A blue wreath

Hello there

Here's a quick little post just to show the last wreath I made. I made it for one of my sister's at Christmas. 

I used an absolute gorgeous paper pad by Tilda called Summer Blues. I absolutely love the double sided patterns on the papers and it's such good quality.

The bow took me ages of watching youtube videos as Mel Heaton had helped me to make the last one and I couldn't remember how to do it.

I wish I'd got round to inking the edges of the
flower centres before adhering the
flowers together

My sister lives overseas, so it was a bit of a rush job to get it done in time to allow for postage times. As it turns out, it was actually delivered to her on Christmas day, so her living in a non Christian country has it's benefits.

I'm hoping that the next one I make will be relatively easy now but I'm not holding my breath.

Take care out there

Yee hah!

Hello there

That's it, I've done it. It's finished! and it's 13.13 on January 16th 2012. After going to the Flower Shoppe cartridge workshop yesterday and not finishing the wreath, I've now spent the morning finishing it. Well, ok and a small bit of the afternoon. In all fairness to me though I didn't get started until 10.30.

The colours are not quite what I would've chosen but that's my own fault as Mel did give us the chance to choose different papers but since it was my first one, I thought it best to go with what she gave us, so that I could make sure I was doing the right thing with the right paper. It is quite a long process, especially doing it the first time. These can clearly be done in whatever colour mix you like to alter the effect. This looks a bit twee for me.

The main difficulty people had yesterday was point 7 in the instructions, which is cutting 4 of 'HEART1' (the centre of the pink flowers). It is a very intricate cut and many of the ladies' machines were chewing up the paper. Mel suggested to use pressure 4 and blade depth 4 and she always has top speed on. We were using a mixture between coredinations paper and Bazzill. I had a new mat which I think aided me too, as Pam did the correct settings on hers and it still didn't work, so I cut them out for her and all was fine.

Rolling the spiral pieces to make the centres is quite fiddly. The main thing I learnt from that was that I put the glue on the base of the wound up paper, rather than on the tab; which is at the end of the spiral- I found it easier to keep it all in place that way. It's just something you need to get into the swing of and then it could be done with much better efficiency.

To finish it off, I sprayed it with Crafter's Companion 'Spray and Sparkle' and put some gems/brads to the centre of some of the flowers. Mel had also embossed some of the pink base flower but for my first attempt, I just wanted to learn the basic skills/techniques rather than go overboard on small detail.

That's one thing ticked off my 'Crafty Plan'. I'm so chuffed that I knuckled down and finished this today. I remained focused and therefore achieve my goal in the time frame I wanted.

I'm rather pleased with myself, so now off to ground myself with housework and dog walks although it's very sunny yet also very cold here, so the walk will be fine.

Take care out there

A flower wreath

Hello there

Today I went to a Mel Heaton Cricut class using the Flower Shoppe cartridge. I've wanted this cartridge for a long time, so I was so glad to learn about this class and you get the cartridge as part of the price - which is rather excellent, to put it mildly. I'd like to type that we made a flower wreath but that isn't completely honest. We went through all the stages of cutting the shapes  and then inking and dashing them but I only actually managed to put together 3 flowers. There are alot of shapes involved as you can see; 30 of one shape:

Let me put it this way; there was much heated debate on the philosophy of how to deal with difficult situations, husbands/partners; freedom and a few things inbetween with much laughing going on inbetween. Sufficive to say, the amount of crafting was sometimes limited. I must take this opportunity to publicly thank a lady called Jackie, who was a saviour as I'd forgotten my glasses and she let me borrow a spare pair she had in her bag and which just happened to suit my eyesight perfectly. I also need to thank the lady; Pam, on the other side of me, who let me use her pro-marker to dash lines around loads of my shapes as I didn't have a brown pen and it saved me having to buy one. How could I fail to have a good time with such lovely people surrounding me?!

This is Mel's version of the wreath I will eventually finish:

Please do visit her blog if you want a full set of instructions yourself to make one.

p.s I'm also a complete convert now to the heat gun - I love the way it dries so quickly, making the whole process quicker and easier.

Take care out there