Hugs & kisses

This is what we'll be doing in class next week! A bit girly and frilly for a change, haven't done that in a while. We're making everything from scratch, except for the flower cluster. (Everyone is bringing a design to cut out for that.) If you're into fuzzy cutting, here is your chance! Fuzzy cutting is the one thing I don't do (often).

Well, I won't tell you how I made the butterflies, you'll just have to come to class for that. But aren't they gorgeous?

If you are a first timer at my class you can get the first class free this month! Contact me for what to bring.

 And that's my third blog post today, I'm on a roll! Please do leave a comment, they make me happy.

Bicheno

Of all the wonderful places we saw in Tasmania, this one was our favourite: the sleepy little town of Bicheno on the East Coast. The LO sketch was scraplifted from Wendy Smith, she's a very talented scrapper. We're doing this project in class this week...

...and you'll get to play with my new little bike. It's a stamp set with matching dies. Totally easy and they look great on acetate.

As a bonus, we get messy with texture paste. 

Cheers!

Flower girls

For a long time my girls have wanted to be flower girls and finally their wish came true. 

My2angels has the perfect range of romantic embellishments to go with the photo from the wedding. I didn't want to have too many embellies on this page, because Joel already complained about being on a pink page, so I made a small cluster. 

There is a love pin, a couple of cabochon flowers, leaf charms and...

...my favourite, a notepad charm:

it even opens up! Imagine putting a little pull-out booklet in there.

Simple and cheap ribbon storage

A few people have asked for a cheap way to store ribbon. I do have a bit of an obsession with ribbon and store them all in one small drawer. It all cost me about $10 to set up. Here is how I do it.

You will need small ziplock bags ($2.00 for 100 from a cheap shop) and large jump rings ($2.00 for 5, also from a cheap shop or a little dearer but colourful from Kaisercraft)

Each ribbon gets its own bag and I spent a couple of TV nights doing all of mine. If you roll it onto 3 fingers, it fits into the bag perfectly. Punch a hole in the top of the bag...

... and thread it on a large jumpring. I organise mine into colours, obviously.

I divided a drawer into 5 long sections by glueing cardstock dividers in and it fits 2- 4 sets of ribbon in each section. And that's it. 

Not only does it fit (most of) my vast ribbon collection, I can also simply pull out the colour I want and grab the right ribbon without anything getting messy. If only I could shut my drawer... Only kidding, I usually go on a ribbon-buying fast when it gets hard to close.

PS: Bree just suggested punching the hole in the bottom of the bag instead so that you can unzip it and take the ribbon out without taking the bag off the ring. Genius! (now you tell me)

Birthday pages with Prima's Meadow Lark

OMG, I'm going purple! Not a colour I usually use much of, but it all started with my Christmas gift, a pair of funky purple pants. And I wore them on my birthday party, which gave Tracy from my2angels the idea to let me play with the new Prima range, "Meadow Lark".

Have you ever noticed that there are 200 photos of each of your childrens' parties and none of your own? That's what happened to me. I had an awesome wine and cheese tasting party with over 40 friends, most of whom are scrappers and only a handful of unfocused photo to prove it. But it needs to be scrapped, so fuzzy or not, here are my photos:

I used the Labelle paper for a background and the new charming word embelly in a cluster of gardenia, chipboard leaves and a calico rosette:

When a paper range has cute barcode strips, they are fun to use as flags:

 Here you have the white stemmed flowers all glimmer misted:

This little set of white mulberry flowers and butterflies is so versatile! So easy to colour with paint, glimmer mist or inks:

 

And guess what my lovely class ladies gave me for my birthday: a Cricut machine! (To use in class, to be sure) I couldn't believe my eyes!

For this page I used Chloe and Bronte paper with a little masking thrown in.

Here is how you can make a cute felt banner: Draw a few flags on a piece of calico, stick some felt ribbon on the other side...

 and cut out the flags before inking them:

Arrange them as bunting with a rhinestone strip:

The bird needed some feathers and I cut apart 3 small white mulberry flowers and inked the edges:

And lastly there is a deer! Don't ask me why, it just matched in colour. 

Psst! If ever you need to change the colour on a number 40 charm, cover it with Liquid Pearls.

A bit of baker's twine for a frame and now I think I've got the colour purple out of my system until the next decade. I hope you liked it.

Finishing touches with My2Angels

I made this layout for my parent's yearly album. It needed something else, but what? My2Angels is the perfect place for finishing touches.

First I took a rhinestone buckle and used a pin to hold it down, since the ribbon was already glued on. 

Then I started digging for some charms. I found the wings, key and the hatpin. The heart got a red coat with Perfect Pearls, but I knocked it over by accident and it landed on the paint side (of course!). I kind of liked the effect, so I left it. In your face, Murphy! 

I trimmed down the hatpin and attached the key...

...and glued it into the buckle. 

Check out this set of white mulberry flowers and butterflies. They are really good value because you can change their colour so easily. I simply inked the petal tips...

... and then put some rhinestones from a leftover piece of a rhinestone square on them.  

Add a cabochon flower and some stamen and you have the perfect mini cluster to balance the rhinestone buckle and charms. 

And here is the finished layout: 

Geli

Hobart ducks

And here is the class version of my last post! As you can see, with just a few small changes, different colours and photos it looks quite different.

If you are interested in coming next week, this is what we'll do. It's excellent for leftover papers. 

How to shabby emboss charms

I made this layout for My2Angels, the place to get charms. (If the sky wasn't so grey I could get a better photo of this, but for now this will have to do)

Charms look quite cute just the way they are, but sometimes it's nice to alter them a little.Here I want to show you how to shabby emboss your charms.

First, I heated a camera charm with a heat gun (use tweezers!) and sprinkled embossing powder over it. It looked like this:

Quite nice, but I wanted a different colour. So I heated it again and sprinkled pink embossing powder on top:

I liked that effect, but now I had overdone it a bit and all the detail of the charm had disappeared. So I scratched some of the embossing powder off again:

 

 And heated it once more to set. After it was cool, I used a watermark pen to add some copper embossing powder to the lens, so it would stand out a little. And there you have it, a shabby little charm:

It's fun to experiment a little.

The yellow rosette is made with this super useful rosette die.

Here are some closies:

For the background I inked a Crafter's Workshop template with Distress ink and printed with it, but it was a little hard to see. So I repeated it, but this time with Glimmer Mist and got this effect. Nice.

A cute little dolphin charm and some resin flowers, definitely one of my favourites: 

If you want to stitch and have no embroidery floss left, you can use a single strand of the mega-versatile baker's twine. Tracy thinks I use it as dental floss, I go through this stuff so quickly...

My little fish

My Hannah has always been my fish. No matter how cold the water, she'll be in it. 

Just a quick sweet little page for my sweet little fish.

waterfall album page

Here's a class I've done before with a flip-out waterfall album, which has been very popular:

You can fit a whole bunch of smaller photos in the small album. Pull on the tab and it all opens up.

Life is an adventure

We are making cogs in class. How cool are they! Really shiny and multi-coloured. 

Throw in some buttons and some crackle paint and there it is, a cool boy's layout!