Chocolate Wrapper

Since buying the Envelope Punch Board I have been having a go at making various things which I have seen on YouTube and other demo's blogs but, this time, I have actually come up with an idea of my own!!!!
This is a chocolate bar wrapper which makes a simple bar of chocolate into something a little bit special. I started with a piece of Pink Pirouette DSP (from the old style DSP pack) and made a simple box envelope but, instead of overlapping two of the flaps, I took them both to the centre and folded them back - a dab of glue keeps them in place. I then wrapped a piece of Pink Pirouette Taffeta Ribbon around to conceal the join and added a butterfly punched from the Elegant Butterfly and Bitty Butterfly punches.
Simple but quite effective I think (and even better that I managed to come up with an idea of my own!!!!)

Margaret x

 

Happy 100th!!

This is a commissioned card which I have been asked to make for a lady who is celebrating her 100th birthday and it needed to be 'oversized'. The finished card is an A4 size so the card blank was made with an A3 sheet of white cardstock.
As the card needs to be sent through the post I had to be careful to keep it as flat as possible so most of the flowers, large ones from Flower Shop and small ones from Summer Silhouettes, have been stamped directly onto the card using Raspberry Ripple. As I wanted to overlap the flowers and leaves (from Summer Silhouettes) I cut out several masks from post-it notes so that some of the flowers and the leaves look like they're behind the others.
The Raspberry Ripple Scallop Oval and Whisper White Oval were both cut with dies from the Ovals Collection Framelits and the sentiment is made up from the Memorable Moments stamp set. I placed a piece of Rasberry Ripple Stitched Satin Ribbon across the card before matting onto the card blank, positioned the ovals on top and added three flowers, punched with the Pansy Punch, using dimensionals and a few leaves from the Owl Builder Punch. A bow, a butterfly from Papillon Potpourri and a few Basic Pearls finished the card.
I have to say this took quite a long time to make (especially as I had to make an envelope for it as well!) but I was quite pleased with the finished result - something that rarely happens :0)

October's Card Swap

These are the cards I received from the lovely Alison, a member of the Card Swap Group, for last month's Autumn themed swap.
How lucky was I to receive two cards form Alison? She said this was because she thought she didn't have any stamps which fitted the theme so she made the one on the left before remembering she had the Trendy Trees set, which she used for the card on the right!! I love them both Alison so thank you very much.

Margaret x

Another Splash of Colour

This is my second entry into this week's LIM challenge which is to use a splash of colour(s) on a dark background. This is also my second post of the day so scroll down for the Simples Sunday post, although this card would qualify for 'simple' just as well! Now I have to say that in real life my card looks quite a bit darker than this but I couldn't get it to photograph any better. I have used Night of Navy cardstock for the base colour and added butterflies punched with the Elegant Butterfly and Bitty Butterfly punches using Soft Sky and Night of Navy. I punched an aperture with the Modern Label Punch and placed a piece of Soft Sky behind with the (retired) sentiment stamped in Night of Navy. For the 'sparkle' I added some Basic Rhinestones.
Well it's back to work for me tomorrow - where did that week go? I can't believe that the next holiday will be Christmas - aaargh!!!

Margaret x

 

Gift set

 

Today I have a matching set to show you which I made for a friend's birthday. The card, although not entirely CASE'd, was hugely inspired by a card I saw on Monica Gale's blog a couple of weeks ago. However, when I looked for Monica's post, I read that she had CASE'd it from Catherine Pooler, a Canadian demo. I have looked for the original post and I can't find it but Monica's card can be seen here.

The colour combo is Pistachio Pudding and Baked Brown Sugar which I think look gorgeous together. The little 'envelope' top right holds a gift card and the treat box holds some yummy chocolate truffles.

I used the Chalk Talk stamps and framelits as well as a stamp from Happiest Birthday Wishes, along with the Extra Large Oval Punch, Large Oval Punch, Scallp Oval Punch and Bitty Butterfly Punch.

Margaret x

Birthday Card & Gift Box

This is the card and gift box I made for my sister's birthday which was on Saturday. I used the Fabulous Florets stamp set with the leafy image for the card and one of the flowers for the gift box. The colour combo was Smoky Slate and black (Staz-on), embellished with Basic Black Chevron ribbon. The sentiment is from the Hostess set, Simply Sketched, and the vellum butterflies were punched with the Bitty Butterfly punch with Basic Rhinestones for their bodies. The gift box is one I made with the Pop'n'Cuts die, finished off with Chevron ribbon and a tag from Chalk Talk cut with the co-ordinating Framelit.

If you would like to order any products or, maybe, even become a Stampin'Up! demonstrator yourself, then please don't hesitate to contact me and I will be very happy to help.

Margaret x

Cards in a Gift Box

This is a gift I made for a friend and work colleague who left at the end of term. The box held six 4" square cards (below) and was made with Naturals White cardstock teamed with Summer Starfruit. I decorated the box with flowers from Flower Shop and the Pansy Punch, leaves from the Bird Builder Punch, sentiment from Bring on the Cake and butterflies stamped with Papillon Potpourri and punched with the Elegant Butterfly and Itty Bitty Butterfly punches. I tied the box with Summer Starfruit Stitched Satin Ribbon

The two cards below used Stippled Blossoms (left) and DSP punched with the Hexagon Punch (right)

These two used the Artisan Label and Dotted Scallop Ribbon punches (left) and Flower Shop with a sentiment from Perfectly Penned (right)

And these two use Scallop Circle and Bitty Butterfly punches with a sentiment from Four You (left) and the Modern Mosaic Embossing Folder, Mosaic Madness stamp set and an Itty Bitty Shapes punch (right).

Finally my card to give with the set, which matched the box.

Pop back tomorrow and I will show you a very similar set I made for another friend but with a different colour combo

                            Margaret x

A Girly Bag!

I'm sorry I've been AWOL this week but the time has just flown by. What with prepping for my Craft Day next week, spending some time with my grandchildren and a bit of socialising thrown in, I haven't got round to blogging! Anyway just a very quick post from me today to show you a 'well done' bag I have made to mark a big milestone in my youngest grandaughter's life - the dummy has been thrown away!! So this bag will have come from the 'dummy fairy' :0)
I have used the retired Pretty in Pink DSP and cardstock for the bag, the initial from the (also retired) Timeless Type Junior Alphabet die, Bitty Butterfly punched vellum butterflies, the Boho Blossoms punch and, for the handles and the circle on the front, the brand new Circles Framelits.
That 'dummy fairy' must be a Stampin' Up! customer I reckon :0)
Come back tomorrow when I will be taking part in the ILWS New Catalogue Blog Hop - if I can find the time to make something to show you that is!!!!
See you soon x

Tile Effect

Today's card is using a technique which I believe is called the 'tile effect' and one which I have seen lately around blogland. I thought I would give it a go and am quite pleased with the result.
I started with a piece of Whisper White cardstock and scored a grid at 1cm intervals to create the 'tile effect'. Once this was done I sponged the cardstock with Wisteria Wonder before stamping the images from Field Flowers in Elegant Eggplant and Old Olive. Unfortunately, as you can see, I was in too much of a rush to use my stamp-a-ma-jig so the stems disappear a little too much into the flower heads!! A butterfly was stamped in Elegant Eggplant and another, punched from Vellum with the Bitty Butterfly Punch and sponged with ink, was placed so it overlapped. The sentiment, also from Field Flowers, was stamped in the bottom corner before matting and layering onto Elegant Eggplant cardstock and a white card blank.
Tomorrow I will be back with another very easy CAS card using new stamps, a new punch and a new colour!

LIM Handkerchief Style

The Less is More challenge today is to make 'a birthday card for Jen' and, because Jen says if she had to make a card for herself it would include dogs, cats or butterflies, I went for the butterflies.
Now a bit about the 'handkerchief style'. This is a new 'style' designed by the lovely and very talented Vicky Hayes. Please go and look at her cards they are beautiful!(just click on her name and you'll be whisked straight there). Vicky has named this because it reminds her of a folded hankie - what better reason?
I have used Whisper White and Elegant Eggplant along with the Papillon Potpourri stamps set and a, soon retiring, sentiment from Made for You.
This is a really quick card to make, made even quicker by the co-ordinating Elegant Butterfly and Bitty Butterfly punches!

Have a lovely weekend - it is absolutely pouring down here at the moment and I am being deafened by the noise it is making on the conservatory roof, but hopefully it will brighten up later! x

This is the inside of the card!

Less is More (incorporating Simples Sunday!)

The challenge over at Less is More this week is to make a card basing it on the COLOUR of your Front Door. The ladies also wanted us to include a photo of our front door and, as you can see from my photo my colour combo was brown, blue, red and white with a touch of gold.
I used the Summer Silhouettes stamp set and stamped the trellis in Early Espresso then stamped the larger flowers in Cherry Cobbler with Early Espresso centres. The tiny flowers are stamped using Pacific Point and I added a few early Espresso seedheads. The sentiment is from a retired SU set which was also stamped with Early Espresso. For the 'Midas touch' I gold embossed three butterflies onto Vellum cardstock and punched with the Bitty Butterfly punch. The panel was then framed with Chocolate Chip cardstock and matted onto a white card blank.
I had real difficulty taking the photos as the sun was shining really brightly and was casting shadows, so the butterflies on the main photo don't really look gold but you can see the effect better on the close up (above right).
Back to work tomorrow so maybe I will get back to being a bit more organised with my blog posts!

See you soon x

Card Swap Group - Birthday card

It was Zoe's birthday last week so now I can safely show you the card I sent her. Zoe is a member of the card swap group, and also a SU demo, and her favorite colours are purples - hence the Elegant Eggplant! I used the Field Flowers stamp set (and whoops I got the bud the wrong way up!) along with a couple of sentiments and stamped in Elegant Eggplant, Wisteria Wonder and Old Olive. I cut a ribbon border from DSP with the Dotted Scallop Ribbon Border Punch and added a butterfly punched with the Bitty Butterfly punch. The sentiment on the stem was punched with the Jewelry Tag punch and the other with the Oval punch matted onto a Wisteria Wonder Scallop Oval. I added a bit of diagonal scoring in the top right hand corner to add a bit of texture and finished the card off with a few Basic Pearls. Hope you had a great day Zoe!

Explosion Boxes

These are the little gifts I made for the ladies who attended my class last week (and of course one for my sister who always comes to help me!) They are made from Island Indigo, Baja Breeze and Old Olive cardstock and decorated with co-ordinating DSP from the Twitterpated pack. Inside are butterflies punched with the Elegant Butterfly and Bitty Butterfly punches and Basic Rhinestones. As you can see they hold a battery operated tealight which had also been decorated with DSP and a tiny butterfly from the Beautiful Wings Embosslit die.

If you would like to order any of the supplies shown or anything else from the catalogue (links to current catalogues on my side bar) then please do not hesitate to contact me and I will be happy to help. My contact details can be found on the tab at the top of the page. 
Or maybe you have considered becoming a Stampin'Up! Demonstrator yourself - if so, now is the time to join us. 
If you join before 30th May 2013, you'll be able to take advantage of Stampin' Up's 25th anniversary promotion. For your £99 outlay, you will get to choose a whopping £155 worth of products to put in your starter kit! You'll get business stationery and catalogues worth £45 on top of that and the whole thing will be delivered to your door for free!

If you join now your first quarterly minimum is not to be reached until the end of September 2013.  We have a new catalogue launch before then so  you would benefit from seeing the new catalogue and the products a month before everyone else and be able to place a pre-order too!

Why not contact me for a no-obligation chat?

Labour of Love!

This is my 'labour of love' card that I was working on last week - called that because of the excessive amount of time it took to make!! It's an oversized card, an A3 piece of card folded to make a card which is A4, made for a work colleague who is leaving and it needed to be large so that everyone can sign it. I used Chocolate Chip for the mat with diagonal score lines across the top right and bottom left corners with Chocolate Chip butterflies stamped on the central plain section. I then used the large scallop oval die to cut Crumb Cake Cake cardstock and a smaller oval die for the Very Vanilla mat stamped with four butterflies, from the SAB set Bloomin' Marvelous, in Crunb Cake. I then punched four butterflies with the Bitty Butterfly punch in Vellum cardstock to overlay the stamped butterflies and added a Basic Pearl to each one. The flowers were made from Very Vanilla cardstock with the Boho Blossoms Punch and Blossom Party die. Leaves were punched from Certainly Celery with the Bird Builder punch. I finished the card with a computer generated sentiment cut into a banner and three Basic Pearls across the top right corner. I made a bag to put the card in which is pictured on the right.
Tomorrow I will be back to show you my card that was made for the same lady.

Card Swap Group

I really can't believe we are on the THIRD month of the card swap group but it's that time again and this month I have to make a card for the lovely Sue. My sister and I met Sue and her sister at a Craft Retreat we attended 2 years ago and we immediately got on really well. When we met Sue and Carole again at the Retreat last year it was like meeting up with old friends and we had a great weekend. Sadly the Retreat is not happening this year so we have to resort to keeping in touch by email, well that is until it's our turn to send a card to each other :0)

Anyway Jane has set a theme this month and that is to make a card in the recipients favourite colours and Sue's are orange and yellow. Jane's email had the comment 'can't wait to see what you come up with' and that's probably because as a regular visitor to my blog she is well aware I don't do bright colours! Well I've tried Jane :0) I have used Pumpkin Pie and Daffodil Delight cardstock along with Polka Dot Parade DSP. The Whisper White panel in the middle was embossed with the Honeycomb Embossing Folder and inked around the edges with Daffodil Delight, the butterflies punched with Elegant Butterfly and Bitty Butterfly punches, and the sentiment was punched with the Word Window Punch and matted onto a Decorative Label Punch. 

I posted my card to Sue on Tuesday so hopefully I'm not posting it on here before she's received it! Have a great weekend and I'm sure to be back tomorrow for the Less is More challenge.

Butterflies and Cake

 

I was asked to make a 40th birthday card last week and was given a brief of purple, butterflies and a cake! Well here are the butterflies, punched with the Elegant Butterfly and Bitty Butterfly punches, in Elegant Eggplant cardstock and DSP and they are sitting on swirls from Wedding Sweet. The bottom edge of both the Whisper White and Elegant Eggplant panels were cut with a die from Adorning Accents Edgelits and embossed with the matching folder. The two tiny butterflies at the bottom were cut with the Beautiful Wings Embosslits die. The sentiment is made up with stamps from Memorable Moments using a stamp-a-ma-jig for perfect alignment. Well that's the purple and butterflies taken care of but where's the cake?

Here inside!

 

Images and sentiment from Create-a-Cupcake

LIM Again!

I have managed to get a few jobs on my list done this morning, one of them being the mammoth task of tidying my Craft room - I am such an untidy crafter!! Whilst in there I came across some punched butterflies left over from another card but surplus to requirements and an idea immediately popped into my head for the sketch challenge at LIM. So what did I do? Yes, made another mess in my newly tidied room!!! I don't kow why but whenever the room is tidy is seems to give me license to mess it up again :0)
A really simple card for my second entry into the challenge using Elegant Eggplant cardstock and DSP, the Elegant Butterfly and Bitty Butterfly punches and a retired sentiment punched with the Modern Label Punch. Just to add a bit of interest I diecut the bottom edge of the panel with one of the Adorning Accents Edgelit dies and added a bit of paper piercing using the template in the Essentials Paper Piercing Pack. A few dimensionals, to fix the panel to the card blank, and a few Basic Rhinestones and second entry today DONE!

CASEing Again

Another CASE'd card on a similar theme to yesterday's post. This time I have used Calypso Coral for a Curly Cute sentiment, the one in the middle is stamped directly and the others stamped off first to give a lighter shade. I added a border with a stamp from Bordering on Romance, a knot of ribbon from the free SAB set and some butterflies punched with the Bitty Butterfly Punch. Some Basic Rhinestones were added to the butterflies to 'bling' it up a bit.
To make this type of card you really need the Stamp-a-ma-Jig to line up the sentiments unless, like me, you happen to have a clear mount sentiment which makes the job so much easier!!