Hellooo! Is there anybody there???

 If there isn't I'll just talk to myself...it's so long since I posted that I've probably forgotten how! It's been a difficult year but there's reason to think that Life is settling down now - not that it has changed very much, but I'm learning to live with the current state of affairs.

Very few cards have been produced in the past few months but I'm posting them all in one go and hope it will be a fresh start from now on. This was made for my daughter Claire's birthday in July, another of the beaded initials by Emmy which I love stitching. The 'Celebrate' at the bottom is  by Stampin' Up!.

I've been planning to make a card like this ever since I bought the dies for the window and cat about a year ago, but this is the first time I've done it - sadly, it's a Get Well card for our 100 year old friend Mary, who had a fall last week and is in hospital nursing a cracked rib and cracked hip. The embossing folder is 'Tied together' by Couture Creations, and I first cut the window aperture  in a piece of cream pearlised card before embossing. Then I cut the window again in white, fitted it into the hole and held it in place with sticky tape. A piece of acetate. made the 'glass' and I mounted the whole on a darker cream card with foam tape so it gave depth to the garden picture which was cut from a magazine. I wished after it was completed that I'd cut the cat from black velvet paper, but that will be something for next time....

My sister's birthday is also in July and I used my brand new Anna Griffin embossing folder 'Rosa' for the background. The stamp is by Woodware, coloured with Promarkers, and the birthday greeting by JustRite. The green strip was an afterthought which fortunately slipped under the circle without too much trouble and I think it finished it off very well.

I do have another card but need to invert the photo so will save it for another post - it's to be used as an Awful Warning rather than a Good Example so best dealt with separately I think!

Pearly daisies

A birthday card for my dear ex-DIL, the design for which I 'borrowed' from a friend who had seen a similar card on a TV craft programme and adapted to fit her own supplies! It's quite impressive when made and fun to do: the strips are all in pearlised paper with a Martha Stewart punch, glued onto a card  covered in pearlised paper and mounted onto a 5.5" square covered card. The paper I used is double sided with two tones of the same shade, so the lavender is the reverse of the dark purple and the cream is the darker side of the lighter backing. Sentiment is a gold peel off mounted on a Spellbinder Fancy Label, and all* the flowers have a gold centre which was waste from a strip of a gold peel off chain. *Except the one I've just noticed I missed!

I think the design would also look good in shiny Christmas colours and intend to play with that idea later today....

This should melt the snow!

I always like to make a humorous card for this particular friend and am disappointed I couldn't see him open it today as planned. He and his wife should have been lunching with us before going to Mary's centenary dance, but the snow in their area (an hour's drive from here) was much worse than we have and they decided it would be silly to travel, so the card is in the mail and I hope it will arrive on Tuesday. Illustration by Art Impression, words by Unknown as it's a polymer stamp and I no longer have the original packaging. Inside is another stamp which says 'You're much too young to be that old' which is entirely appropriate for the man concerned - he's now 84 and looks about 50. It's quite obvious just from looking at both Terry and Mary that dancing keeps you young!

Back again

 Where on earth has the year gone? We're still waiting for spring to arrive and the weather is more suited to making Christmas cards but I have  at last made a couple of birthday cards, albeit in much more of a hurry than should have been necessary, After all, we've been looking forward to celebrating our friend Mary's one hundredth birthday for a very long time! Last week we were in Somerset with her on our annual folk dance week which she organises - sadly she is having to hand over the administration to someone else from next year because her eyesight is giving her problems, but we were delighted to see her dancing once more (and we have photos to prove it!)

I had all sorts of vague ideas for her card but ended up with my tried and trusted stepper template by Get in Shape. The first one I cut wasn't quite wide enough for the three numbers (hand cut in several layers of thin card and layered) so I put that aside and made another, moving the centre cutting line further to the right. I added a backing panel of the same aqua (more green than it appears here) embossed with a Cuttlebug folder of plum blossom just to give some texture then used the same on the middle step. The trellis edging is a Memory Box die and the sentiment is by Britannia Dies. I added a strip inside stuck to both back and front as a stay to prevent the card collapsing, and trimmed a piece of plain white card with a Martha Stewart punch then stuck it on the back for the message. It went in the post and I hope it arrives safely in time for the big day on Saturday. On Sunday we are having a dance with around 80 dancers and hope that Mary will again take her place on the floor among so many friends. Her brain is as sharp as ever, her memory phenomenal and her sense of humour acute - her physical frailties of eyesight and wobbly legs  irritate her immensely for in her mind and spirit she can still do everything she did 80 and more years ago!  God bless Mary.

The too-small card base that I first cut didn't go to waste as I used it for a similar card for a craft friend. This time I cut a separate front panel and used a Nestie oval to cut an aperture which hides the stems (and sticky tape) on the Memory Box die (I forgot to emboss the panel before cutting the oval as I had intended). I love this bouquet. I used the trellis border again plus leaves from Cheery Lynn and the Britannia sentiment - it took me about a quarter of the time that I'd spent on Mary's card having done so much preparatory work and that too was whisked into the post. I need to make one more card for Sunday for a friend who will be at Mary's dance, so I really can't use the same pattern yet again (her cards are sure to be on display)..

I've enjoyed my card making over the past couple of days after a long break. Life is a bit difficult at present: I'm not sure if I've mentioned on here that my husband has had to give up driving because of eyesight problems and it has meant a huge upheaval. Not only do I now drive everywhere, it's the extra time taken by driving him to appointments etc when previously I would have been doing my own thing while he was out. Also I have two other major interests which are taking up more of my time. I'll try to get back to card making on a regular basis and will share them on here, but in between I'm likely to be either dancing or collecting, learning and telling traditional stories.

A very quick card

We have two little girls living next door and Florence, the younger, will be 3 years old next month. I decided to make her card today, having already chosen which stamp to use. I needed to find a suitable background paper for it,  perhaps with balloons on, and started by looking in the current issue of Making Cards magazine which was lying on my desk. No balloon paper, but I did find a perfect image of a teddy with a birthday cake bearing 3 candles! I abandoned my original idea (which I might use for Big Sister in May) and then chose as background one of the papers intended for a different set of images - the girls are usually dressed in shades of pink so the pink and red of this one seemed to be most appropriate A  scrap of  plain red plus a   large peel off number completed what must be my quickest card ever!

Birthday cards - for a change!!!

Just to prove that I'm not only making Christmas cards, here are 3 birthday cards for friends in my craft group :) They are quite quick to make and very enjoyable; it probably takes me as long to pick the card for mounting and matting as it does to stitch and bead the initials. Fortunately Daphne, Janet and Eleanor don't follow my blog so I'm not worried about them seeing their cards before the Big Day. All designs by Emelie's Designs, sentiments cut with Britannia Dies.

I do have another Christmas card to show here: I started to stitch it in December but ran out of steam, and have had it in the back of my mind that I needed to finish it before I forgot what I was doing. So I did.

Is it nearly Christmas?!

I apologise if you are one of those who refuse to admit the existence of Christmas from Twelfth Night until  the beginning of December, but having vowed to make 6 cards every month I can proudly say that I have actually made 10 already! Today I finished off all of them with insert sheets and my stamp on the back so feel very pleased with myself, although I do realise it puts me in danger of losing my self-professed  position of World Chief Procrastinator.

The cards are all made from the inherited pack of decoupage prints, and having used the ones I liked best I've now handed the rest over to my daughter - those were all designs for children and since she makes far more children's cards than I they are of more use to her. So I am also doing well on the 'Using up my Stash' front, and I made a point of using lots of scraps for the die cuts, by sticking glitter paper onto card before cutting. The dies are all Nestabilities except for the Merry Christmas which is a Marianne die in 2 sizes (I cut off the attached snowflakes). I've scanned the cards in pairs and apologise for the crookedness, but they were spinning round on the scanner platform like Olympic hopefuls on a skating rink!