Floral delight!

I have my MIL's birthday coming up, and I know she likes a "clean" card, rather than a card overloaded with embellishments and detail, so I wanted to keep it really simple for her, but nice :)

I used yellow and white cardstock, as well as free papers (My Craft Studio) from Creative Cardmaking magazine, and finished it off with 4 pearls. The top panel has been matted using foam tape so that the two layers of patterned papers don't blend in together.

I love my craft magazines, especially the ones that come with free goodies such as papers, die cut elements, etc. I have a stack of papers a few inches thick that I absolutely love! I am delving into the world of paper pads, and have a few gorgeous Graphic 45 ones on order, so stay tuned for some Steam Punk goodness down the track :)

Hope you enjoy, and thanks for stopping by! :)

Male birthday card!

Cards for men are soooo hard to do! It's always tempting to add a flower here, some bling there and before you know it, the card is not quite as masculine as you planned :) This card is for a family member's 21st, so I wanted it to be nice, but masculine.

The image is a digistamp I got from Complete Cardmaking magazine's free cd, and coloured using Copics. The background is plain white cardstock that I scrunched and sponged with Tim Holtz Distress ink in Old Paper. The sentiment was stamped with Versamark Pinecone. And it's all matted onto white and blue cardstock, with a few brad "screws"in each corner.

Copic colours used:

E31, E33, E35, E37, E50, E51, E53
B00, B02, B05
C1, C3, C5

Hope you like, thanks for stopping by! :)

Playing with Copics!

I'm very new to the world of Copic markers, and I have to say, I AM IN LOVE!!! There is a plethora of information available through craft shops, craft magazines, the official Copic Australia website, and blogs if you are interested in learning how to use them, or expand on your knowledge. As I am NOT a Copic certified designer, at this time, I WON'T be posting any tutorials, just illustrating what I do (pardon the pun) :)

Firstly, I wanted to show you just how different the same stamp can look with a different light source!

Here we have C.C. Designs Swiss Miss Rosalie with Roses. In the first picture, I have coloured her with the light source coming from the right:

And here I have used her with the light source coming from directly in front of her:

Please forgive the very, VERY rudimentary colouring! :) In both images, I have used the same Copics:

Skin: E000, E50, E53
Hair: E50, E31, E35, YG00, YG02 (YGs for the ribbon)
Dress: B00, B02, B05, R35
Socks: RV10, RV13
Shoes: C1, C3, C5
Roses: R32, R35

Now while some of the more seasoned Copic users might question my using E000 with the two E5* Copics, I was taught that when it comes to Copics, there are no rules! :) And my collection is still fairly limited (25 Copics to-date) so I had to make do with what I had, I'm not unhappy with the results. I have been blog-hopping, and have found that for skin tones, E000, E00, E02 are the most popular choices. I purchased the E00 and E02 today, and I am attending another Copic workshop this weekend, so stay tuned for *hopefully* some better Copic portraiture!

Next (sorry for the long post!), I wanted to show you how effective the "Cool" tones are! I was very reluctant to play with these, as I thought they were a bit of a boring group and wouldn't be very versatile. How wrong I was! I coloured in this gorgeous little Imaginisce Snag 'em Stamps Dolphin stamp: A perfect example of how you won't get the same result twice, even with the same light source!

Please excuse the ink smudge on the left Dolphin!

And FINALLY! I am a huge fan of anything vintage! And when I bought the VERY beautiful set of Hot Off The Press Vintage Ladies stamps, I was a bit concerned that they wouldn't be very versatile. This was BEFORE I started using Copics :) These look great either un-coloured, or coloured, depending on your co-ordinating papers! I haven't put one of these lovely ladies onto a card yet, but I will post pics as soon as I do! :)

Thanks for stopping by today! I hope to bring you more Copic goodness very soon! :)

Blue and yellow! Hello!

So I made these two cards on different nights, for different people, and somehow ended up with a similar theme! I don't usually go for a "set" of cards at once, but it is always nice to be different :)

IT'S A BOY: I used blue and yellow cardstock, with Grace Taylor baby papers, vellum and sticker from the Nursery Scrapbook In A Kit, and some silver ribbon to finish.

BEST WISHES: Blue and yellow carstock, and the Best Wishes stamp was a freebie in a magazine (gotta love those, lol), and the gold ribbon was actually off a present I had received for my birthday! On the larger blue cardstock behind the sentiment, I embossed it with my Cuttlebug and Venus Embossing Folder, and then inked over the raised image with Tim Holtz Distress Ink in Old Paper.

And of course, both cards have inking around the edges :) I swear I will use my sewing machine one of these days!!!

Have a great day! And thanks for stopping by :)

Lights, camera, ACTION!!

Here is a scrapbook layout I did of my gorgeous little 1 year old, Grace. With her other pages, I have gone for girly, cutesy styles. But because of how funky this photo was, I wanted a funky layout to match!

The papers are Grace Taylor Vintage, and Whimsy stack. I used a Martha Stewart lacy-edged punch, on the polka-dot paper, and inked the edges to make it pop.

The cardstock is just a plain peach colour, so I punched stars out of black card to jazz it up a bit!

Hope you have a great day!

Hexagonal exploding box!

I was after a crafty Mothers Day present for my mother and mother-in-law, and saw one of these in a magazine, so I thought I would have a go! The finished product did look smaller than in the magazine, so you will need to use passport size photos, but if you enlarge the template, you could use bigger pictures.

I found the ideal template for my exploding box here:

So here is how I did it, please excuse the dirty mat, I'm a messy crafter :)

Here is the base layer, the best way I could think of to do this was to trace the template onto baking paper, cut out the template, then trace onto cardstock, and cut out.

Repeat with other two layers:

You will need to adhere the photos to the paper before you put your box together. I used 2 sheets of Grace Taylor Vintage elegance and alternated them among the photos. As this was my first attempt and it was a Mothers Day gift, I wanted the focus to be the photos, not the box itself. I kept it very basic, and used a patterned cardstock for the lid. However, you can bling it up as much as you like! You don't even have to add photos to every tab. You can use some rub-ons, or embellishments, the only limit is the size and your imagination! :)

So here is the finished product, sorry I didn't add the lid, I was running very short on time making this:



Hope you enjoy! :)

Some tips I have picked up, to get you started :)

Tip number 1:

When painting Beyond The Page projects, baking paper is much better than newspaper or scrap paper to lay the project on, as the paint won't stick to the baking paper, thus leaving bits of paper on your project. I learned this one from my very artistic sister :)

Tip number 2:

Ok, so I am probably the LAST person on earth who worked this tip out, but to save loads of paper/cardstock when running an alphabet die through your cuttlebug, etc, rather than cut out a strip the length of your die (and wasting a lot of letters you don't need, or running the die through multiple times with multiple strips), cut out squares just big enough to cover each letter that you need, place on die, and run through the cuttlebug, etc. It won't matter if you catch a bit of the letter next door as well. After I worked this out, I managed to use only one strip to create a lengthy page title (for interest, it was "A Proper Vintage Gentleman", for the Graphic 45 Proper VIntage Gentleman collection which is a gorgeous collection if you like vintage/James Bond, etc.).

Welcome!

Hi and welcome to my blog! Here you will find pics of projects I have done, some hints and tips, and some tutorials, I hope you enjoy, and feel free to leave comments on my posts. All I ask is that if you comment, please be kind :)

As I have only set the blog up recently, it is still *obviously* under construction, so there will be fancy schmancy doo-dads, etc as I go along, and as I am VERY new to blogging, I'll be learning as I go it seems! Lol