60th Birthday Card

I am currently sheilding with my eldest son Craig. Craig has cerebral palsy and lots of associated health issues. We have Craig's very own angel, Liza, living with us during these very difficult times, Liza moved in with us at the beginning of the lockdown to protect Craig and we have been here doing our best between us to keep Craig happy and healthy ever since. Craig usually goes to a day centre where he is very popular and has many friends.  Craig loves to be involved in creating anything crafty and we really have been busy these last few weeks, I say we, that being the royal we, it is mainly liza diecrted by Craig and a little bit of interference from me. This card was created by Liza under Craig's direction. Craig does not speak but he makes sure he gets over to you what he wants and doesn't want. Many of Craig's friends have been very upset during these difficult weeks, not fully understanding what is going on and why they can't follow their usual routine, which is very important. The crad is for Jane, one of Craig's friends, she is having a bit of a hard time worrying about things. It is Jane's 60th birthday this week and Craig wanted to make her a special card.

The die cut in the centre is cut with a die set I have just bought from Tonic Studios. I was just having a play trying out the new die and Craig decided he wanted to use it is the centre point of his card. With Liza's help he chose the rest of the papers from his craft stash and they came up with this card design. I think the card is great and that Craig really has a good eye. Craig can't do anything for himself but he gets great pleasure from being involved in doing lots of different crafts.

I have been telling him about the challenges on the internet and he was excited to join in the fun.

With Craig and Liza's permission I am going to be entering this card into the challenges listed below.

#508 ANYTHING GOES
#283 - Art Impressions
Try it on Tuesday - Cut it out
Crafty Hazelnuts Patterned paper Challenge

Playing along today at "Addicted to CAS"

Addicted to CAS

Playing along today at "Addicted to CAS" 

Challenge #185 - Rainbow

and "Moving along with the times"

Challenge 118 for May - Flowers

Been thinking about rainbows a lot these last few weeks, they have appeared everywhere as a celebration to our amazing NHS staff. I thought I would do a bit of a different take on the idea. I used print and cut on my Silhouette Cameo to create flowers combining every colour of the rainbow. Each flower has a different colour background and has inlaid the other 6 coulours as petals. I finished the card off by cutting the letters thanks! and putting them under the flowers.

This shows the cutting file I used to create this card. 1 print and cut can be used to make 2 cards.

Thought my rainbow flowers would be perfect for both challenges :-)

CAS(E) this sketch #372

CAS(E) this Sketch #372

I decided to enter a card I have just completed into the CAS(E) this Sketch challenge.

This is the sketch for 07/05/2020

The sentiment is one I have designed myself and printed and cut on my Silhouette Cameo cutting machine.

The butterflies and hearts are cut from Tonic Studio Classic card stock, again designed and cut on my Silhouette Cameo cutting machine.

I looked at the sketch and saw this card in my head. I am pleased with the finished card and I hope you like it :-)

Beaded Christmas Tree Dangles

Today has been a bit hard going, I have just returned to work after 5 weeks leave, as you can imagine I wasn't bursting with excitement but all in all it has been a good day. It can get very hectic but today was just steady. Got on with my challenge projects and this is what I came up with using the beads from my necklace and some from my stash, see yesterdays picture. I wanted to have a go at doing these as I have seen so many beautiful examples on Pinterest. I have only used a fraction of the beads, I could probably make about another 10. The dangle is in two parts, the top part is on heavy gauge beading wire, there is a little extra bit added at the bottom just using ordinary beading pins. Why two parts, I don't really know, this seems to be the format that most of the examples I have seen have taken so I thought why buck tradition.  The two separate parts do mean that the dangle has extra movement. I really just chose the beads at random, the only thing I controlled was that each dangle had to have at least one bead from the original necklace as using these was the whole point, and then I just mixed them all up. I am rather pleased with the end result, there are 6 dangles all measuring around 7 inches so they will make a nice addition to pretty Christmas tree.

I would change a couple of things about how I put them together and I have learned the hard way that getting the beads to stay in place can be difficult and if you decide to use glue as I did then be prepared to get messy.

Paper for my "Half Past Christmas Challenge"

This is my attempt at making a background that I will convert into a digital image. I started with a 12 x 12 piece of teal coloured co-ordinations textured card stock. I started by using white acrylic paint which I blobbed on and then scrapped down with a credit card, I then used three colours of Papermania ink pads to add some extra colours in. The pads I used were the small square ones and I used the lid inked up to just make some marks on the paper. I added some silver acrylic in the same way as the white. I then went back to my ink pads and using a large snowflake stamp, yes you heard me right I did say snowflake, I stamped randomly over the piece. At this point I felt the white needed bringing back to the front so I repeated the white acrylic stage but not using as much paint this time. I then stamped with a smaller snowflake stamp and finished off by stamping some snowflakes and embossed them with a blue glittery embossing powder. I wanted to make a background that I could use in my Christmas crafts. This will be my starting point for my paper craft projects for this challenge

From the resources I have uncovered around my house it is looking like I will be doing beading and paper crafts. I am more comfortable with the paper crafts but I do want to challenge myself so I will be trying stuff I haven't done before or tried and not had much success with.

The first thing I am thinking about for this paper is to cut circles out of it and make dates for an advent calendar. I will start playing around with this in Craftartist to get some ideas but today I have been working on beaded Christmas tree drops, they still need a bit of work so I will finish then I will post the pics later

Ooh! thank goodness for Pinterest

I love looking for ideas on Pinterest so what better place to start collecting my ideas for my projects together. I have started saving pins to my board called "Kick in the Creatives" just collecting ideas at the moment, will sift through them and then decide which way I will go with this creative month. The bar is high and I have set myself a real challenge but I need to start doing rather than just thinking about doing and kidding myself that they are the same thing.

You can see some of the pins I have been collecting here

https://www.pinterest.co.uk/jackie3672/kick-in-the-creatives-challenges/

I have started to collect some beads together, I knew I had a lot but I really have got hundreds of thousands of them in all shapes and sizes.

I have collected together some that I am going to use, together with my original beads from my necklace, to make some Christmas tree dangles. Don't they look just yummy together?

These are what I removed from the necklace

And here they are with beads from my stash, ready to up-cycle and create something new!

This really is the tip of the iceberg for my beads, I really have got carried away with this fetish, especially since I am not a jewellery maker. Now to look at the pins I have collected and get some ideas for dangles and see if I can work out how they are put together.

Crafty art

I have recently joined an art group at a local library. There, with the encouragement of some good friends, I have started to dabble a little in arty things as well as my crafts. I have also joined a couple of Facebook groups where challenges are posted to encourage members to be creative every day. I am currently doing challenges on "Nina Ribena's Art Journal Prompts and More" and "Kick in The Creatives". I haven't done many of the challenges but I keep having a bit of a dabble.

I am aiming to do one of the July challenges on "Kick in The Creatives". I am going to try to do the "Half past Christmas" which involves making something for Christmas everyday in July. This really appeals to me as I love crafting stuff for Christmas and I want to try out some ideas I have had buzzing around in my head for a while. I do a lot of looking at other peoples stuff and watching videos but don't actually do much crafting but I really want to change this, hopefully this challenge will spur me on.

I am always picking up stuff at charity shops that I intend to re-purpose but never actually get around to it. I recently picked up a beaded necklace that I really loved the colours of.

Needless to say I haven't actually done anything with it yet. Looking at it the other day I decided I would use this to make the colour scheme for my Christmas projects, I also decided that I will try to only use stuff I have already got and believe me I have a lot of stuff so really should be able to do this without difficulty. First steps will be to have a look what I have got that will go with these colours, a job for tomorrow I think!