Once it was all together and stuck down, I thought it needed a bit of bling to liven it up a little.  So out came the good old standby of the Quickie glue pen and Martha Stewart glitters, and I just highlighted the veins on the butterfly wings.  My DH looked at the finished article and said "Mmm, that looks good" - always a nice thing to hear.  There was even a specially created insert to finish the card off properly.



His own birthday card was another decoupage, and again divided between two different cards.  The design is a Joanna Sheen / Jayne Netley-Mayhew masterpiece.  He is a bird lover so this was an image that fitted so well, especially as we are heading fast into Spring, especially if the activity of the local birds is anything to go by.  They are so busy pairing up and chasing others off.  The base image already has a blue line round it, so it is just a case of  cutting it carefully to avoid any further need to matt and layer, just building up the decoupage on the top.  I always use Pinflair glue which allows fine adjustment of each piece to match perfectly.  I gave up using sticky pads ages ago when I got fed up of things not quite sitting where they should.  You can also vary the depth of glue to aid giving dimension after curling each layer as you want.  For example, the tail of the baby on the right is curled up as are the wings of both babies.  The body and head of the mother is curled on both sides to give the impression of her rounded outline.

I have managed to fit in some time out in the garden and in particular in the greenhouse over the last week.  I cannot stand for too long at a time, so we dug out a very old kitchen stool that was made by my father in his father's yard.  It was made from well seasoned coffin wood - my grandfather was an undertaker in the days when they made the coffins to fit each customer.  I always remember when I went to Grandad's (he lived behind the business with the workshops in the yard behind that), all up the side alley, there would be stacks of wood, seasoning before being stored in the cellar until needed.  anyway, back to the stool and the greenhouse, the stool is just the right thing to plonk down on when I need a break.  Then I get a chance to watch the bird life, who don't seem to notice me behind the glass.  A pair of magpies spent ages chasing off a crow, making sure he went right away from where they fancied staying.  The goldfinches don't seem to care about us or the dogs and are just fixed on eating as much of our niger seed as possible.  I am planting sunflowers in the garden this year specially for the birds to eat.  So far, in the greenhouse, I have three tiny buddlejas, several echinaceas and the sweet peas, just starting.  I can't wait to see how they develop.

I seem to have rambled on for a long time this week, so now I must let you go  (if you made it this far) and let you visit lots more of the desks on show at Julia's place.  There are so many very talented crafters over there, just waiting for you.  I hope to get to meet as many of you as possible this week - I will do my best.  Have a great week.

PS I have just found the butterfly decoupage sheet original and is was produced  by Audrey at The Lilac Garden.  Since I downloaded my sheets, she has developed her website and now produces CDs as well.  She has some lovely images on her website, some free as well as the CDs.

I created something at last!

Well, sort of.......  The cards were basically done apart from the finishing touches, inserts etc, but I was desperate to get them in the post today.

The sweet peas on the left used the stamp from Joanna Sheen's Garden Flower range, onto white pearlescent card, which had a tint of cosmic shimmer dusted on to it.  The flowers were coloured in with Sakura pens to maintain the shimmer look, and shaded using a water brush. 

The Rainbow Teddy in the centre was a design downloaded from Monica on http://www.3dsheets.com/index.html   I edged the card with shimmery border peeloff  to tone in.

The little girl was also another Joanna Sheen product fom one of her CD's.  I cannot remember which one, although I used it today.  Total lack of brain power at the moment.  It was mounted on black card, which I edged with a copper Krylon pen which toned in with the border.

You may like to notice how tidy my desk is with these cards on.  Remember this - it didn't last long.  Five minutes later, it was like this

Back to the photo scanning and printing out labels for all the drawers.  The poor computer must be getting a headache with everything I am asking it to do all at the same time.  These big photos take a long time to scan in and save, but they are worth keeping.

Then I started sorting out some of the drawers.  I seem to have little bits of paper, card, Mirri card, glitter and other stuff in each one all doing a very good job of jamming the drawers.  So I found one big box, and copied an idea from someone else (sorry, I cannot remember who it was but thank you).  All the little bits of everything went into the one box to be kept by my desk and used.  My theory is to use the box to make at least one card each week - I will let you know how that theory works in practice. 

Then I looked at the floor.  The space under the desk and a lot more floor is now covered, and the boxes are breeding.  That is going to get worse before it gets better.  I have to move everything off the surface on one side of the room, to allow Geoff to put the supports on the walls for the work top and to put up the shelving for all the other things.  That may be tomorrow, if things go well.

I also have a theory that I am going to make at least one Christmas card each week .........maybe, if I have time.  I have two boxes of Christmas stuff, which I manage to lose every year as it comes up to card making time, one being full of stuff gathered from old cards to be recycled.  With luck, I might get the Christmas stuff down to just one box, which will give me a spare box for something else.

Thank you to all those who have been asking how we are.  Fingers crossed, I think the worst is over, and we have got that particular bug on the run.

Notelets

This is one of the samples I made recently for the 3rd birthday celebrations of My Craft Studio.  I used one of the images I was sent, and took the box shape from Joanna Sheen, resized it, and put my image on the top, and made 6 notelets to go in it, toegther with the envelopes from MCS (also resized).  I used Pinflair peel offs to decorate the top, and finished the box with some lovely gold ribbon from my stash to complete the project, which was actually shown on two of the programmes.

Manipulating images

One minor gripe I have with My Craft Studio is that it does not handle pdf files.  This may not sound very interesting but when you have a lot of discs where all the images are in pdf form and you want to manipulate one of them to create a different format, it can be irritating.

I have got round this problem using another program to convert the pdf to jpg format.  For this card, I took the image and the insert from the latest Joanna Sheen / Pamela West CD, and copied them into Roxio Photosuite, then saved them as jpg's (make sure you know where you have saved them to on your computer - you can waste hours trying to find missing images).  From there, I was able to then take them into My Craft Studio, and resize them to suit my needs.  The image on the front is as designed by Pamela West, cut out and mounted onto holographic card, and then onto the backing paper.  The insert was resized to fit the card I had, then I digitally punched out an oval, into which I put the text.  With My Craft Studio, you can match the colour of your text to any part of your design.  I picked the darkest part of the twigs, and then darkened the text a little from that to make it stand out but still tone in well.  To get the sentiment strip across the front of the card, I cropped the insert to keep just the section with the vertical lines, then turned them through 90 degrees to go across.  I found that I could not get the text to show up satisfactorily on that background, so I went back to the insert and cropped out a small section of the main background, and digitally placed that on top of the strip with the lines, put the text on top of that and printed it as one complete image.  Both the image and the sentiment strip were mounted on the card with narrow shaker tape to give some dimension.  This card was to be given by hand so I used the thicker shaker tape, but if it was to be posted, you could use the thinner tape, or just design the whole thing digitally and print it out as a flat design.  I did this initially to assess if the end result would be as I wanted.  Doing it on the computer first saves using expensive ink printing things you really don't want in the end.

 I thought this particular design from Pamela West was a good one for a male card, always a problem to sort out, especially if your subject is not too keen on sports or cars.

21st June 2010 - Embossing

This is the embossed design of pansies. The original design for this one came off a Joanna Sheen disc, which is all I had with me this week. I just traced it onto parchment with white water colour and them embossed and shaded it. I will mount it and use it when I get back off holiday.

June 12th 2010 - Use your brain power and time to save money

This card is an example of achieving an effective card without spending a fortune in money, just time and thought. This is one of Joanna Sheen's images, really clear and sharp. I saw it demonstrated on TV, printing on to expensive gold paper, and thought it was so good that I wondered if I could do something on the same lines. In my cupboard, I had some plain gold printable paper, so I tried printing on that on best quality print, with quite good results. Then I sprayed it with 3 separate layers of Spray and Shine, which really made the tiger pop out brilliantly. The Happy Birthday sentiment on the front was printed on vellum on text print, and instantly embossed with gold. That way you can choose exactly what you say and the design of the font etc to personalise the card completely. Both the image and the sentiment are mounted on gold mirri card, and then onto the base card from the Stardream and Majestic range from PDA Cards.

Today's Tip: At some time, you will almost certainly start on a project which goes wrong. don't bin it or destroy it yet. Put it to one side for a while, then have another look. If you still cannot see a way to recover, keep putting it away and going back to it. It is very rare that a project is totally unrecoverable, and inspiration will hit at some stage and give you something to be proud of.

First ever posting - 11th June 2010

I thought my birthday was a good day to start this blog. I was inspired to have a go by Silverwolf (Shaz), who is such a talented crafter.

My name is Margaret, and I have been (and still am) happily married to Geoff. Both our children are now married and have given us lovely grandchildren to play with. After years of having nutty Burmese cats, we now have two even nuttier working cocker spaniels to keep us busy and amused.

I only got started on card making 4 years ago when we were asked to do the wedding invitations for our son's wedding. The design was very plain and simple, with gold peel off stickers - just what they asked for, and carried through to the place cards. Of course, I bought far too many cards and far too many peel offs, so what do you do in that case..... you've got it - you buy more stuff to help you to use it all up. Then you need more equipment and more stuff because you do not quite have the right colour to do the next project. And so it goes on until the craft box becomes a craft room to give you space to work, then you find you are restricted to a small area to sit because the stuff has taken over. It is so addictive.

I have always crafted in some way, starting with embroidery at school. My aunt taught me to knit and she was a very strict teacher, insisting that I kept my fingers on both needles at all time. I cursed her at the time, but I have blessed her many times since for giving me the skills to knit evenly and fast. I taught myself to crochet from a book. Cross stitch started about 10 years ago when I have a bad bout of vertigo and needed to do something where I could keep my head and eyes perfectly still to avoid feeling sick.

I used to do cross stitch cards for those I thought would value the time and thought I put into it, but now, most of my cards are papercrafted. I keep pictorial records of all the cards I make, together with the date and who it was for - helps to avoid sending the same or similar card to the same person. It is also good to look back and see how I have progressed and to see how I could improve in the future.

I love trying new techniques and I do watch a lot of the craft programmes on QVC and Create and Craft to pick up new ideas. I generally record them and watch the bits I am interested in later. Every so often, I ring Silverwolf and pick her brains about a better way to do something, and find a better and cheaper way to achieve a good effect. The latest craze is to type your own wording to personalise your card, print it out and emboss it. Silverwolf showed me how to do that 3 years ago - nothing in this world is totally new.

Acetate is also one of the "in" things to use. Again, something I have been using for 12 months or more, either as a wrap for a card or as an enhancement for the main image. I notice that is now being used a lot on the various programmes. A technique that looks good, especially for the stained glass type of image is to print the image as normal on good paper, then flip it on your screen (most graphics programs will give you that facility) then print it onto printable acetate. Cut the acetate with a good border outside the image, turn it over and position it accurately over the paper image. Holding it safely in place, lift a corner and apply adhesive in an area which does not show. Once it is fixed, you can carefully lift each side to apply adhesive, cut it out and use on your card. To hide the adhesive, you could create a border to place over the top. You could also back the acetate image on to silver or gold mirri card.

Commercially produced craft materials are a good way to start, but I do enjoy finding my own ways to produce similar or even better results. The images on Joanna Sheen's discs are brilliant, and can be used in your own graphics program to manipulate them to suit your own project. Do not forget to take your camera wherever you go, and keep your eyes open for anything you could use later. A huge bumble bee on purple crocuses made a fantastic easel card earlier this year. A friend's photo of bluebells carpetting the ground made a superb backdrop with a wrought iron gate (cut on the Silhouette) placed over it. The same friend also took a lovely silhouette of her dog with the backdrop of the Lake District. A little manipulation created another easel card for her birthday this year - something very personal for her.

I intend to add to this blog on a regular basis, adding pictures of some of my cards, and any hot tips I get or discover. Hopefully, I can live up to this. Keep watching.