Sunday 30 October 2011

My last Guest Designer week

As the title says it's my last week as Guest Designer for the CD Sunday Challenge Blog. I've had to schedule this post as I'm away so I hope Mr Blogger plays nicely. The themes for 3 of the 5 weeks in October were good ones for me. I already had a CD called Wine Buffs so that was an easy week for me, I love Halloween - as last week's photo shows! - and this final week was very enjoyable as it's Puss Cat and I adore cats. I've recently discovered Polka Doodle CDs so reached for Paper Boutique Volume 3 as I knew there was a cat image on there. I decided to make a magnetic notepad to keep on the fridge door.
The cat image has been attached over the top of the notepad that I made. I cut sheets of paper to the same width as the green dotty label and run them through my Carl rotary trimmer with the perforating blade attached so the sheets could be torn off. I then used 2 backing papers from the cd to make the background. The brown BP has cat related words on it such as kitty, claws, purr, meeow, paws etc but I like the pink one with the fish bones on it. I finished it off with some pink letters to spell out Shopping and I attached strips of adhesive magnetic sheets to the back so it could be kept on the fridge door. It looks as if my cat has already made use of it! LOL! Hubby and I are now having a much needed long weekend away. We chose this weekend because it was my birthday yesterday (Saturday). We're hoping to recharge our batteries ready to do the final clearance of FIL's home when we return. It's hard to believe FIL has already been in the care home for 5 weeks but he's looking a lot healthier and doesn't seem so confused. I hope my 5 weeks as Guest Designer has given you some inspiration or at least something to smile about. Having to force myself to make something each week has been a welcome distraction from what has been a very stressful time. Otherwise I probably wouldn't have done any crafting for quite some time. I'd like to thank the CD Sunday Design team for asking me to be a Guest Designer and I hope to be able to continue joining in with the weekly challenges.

Sunday 23 October 2011

My Halloween makes.

I don't know why but I love Halloween - perhaps it's because it's near my birthday and I'm often refered to as The Welsh Witch! LOL! So when I was told that it was one of the themes for my month as Guest Designer for the CD Sunday Challenge Blog I knew I'd be in my element. This is going to be a long post with several photos so make yourselves comfortable. The first photo is a group shot of the items I've made.
I'll start with the item that I made first and which took me the longest - the bunting.
I opened MCS and typed the word Halloween using a font called Parry Hotter. Some letters were coloured purple and every other coloured orange. I then dragged in a circle, coloured it orange, copied it 4 times and placed them behind the purple letters. I did the same to make purple circles to put behind the orange letters. These were cut out, along with slightly larger circles from black card, and matted and layered together. I then went and searched through my cd roms to find Halloween BPs and found some on Joanna Sheen's The Cardmaker's Year and Crafter's Companion Autumn & Winter. These were cut into triangles and the letter circles stuck onto them. After threading them onto some cord I decided I needed a few more triangles so cut some from Coredinations card, embossed them in my Wizard and sanded them to reveal the coloured core. As I was putting the embossing folders away I found one I hadn't used - an A6 haunted house. So I played around with the folder and coredinations card and liked the result so much I made a Halloween card from it. It's matted onto silver holographic card and BP from the Crafter's Companion cd rom but the colour was changed to look like the dead of night. I must admit this is my favourite out of everything I made.
Next I made a party invitation which I based on a design from a craft magazine. The bat paper is again from the Crafter's Companion cd but I opened it in MCS and darkened the colour. The foam bat was given to me by my neighbour but it was purple so I coloured it with a black Promarker (resulting in very black fingertips!). I had some googly eyes that I was going to use but they were far to large so made some small circles using an office hole punch and black dots from a fine nib pen. The wording was done in Word using the Parry Hotter font again and wordart.
All that was left now was to make some little bags of sweets for the trick or treaters. I used several BPs from different sources and got the idea from a blog called It's All Fiddle Fart.
Starting at the back. The eyeballs and skulls are from a very talented artist's blog - Vince. He regularly has free digis of his amazing artwork that can be downloaded. The eyeball packets contain eyeball sweets and the skull packets have skull rock sweets. The RIP headstones, red devils and green frogs are clipart from the internet, opened in MCS, resized and tiled. RIP packets are 'body parts' sweets, devils and frogs have red and green jelly beans respectively. Bats, flying witches, ghosts and pumpkins again are all from the Crafter's Companion cd and colours changed in MCS to match the colours of the sweets (jelly beans). If you're still with me - well done! And I hope I've given you some ideas for your own Halloween celebrations. Next Sunday is my last week as Guest Designer for CD Sunday (sigh). I've already made my 'item' as I'm away for the weekend and will have to schedule my blog posting - fingers crossed Mr Blogger wants to play nice!

Sunday 16 October 2011

2012 Calendar

When I found out the theme for CD Sunday this week was 'Around the World' I was a bit stumped. I wanted to include lots of images from around the world so decided a card was out as it would be too small. Looking through my cds for inspiration I came across one by Card Creations+ called Wild and Beautiful. There are so many lovely images of animals from many different places - Alaska, Russia, Australia, Canada, Greenland, Africa, Norway, Eurasia etc I knew I wanted to use as many photos as possible so decided to make a calendar for next year to hang in my craft room.
I thought you'd all be bored with 13 pictures in this posting so photographed the 12 monthly pages as one group shot:
The cover was printed onto glossy photo paper and the pages onto lightweight card. I bound it together using my Bind It All and added a hook to hang it from. I can't wait to see what everyone makes for this theme as it's quite 'open' and your cards are all so inspirational.

Sunday 9 October 2011

Favourite Tipple

The theme this week on the CD Sunday Challenge Blog is Wine Buffs. Well there's one cd that fits the bill - Wine Buffs from Katy Sue Designs! I decided to make a double easel card so that I could use two of the cartoon images.
I picked out the black and wine colours from the images in the card I used to mat them on. The base of the card is covered in a backing paper from the cd - don't you just love the wine stains! LOL! I used the same card to make the 'stopper' that keeps the 2 easels upright. I then cut out 2 of the wine bottles and put them on the top of the 'stopper'. Luckily I had Happy Birthday stickers that were a wine colour, so they went on the labels of the wine bottles. There's a surprise inside the card as I used a second BP to cover the back of the 2 easels:
Wine is hubby's favourite tipple so I'm saving the card for his birthday. My favourite tipple is Dandelion and Burdock pop. We're like chalk and cheese! LOL!

Sunday 2 October 2011

Butterflies..........................

............why do you think they’re so popular with card makers? I like butterflies in real life but rarely include them in my card making. So when I was told the theme of my first entry as a Guest Designer for the CD Sunday Challenge Blog was Butterfly Kisses I knew I’d find it challenging – little did I know how challenging! LOL! Along with the members of the Design Team I received a set of stamps from this month’s sponsors, Creative Expressions. The stamps were designed by Sam Poole and called Nature’s Wonders. The set includes several butterflies, some ladybirds, a large stamp with plants a moth and a beetle, a few sentiments and……….a spider on a web. I have a dread of all things creepy crawly but especially spiders (even typing the word I’m feeling nauseous). I’m not too bad if they don’t move but you won’t see me for dust if they do. Thankfully rubber stamps don’t have a habit of crawling along your desk so I did manage to make a card.
I coloured a piece of card with a distress ink pad, then ran it through my Wizard in an embossing folder. I used a folder by Provo Craft from a set of four called ‘Wall Décor and More’. I then coloured the vine with ink from a distress ink pad using cut and dry nibs. More distress ink pads were used to colour the main stamped image. I then stamped the large butterfly a second time and layer it over the original butterfly. For a BP from a cd I turned to Butterfly Bliss by Artylicious. There’s some beautiful backing papers on this cd but all the butterflies were to large to go with the ones on my topper. So I used a plain BP from the cd and stamped the small butterfly from the set all over it. So I got there in the end even though I had to colour in a moth and a beetle! LOL! Thankfully the themes for the rest of the month aren't likely to bring me out in a cold sweat. EDITED TO ADD: Houston we have a problem! LOL! The theme for this week's challenge was changed to 'Nature's Wonders' but I didn't receive the message. Sorry if I've confused anyone wanting to enter.

Saturday 1 October 2011

Guest Designer for CD Sunday

The lovely Design Team members over at CD Sunday have asked me to be a Guest Designer for the month of October. I was hesitant at first because life is very hectic and stressful looking after my FIL. But my darling hubby (known to a few as the Pie Man) persuaded me to accept. October is my birthday month and 3 of the 5 weekly themes were good subjects for me so I took that as an omen and agreed to do it. At this point I have made 3 'items' and have ideas for the last 2 so it looks as if I'm on track! I'd be so upset if I wasn't able to fulfill my commitment and let the DT down. So starting with this post I have to learn how to schedule a posting - fingers crossed this goes ok! LOL! I have a busy few days ahead as we're clearing out FIL's shed, but family are visiting and helping us out so despite the soaring temperatures it shouldn't be to difficult a task.

Business as usual!

After managing to post my entry for the CD Sunday Challeng Blog on Tuesday of last week, I'm back to tail end Charlie this week! LOL! I knew I was going to have a very busy week so wouldn't be able to make this week's card until today. But when I got up this morning I had a sore throat and felt really ill so after being up for all of 2 hours I went back to bed. I slept most of the day and when I eventually got up managed to quickly make this card for the theme of Winter Wonderland.
The card base is one I bought from the craft show I went to on Thursday from a company called 'Every Crafts A Pound'. I covered it with a BP from Xmas Snowy Wonders cd by FeeJ Designs. Not a good idea! I had to cut the excess paper from around the card base which was a bit stressful as my head was a bit woolly. The topper is from a Kanban card kit. It already had glitter on it but I added a bit more sparkle with a Sakura gelly roll pen. although I don't think you can see it in the photo.