Bill Withers would be pleased

Hello there

 Yes, Bill Withers and his song 'lovely day' says it all. On Saturday I had a lovely time with some ladies whom hopefully I will be able to call friends soon. 

The leaves and the swirls are from the Cricut
Home Accents cartridge

I have only known Polly for less than a week. Polly had mentioned on a local Facebook page that she might consider setting up a sewing group, so I commented that I would be interested. This developed into a Facebook chat when Polly told me about a crafting group that she belongs to and it just happened to be meeting on Saturday. I went along and her and the other ladies made me feel very welcome and I spent a very relaxed time there for a few hours.

I mainly did listening and drinking tea but I also did lots of cutting and taking some die cuts off the Cricut mats. I really shouldn't have done them quickly the night before as I had put paper onto new mats, which is never a good idea, as the new mats are too sticky and make peeling the paper off quite tricky. I made large inroads to three cards though and then finished them off at home that night.

The flowers are from the Everything Eleanor Stampin' Up set
and the centre cream background and sentiment background
 is from the Cricut Craftroom basics set

I got to see Polly's wonderful City and Guild's Design and Craft (embroidery) portfolio and Kate's gorgeous coloured cross stitch and another lady did mosaic and Polly was making these really cute bottle top pin cushions. There was quite a range of things being worked on whilst the chat continued. I am seriously considering doing a City and Guild's course myself but I might try the quilting one. They also mentioned a sewing workshop centre in Thornton, Lancashire which is gorgeous too. I looked online and saw that they're running a two day 'Quilt top in a day' course in July; you do the top on one day and the backing and binding on the second day :-)

The first ever cuts with my mini tattered florals dies

Crafting really has helped me to meet the most lovely of people.

Take care out there and appreciate the good people.

The Wanted

Hello there

When I asked my daughter about what I could use for inspiration for a birthday card for her friend, I was told that her favourite song at the moment is 'Chasing the sun' by The Wanted. That theme sounded good to me, so off I went a thinking. First of all I did a little hunting around of papers and decided to use a lovely flowery yellow and red paper from a very nice free set of papers from the latest cardmaking & Papercraft  magazine. I also routed around my Cricut and Card magazines for card ideas and thought of a couple of stamps which could be used.

The next step is to blend all the ideas together to make a rough design on plain paper. It took a little bit of playing around to get the concertinas right as I can never remember how wide to make the paper in order for them to work - I used 2cm this time.

Living life on the edge by doing free hand concertina-ing!
No score lines for this little lady :-)

From then on, it just rolls with the punches as such; making decisions dependant on variables such as how a Cricut cut went; could I find the design I liked and did it cut alright; was I left with any remnants which inspired me? I like the almost monochrome look of the yellow and red, as it's fresh, young and summery - perfect for a June birthday, although we've had it very cold and rainy for a couple of weeks now, so this card is about as summery as it gets here at the moment.

I made the mistake of trying some stencilling inside the card and it went wrong, so I had to cover the bottom mistake with a Cricut butterfly cut i.e Home Accents, butterfly one, shift, shadow; which is the shadow version of the same one I did for the front of the card. I put the The Wanted's name on a red card piece to cover the top mistake, so I think I got away with it. There was no way I was throwing the card, after all the messing around I had to do with the two layers of concertina.

I made the box with the same card and decorated it with some remnant bits of Cricut cutting I'd done.

Let's hope it's liked or appreciated at least.

Take care out there

New version of napkin box

Hello there
I've finally managed to do a new version of the napkin box I made. Why I've done this and not one of the other three million things I'd like/need to get done, is beyond me as it was hardly urgent but hey, it's done and that's what matters.
I got my inspiration as such from the Cricut magazine, June/July 2011 issue. Maggie Lamarre had a scrap page of hers using a gorgeous deep pink flower she'd made from the Home Accents cartridge which I had loved since seeing the magazine. My flower isn't the same as hers in many ways but she got me started with this particular flower in the first place. I forgot to do the shadow version of the 'hearts' flower which Maggie used, hence mine is so much more intricate and was really quite a challenge to remove off the brand new mat and a few flowers were ruined in the process. I also feel that double sided card would've been easier to cut and appearance wise would've been better but I used the My Mind's Eye 2009 Totally girl pad I have. I did ink the edges but the white background still isn't great- perhaps I should've inked all of the back. Next time maybe. It looks better in real life so I'm more than happy for it to sit on the table.

Take care out there