More Birdie Brown!

I am totally in love with the digi stamps designed by Torico of Birdie Brown - they're easy for a beginner like me to colour and are charming without being overly cutesy.  There's a good selection of free stamps available  and more to buy from her etsy shop (the robots!).

First up is another of November's digistamps Just For You, made into a small hendacagon box (11 sides).  I made the box template in Serif by butting up a small rectangle to a hendacagon shape made using the Shapes feature.  By copying, pasting and shrinking it slightly, it's given me a perfect fit between the lid and the base.

I used Promarkers to colour the image and I *will* master a blended black hat eventually!  But not today...  To mask the overblended area that refused to be fixed, I've added glazed holly leaf punch outs and clear crystals coloured red with a promarker.  There's also clear glaze and glitter accents. 

The sides of the box are decorated with ribbons and ric rac with a snowflake glued to the bow.  I plan on filling the box with handmade chocolate rum truffles for Christmas.  I'm entering the box into the Anything but a Card challenge over at Sweet 'n Sassy and the Anything Goes challenge at the Anything Challenges blog, plus, of course, the November Challenge at Birdie Brown.  

To add some variety into my Christmas crafting, the next image I played with the Dreaming Birds images and made two cards.

This card has soft pastel colours, a delicate paper doily, a little flower and pearl heart embellishment...

And buttons!

For the second card, I used promarkers to give the larger bird a rainbow wing, and then teamed it with lots of rainbow ribbon.  The floral border stopper I made in serif - the flowers are just circles and hearts.  By copying and pasting them in different sizes, it was easy to make a little floral strip.

I'm entering the rainbow card into the In the Garden challenge over at the Passion for Promarker blog.

Next up will be something pink for a couple of pink challenges - this will be interesting as it's not a colour I'm particularly fond of and certainly not one that I'd gravitate towards if left to my own devices!  Plus, it'll keep me occupied whilst I'm waiting for these to arrive....

P.S Go visit Going Buggy: WIN a complete set of PROMARKERS!

Put a button on it!

Christmas card inspired by the Totally Gorjuss Anything Goes...with a Button challenge and the Texture challenge over at CraftyCatz.

The Gingerbread couple are from the Nitwit stamp collection, and I've used coordinating papers from the same range.  There's also ricrac, lace, string, ribbons and of course...buttons!  The stamped images are coloured with Promarkers - I think I'm improving!  

I recently bought some Bookbinding Glue from Pinflair.  This stuff is brilliant!  The string on the card is attached to the edge of a card oval using the glue.  It dried first, and that string is going nowhere - no more will embellishments like this be falling off!  I tried some on string and scrap card, let it dry and then tried pulling the string off - the card tore, but the string remained attached to its card base.  It has multiple uses and I'm looking forward to experimenting more with it.  

Birdie Brown Free Digistamps

There's new free digistamps available from Birdie Brown :)  I'm really enjoying seeing her blog and I like the monthly challenges - seeing what other people do with the same thing is inspiring and fascinating in much the same way as the Ravelry project pages for the same knitting pattern.  It underlines just how unique each creation that leaves a crafter's hands really is.

This month there are two snowmen images to play with.  I instantly fell in love with the Just for You stamp, whilst Snowy Day didn't really grab my attention.  Having played with both, however, the former remains a favourite but the latter has grown on me considerably.

I made a card with the first digistamp, and while the characters are hand coloured, I created the snowy background to them in Serif.

See the little star buttons and ribbons on the bag?  I confess they're covering up a bit of bleed through from the promarkers!  His glasses and coat buttons have a little clear glaze over them, and I've added tiny seed beads to each dot on the doily.  

Snowy Day has been turned into a small hanging gift box for the Christmas Tree.  He's decoupaged onto the front, complete with a rainbow scarf and shiny nose!  As this background was so much smaller, I coloured it by hand.  

Both have glittery accents, and to give a sense of scale for the box, here it is with the card:

There's enough room in it for four of the little Christmas chocolates from M&S (the ones that come in the nets - yum!)

Silicone Disaster!

A weekend of card making here, and thanks to a recent reorganisation of my craft cupboard, old treasures have found new light.  Including silicone gel.

I wanted to create a card using just brown tones and the Gorjuss On Top of the World stamp.  All went well until I decoupaged the layers and this happened...

Look at the way the silicone has bled through to the front - the blotchiness on her face and pinafore!   Argh!!

Luckily, I'd also coloured and cut out another image, which didn't have a home, so I layered it over the top.  It's no longer just brown tones, but I'm pleased with the results.  Vintage buttons added the perfect finishing touch:

Much better :)

Halloween

It's the morning after Halloween - such good fun last night!  In England, Halloween is slowly catching on, and I love the growing community spirit surrounding the night.  I love the effort the parents and children put in to their costumes and their eager faces when you open the door.  We're very lucky here that the children dress like devils but behave like angels for the night - they only go to houses with signs of Halloween decorations and are enthusiastically polite over treats given out.

Last year, the treats were bookworms:

Book page pouches, with printed labels stapled on and filled with jelly worms.  I can't remember how many of these I made, and it was my very first halloween living within reach of neighbours who might trick or treat. We ran out :/  Those last few children were given Christmas candy canes out of desperation!

This year, I started off by making broomsticks.  I found sweets packaged to look like pencils for the base, printed out sheets of "wood" to wrap around them and finished with twigs and twine to complete the broomstick.  The sweets were 20 for £1 - it's a great way to make cheap sweeties look special.  You could probably use pixie sticks instead.

Here they are ready to give out:

See the cute Death figure?  He's a free printable from Stitch Punk :)

I also made little pouches out of fabric with printed card labels (if anyone's interested in the labels, I can publish them as a pdf).  Jelly snakes for decomposing eels and skidaddles for bat poo!  Note to self:  these were much faster to craft in bulk than the labour intensive broomsticks...and you need to do at least 60 of them next year...'k?

And using the same fabric, a little bag stuffed with Halloween treats for a friend's daughter 

The skulls are hair clips made out of  printable shrink plastic (skulls taken from a free digikit - Spooktakular  available from Daisytrail) and hot glued onto clips.  I also played some more with my alcohol markers and a Gorjuss On Top of the World stamp. (Edited to add I've entered this in the weekly challenge over on http://totallygorjuss.blogspot.co.uk)

I also made a card for my son, again taken from the same free digikit.  He had posh Halloween chocolates from Hotel Chocolat (honestly, I didn't choose them because I knew he'd share....ahem)

Even the knife block got mummified!  Free printable from What I Made - check out the rest of the site, it's visually stunning and there's some great projects on there.

Finally, we made two pumpkins - one real for outside, and other out of papier mache for indoors.  The papier mache one was a pain to be honest - I'd forgotten just how time consuming it is to build up the layers with the drying time in between.  I used a punch ball balloon which happily started to deflate after the first layer was put on.  I cursed it at the time, but it's actually made a more realistic mishapen pumpkin that Mother Nature might have come up with.  It blocked up my crafting table for over a week.  I used orange, brown and yellow acrylic paints to colour it and then drilled holes in a swirl design with an electric drill (tip - use a face mask next time...orange gunk when you blow your nose...not attractive!)  It's a little lame in the daylight, but looks really pretty when its lit at night, honest.

The real pumpkin got drilled too - this was so much fun to do apparently (my son insisted on doing the grrrr...manly thing with a power tool)  We punched out one larger hole to shove artistically arrange a plastic rat in, hot glued smaller mice to the outside and used a battery operated 20 green led light set in the smaller holes, while the rest had white light shining out from a powerful led push light.  I pinned a triple bow to the top.  This was easily the fastest and simplest pumpkin we've ever done, but it looked really effective.  

I stood it on an upturned waste paper bin which is an opaque plastic and hot glued glow sticks inside it.  

 Very blurry picture without the flash....

As it's blustery, but gloriously sunny this morning, I'm off to wrap up and sit in the garden with a cosy mug of hot chocolate - Autumn is my favourite season, and I want to make the most of it while it lasts!

Discovering....digistamps!

I've always been a secret fan of colouring in throughout my adulthood.  When I was a young girl, I spent hours drawing and colouring in pictures of my own devise or printed.  Including the illustrations in books: especially Enid Blyton's Faraway Tree series, much to my sister's disgust as the ink would bleed through the page and obscure the text on the reverse (pah! - like we didn't know them off by heart, anyway!)

I've recently discovered a whole world of people who also like colouring, disguised with grown-up sounding tools - alcohol markers, blending tools...digistamps.  I had replacement felt tip pens twice a year growing up - one treasured set each Christmas, and another of my own choosing during the Summer holidays bought from Woolworth's with carefully counted out pocket money.  Each set never lasted through the time from one set to another, and I'd spend many hours soaking the inners in vinegar, or sucking the tip to try to breathe just a little more life into them.  How much more fun would that have been with alcohol markers?!

Armed with newly acquired Promarkers from Letraset, and my good friend Google, I found this wonderful site -  Birdie Brown, a digistamp designer who has really cute images to buy.  She also has a few free digistamps which are perfect for novices like me, venturing into this new craft.

I picked her Gnome Boy in a Wood to start out with.  Here are the results:

Apologies for the rather blurry picture - the weather is really miserable today, and my little point and squirt doesn't like it!

I had so much fun making this little card - I can see this is going to be another craft that I really love...if you're  into this kind of colouring, and have any tips or sites to share, please shout out :)

I've also been busy crafting for Halloween and can't wait for it to get dark and for the doorbell to ring - will share what I've been making next time.

Happy Halloween!!

Time Again

It's been over a year since my last blog post - it's easy to fall out of the habit of updating, and the more time that passes, the harder it is to pick it up again.  I hope this is a fresh start to blogging again, because it's nice to be able to look back and see what I got up to!

It's also been just over a year since I knitted this:

My first knitted clock!  It was a huge amount of fun to make, and it hangs in my living room and continues to make me smile every time I glance at the time.  I've wanted to knit another one for a while, although with other projects vying for my attention, I just haven't got around to it until now.  

But with a commission request for a housewarming Strawberry Clock, I could ignore the urge no longer!  I present clock the second:

Again, it's a knitted cover for a vintage style clock.  I'm not quite so keen on the deco-style numbers on the face, but this was the only clock I was able to find in this style and it's growing on me.  This time, I've used a grey woollen moss stitch base, double knitting weight, with eyelets again for ribbon.  

The flowers and leaves are slightly different on this one.  The leaves are cotton 4ply, knitted rather than crocheted and double thickness.  They have more structure, and I love their petite neatness.  The flowers are also in cotton 4 ply, and are the same pattern as the original, but these have little knitted button middles and I've added some pale green embroidery threads to the petals.

There are 7 strawberries dangling from one side.  As these are knitted in 4ply rather than DK, they're more compact than my original.  Plus I actually thought about where to put the french knot seeds on them so they're less haphazard than the first!  It feels as though it's evolved - a little more conservative than its big sister, but still a lot of fun.  I hope the recipient loves it too.

The other recently finished commission is a bunny.  A lucky chimney sweep bunny!  A colleague had a knitted chimney sweep given to her when she got married, and wants to gift her daughter with one for her wedding day this August.  Patterns for knitted chimney sweeps are a little thin on the ground, but I really fell in love with this Alan Dart pattern, despite having a few gripes with it!

Isn't he cute?  Her colour theme is purple, hence the waistcoat :)  I made a gift box for him to go in, from sheets of posterboard and brown Kraft paper.  It's something I enjoy doing, but I need more practise in to iron out some of my own design flaws!

I have a blissful couple of weeks off work, and plan on catching up with plenty of crafting.  Sewing, crochet and knitting awaits - and perhaps a bit of box practise too!  And who knows - maybe I'll even blog about it ;)

P.S.  I've bought another clock to knit - should I stick to strawberries or try something different?

Itty Bitty Bunnies

Easter is just around the corner, and there's not much time left to make crafty things for it.  But Anna at Mochimochi Land has generously offered a free pattern for the teeniest knitted bunnies.  These take about half an hour from start to finish to whip up.  I couldn't resist making a few for myself!

The smaller ones I knitted using 4 ply wool and 2.25mm needles as the pattern suggested.  Mama Bunny used DK wool and 3mm needles.  I did manage to snap one of my beloved Symfonie 2.25mm dpns - I am so grateful that they supply 6 of them for such accidents!  You can see the broken dpn in the foreground of this shot (and you probably heard my wail when it snapped!):

I also discovered the 1000 Cranes Appeal on Miya Company's website.  For each picture of an origami crane they receive, they'll donate $5 to Save the Children for Japan's relief and recovery, up to a total of 1000 cranes.  If you don't know how to fold the crane, they have a pdf file you can download to help you.  My son and I spent a while folding cranes outside today, although typically, a breeze started up when I wanted to photograph them, so they're all a bit less posed than I wanted them to be!

And a less pterodactyl-y shot of a couple of them...

If I don't blog again before, have a wonderful Easter everyone :) 

Crafting Returns Slowly

I dislike my current lethargy towards crafting.  It's unsettling and I'd like to get back to "normal", please!

I have managed a couple of little projects though.

The first is a little Easter-y bunny sachet, using this great free pattern.

And secondly, some little handmade seed packets.  With only a tiny garden, there simply isn't room to grow whole packets of seeds, and I end up with loads left over.  Normally I keep these for the following season, but this year I've had disappointing germination results from my older seeds and it seems far more sensible to give away the excess and start each season with fresh seeds to put my energy and love into.  The packets are just little rectangles of handmade paper and vellums machine sowed around three sides before the seeds are popped in and the fourth side sown.  They all have little tags with the seed variety and basic sowing instructions on them.

I love the Flower Fairy vellum - how wonderful would it be to make up a little set of these and have one just purely filled with glitter as fairy dust to make the seeds grow?  They'd make adorable party favours or combined with a little tin watering can and some colourful pots, a great Easter egg alternative (or in addition to an Easter egg - I do like chocolate a lot!)

Please tell me what you're working on at the moment - it'll inspire me back to my creative self again!

Gardening

My desire to craft has been temporarily usurped by my desire to garden.  I know that it's temporary and things will regain balance soon - or at least, I hope so because I'm missing the urge to knit, crochet or sew!

I've made a new blog purely for gardening adventures - it's here if anyone fancies a nose :)  It'll be a place for me to make more detailed notes that'll help in subsequent years, and will be a good way of keeping check on how things are growing.

Having spent a few weeks warming up the soil in the raised bed, I removed the cover, dug it over and covered it with netting to stop the neighbourhood cats viewing it as a Wonderful Litter Tray.  Catalpa came out and showed me just how kitty proof that netting is...

At least he's not able to dig holes in it, but it's not particularly helpful, is it?!