Thursday 29 December 2011

Christmas Cards

This blog entry is a bit late but I didn't want to show these until they'd been delivered. I didn't make many handmade Christmas cards this year, just those for immediate family & a few of them are shown below - the rest are in my Picasa gallery.



VERY easy card - freehand cut the hill, edged it with Stickles & mounted using foam pads .  The trees & greeting were purchased and the snowflakes stamped to finish.



Free backing paper (from madaboutcards, I think), image stamped & coloured with Promarkers.



Recycled image, free backing paper, baker's twine by Creative Expressions.

Sunday 11 December 2011

Using Paint.NET to work out colour codes

I've put a new tutorial under Useful Information in my sidebar which shows how to use Paint.NET to work out RGB colour codes.  "How does that help me?" I hear you ask!  Well, if you use Promarkers to colour images but want to make a sentiment using Word or Serif PagePlus then, like me, you may find it a struggle to match the colours.  This tutorial shows you how to do that quite easily.

I've never done a tutorial before so be kind to me!

Thursday 1 December 2011

My 15 seconds of fame!

My 15 seconds of fame (yes, I know it's supposed to be 15 minutes but that's never going to happen!) came on 4th June 2011 when Create & Craft showed a birthday card I made for my sister on my Craft Robo.  I designed the backing paper myself using a free dingbat font.  I just did this as a test of how to get videos on my blog!

Sunday 27 November 2011

Baby's 1st Christmas card - Katy's sketch challenge

This was for Katy's sketch challenge on Docrafts, and I was well out of my comfort zone - I'm really not sure about Kraft card but it matched the robin so I stuck with it! Since I made the confirmation card I found that Serif Page Plus is easier for creating word art than Picasa so this is the first card I've made using that.

This is for the newest member of my extended family.




Resources
Main picture - recycled from an old Christmas card; 
Snowflakes - cut on my Craft Robo Lite, then heat embossed in white and finished with silver Stickles. 
Backing paper - free from here then cut on my Robo.
Word art produced using Serif Page Plus.
Cotton border: coloured using Burnt Orange Promarker. 

Wednesday 23 November 2011

Confirmation card

I made this card recently at the request of my sister, who had been asked to be a sponsor for a teenage girl who was being confirmed.  The theme of the confirmation was "Include God in your Dreams" so I was asked if I could incorporate that phrase somehow.  That almost had me defeated!  I knew I wanted to create word art but I didn't know how, until I saw this blog which showed how to use Picasa to do more than just store & edit photos.


I printed the word art then filled some of the spaces in the letters with a Sakura Stardust pen in silver.  With that done, finishing the card was easy - a dove cut on my Craft Robo Lite, some elegant Pink Petticoat backing paper layered onto satin paper & flat-backed jewels to finish.

Tuesday 22 November 2011

First post!

Hello & welcome to my blog.  I started making cards in December 2007 after a lunchtime lesson at work got me hooked - little did I know that I would still be card making almost 4 years later & that I'd be several hundred pounds poorer!  I mostly make cards to send to friends & family; I occasionally make them to order for family, donating any profit to charity.
When I first started out, one of the best things about doing something creative was the contrast between that & my day job staring at a screen all day.  So why have I started a blog?  Well, I found that it was a really good way to put all the internet craft resources I use in one place.  It's also a good way of keeping a record of what products I've used for every project so I can recreate the same effect easily.
There are links to my gallery on the right, but please don't laugh at my earlier work - we all had to start somewhere!