Monday 26 November 2012

A wet and windy weekend

Happy Monday to you all.
 
Just thought I'd post a quick catch up post about my weekends craftiness. The weather had a lot to answer for this weekend as I had a cancelled party on Friday evening as some ladies were travelling from the mainland for it and the weather interfered with their plans. And then I had a Christmas Fayre on Saturday which again was effected by the terrible weather. Every cloud has a silver lining however. Instead of craftiness, I had a lovely day chatting with my downline Sandy and my friends Chris and Pat on the stall next door. But sadly no customers! I have been left feeling super festive after a day of looking at other peoples Christmas craftiness and listening to Christmas music. Just in time for my festive break away at the weekend ;0)
 
Here are a couple of pictures of my stall on Saturday. My display board full of Stampin' Up! inspiration:
 
My make and take space and my bits and pieces for sale:

 I was looking through my crafty picture folders on my computer this afternoon and found this card class project I havent shared already. We made this in a card class a couple of months ago. A card folder. Perfect for keeping your Christmas cards in or for giving as a gift filled with cards and envelopes.

We made this using the Cottage Window stamp set.

This is one of my favourite stamp sets in the new catalogue. Two step stamping was the reason I fell in love with Stampin' Up! and their products. I love being able to interchange my images depending on the event or season.

Please get in touch if you have any questions or queries about Stampin' Up! or to book a crafty party with your friends ;0)
 
-X-

Thursday 22 November 2012

A Very Merry Christmas Treat

If you're stuck for a Christmas gift this year for a crafty friend. I have a perfect solution for you.... a Stampin' Up! gift voucher. I can provide these all year round for Christmas gifts or birthdays or as a just because pressie.

Here are two of my new style Christmas themed vouchers tied with our lovely Stitched Grosgrain Ribbon and using our fab Snow Festival Designer Series Papers.
 
 
I created this embellishment with the Snow Flurry Die and the For the Birds stamp set (and a bit of Cherry Cobbler glittery bling for the hat).

 I created this embellishment with the Scentsational Season stamp set and matching Holiday Collection Framelits. The sentiment is from the Come to Bethlehem stamp set.
 A view of the inside of the vouchers.
 And lastly, here is a quick crafty project I made recently. I had seen some lovely paper piecing cards on various blogs and wanted to have a go myself. I used the trees from Polar Party and stamped on different patterned Christmas papers cutting each tree separately to create this effect. I think it is such an effective technique for a quick and easy stamped Christmas card.
If you'd like to order a gift voucher or find out any more information on Stampin' Up! please get in touch on poulton_sarah@yahoo.co.uk or 01983 609249.
 
Happy Crafting ;0)
 
-X-

Sunday 18 November 2012

November Card Class Crafty Makes

We had another lovely card class afternoon yesterday. We welcomed a new lady and bid a Merry Christmas to our two cruising ladies who won't be able to attend our December card class. We had a lovely afternoon of chatting and mincemeat orange cake and coffee ;0)
 
Here are two of the cards we made yesterday. This was our card class finisher (which I always like to keep quite simple as sometimes we chat so much we run out of time). This was a simple wreath made from the larger Scallop Circle punch embossed with the Petals-A-Plenty Embossing Folder. We then punched a circle from the centre and embellished with Basic Rhinestones (super sparkly!). This was set against a white embossed background which was edged with the Scallop Ribbon Border Punch (Old Olive). The bow was made with Old Olive Scallop Dots Ribbon and the sentiment was stamped using More Merry Messages.
 
 This was our luxury card for Christmas. This was inspired by this card I had seen on Pinterest. We used the brayering ink on the embossing folder technique for the background. We brayered Crumb Cake on to the Lacy Brocade Embossing folder and then ran a piece of Naturals Ivory card through the Big Shot. This is almost a reverse coredinations style effect. We then stamped the the Ornament Keepsakes images in Soft Suede, Crumb Cake & Chocolate Chip and cut the coordinating Holiday Ornaments shapes from Champagne Glimmer Paper and layered them up (with some creative cutting and trimming to show as much of the glimmer as possible). We layered the embossed layer on to brushed gold cardstock and then on to a Naturals Ivory base and embellished with Basic Pearls.

Thanks for stopping by this bright and chilly Sunday morning. Hope you are all having a lovely weekend. We are wrapping up and staying warm in this household. The only one without a cold at the moment is Summer. She is most certainly full of beans. Sam and I are taking it in turns to try and keep up with her ;0)

Happy Sunday Crafting
-X-

Friday 16 November 2012

A crafty catch up

My poor blog has been neglected over the past week due to a house full of cold and bugs. First it was me and Summer and now my other half has it. I think we might've given it to my poor family also. So all in all its been pretty hectic trying to get us all better.
 
But on a positive note, I have been able to get some crafting done while we have been house bound and Summer has been napping.
 
Tomorrow is my monthly card class and it will be the last until the New Year for two of my regular class attendees. So I have created a couple of extra projects for us all to complete together. I always like to create a special fun chocolate gift bag for my December class but have moved it forward to this month for all my ladies. For this project I have used one of the glassine bags from the Ghoulish Googlies Designer Kit in the Autumn Winter catalogue and embossed it with the Petals-A-Plenty embossing folder. I cut a snowflake using the Snow Flurry Bigz Die and layered that with a stamped circle (the penguin from Polar Party) and a circle of Red Glimmer Paper. The banners are cut from the Be Of Good Cheer Designer Series Paper.
 
This bag is filled with lots of lovely chocolately Christmas goodies.
 
To make up for my quiet blogging week I will also share with you three cards I made at a Christmas showbox swap with 3 fellow Demonstrators on Thursday. We each brought enough supplies for each to complete each others card design. It was a lovely couple of hours and great to have a catch up and chat Stampin' Up! Here are the three cards I made provided by Sandy, Lorraine and Jane. It was lovely to get inspiration and see what different projects we all made. Look forward to seeing them all again soon (and Lorraine will have a new addition to celebrate too ;0)
 
Hopefully I will get a bit more time to blog this week and share all the lovely card class projects I have been working on.
 
Happy Autumnal Weekend Crafting to you all ;0)
-X-
 

Wednesday 7 November 2012

Come to Bethlehem Christmas Cards


I thought I would share two Christmas card projects today. For last month's card class I wanted to create a card with the lovely new Christmas-y stamp set, Come to Bethlehem, from the new annual catalogue. I had seen this set in the American catalogue and loved it and had my fingers crossed it would travel over to our catalogue.
 
The card above is the one we made during the class (inspired by this card I had seen on Pinterest). I love this vintage-y aged colour scheme- Brushed Gold and Chocolate Chip. And I always love a bit of daubering round the edges of the card for an aged look.  The image was heat embossed in gold on Naturals Ivory cardstock. This was then layered on to a background of Brushed Gold embossed with the new Lacy Brocade embossing folder.

This second card was one I toyed with demonstrating at our card class but chose the above card instead. I love how the wise men image fits so perfectly within the Apothecary Accents Framelit. I heat embossed the image in black and layered on to Brushed Silver Cardstock and another Lacy Brocade embossed layer in Night of Navy (I brushed my Illuminate ink pad over this layer to give a shimmery sheen). To create the night sky circle I punched a circle in a post it note as a template. I then inked Marina Mist and Baja Breeze over the star to create the night sky circle
 I love this stamp set and cannot wait to use it next month as part of my Journal Your Christmas album (I've been collecting supplies for it for a couple of months already).

Hope you liked my shared projects today. Please get in touch with any Stampin' Up! questions or to find out more about booking a party or attending a class. I'm happy to help in any way I can: poulton_sarah@yahoo.co.uk or 01983 609249.

I'm just off to pack my bag for a crafty birthday party tonight.  I do so love planning a Christmas themed birthday party crafty evening.

Happy mid-week crafting to all.
-XXX-

Saturday 3 November 2012

Halloween Scrapping

First things first, Stampin' Up! have announced two exciting new promotions for November. A really exciting ink pad promotion when you place an order for £325 (individual, party or group orders qualify) you will receive a colour family of ink pads for free (10 colours from with the Subtles, Regals or Brights). There is also another great promotion on the Ornament Keepsakes bundle. Buy the stamp set bundle and receive the matching Paper-Piecing Pack for free!! Wow, what a month to place an order or host a party with me. So many fab freebies!! To find out more please click on my promotions tab above.
 
Now, before you pack away all those Halloween crafty supplies for another year I wanted to share a few more projects you can use them for. I'm sure we all have a stack of pictures from Halloween so why not use your stamps and papers for a bit of seasonal scrapbooking.
 
These are the two pages we created at this months Stampin' Scrapping class. I had to dress Summer up and stage these photos as my class was on Monday, two days before Halloween. But with a headband and some orange cushions the pictures had a very Halloween-y feel.
 
This first page has an Elegant Eggplant base and uses the Howlstooth and Scaringbone papers to embellish the photo. We created a rosette using last years retired Halloween papers and the fantastic Big Shot Rosette die. We stamped the Frightening Feline in black on the background then using the Illuminate pad on black for the embellishment. We used a tag fom the Ghoulish Googlies for the journalling spot and then finished with Neutrals Designer Buttons. (We also finished with a bat stamped from the Googly Ghouls set and embellished with googly eyes)
The second page we created was a bit busy for my liking so I changed it slightly for the class (instead of stamping the Googly Ghouls witch in Basic Black with stamped her with versamark instead to give a tone on tone effect rather than too much busy black). I wanted to see if we could make the layered stamping effect work with a scrapbook layout. I love this effect of stamping over multiple layers. The colours on this page are Old Olive, Pumpkin Pie and Elegant Eggplant. The stamps used are the Googly Ghouls again. This witch is just perfect for embellishing a scrapbook page ;0)
 
Right, little Miss seems to be stirring so I had better post this sharpish (I have had this in draft since Thursday but not a moment to finish it!). I hope you are all having a lovely weekend and finding plenty of time for crafting ;0)

Happy Weekend Crafting All
-X-