The lovely Shimelle posted a new Sketch to Scrapbook Page the other day, and I found the sketch to be very alluring; there was way more stuff in that sketch than I would usually dare to put on a layout. Maybe I’m coming out of my shell, hehe. As I flipped through my Box of Forgotten Prints I Really Love (BoFPIRL, in short… ehm) there they were, the perfect 4×6 photos just waiting to be scrapbooked.
Following the sketch, this layout took me roughly an hour. AN HOUR, people! I usually spend way more time than that on a design, biting my nails, moving pretty paper around, getting ink on my fingers and glue in my hair, not being able to make up my mind. So, this sketch was a total kick starter for me. Thanks, Shimelle!
This is the finished layout, I apologize for the really badly lit picture!
In the photos you see our old family dog, who sadly passed away a few years ago. He was a happy little dog with loads of funny mannerisms and quirky personality streaks (something that seems to happen with all the pets in our family). Just as the rest of us, he was always happiest when we were out by our summer cabin. He was a free pooch there, hanging around the family but sort of deciding his daily curriculum as he pleased. He had a habit to take himself for a walk every day, checking the perimeter of the house and our orchard, and then strutting down to the waterfront to dip his paws. After he’d shaken the water off, he’d stand in the sunshine with his nose pointed at the horizon, and sniff the sea. Just enjoying himself. Then he’d mosy up to the cabin again, hoping for a treat.
He was a very special dog, we talk about his funny little ways quite often. He was with us on so many special occasions… It’s funny how, thinking about one specific memory, opens up a whole bunch more. There’ll prolly be more doggy layouts sometime in the future.
Happy Monday to all you happy crafters out there! Hope you had a great weekend and got to make something awesome out of pretty paper, or something beautifully messy with your inks, or that maybe you got to have a nice cup of coffee and a cupcake with your loved one while out on a shopping trip where more pretty paper was purchased. And that maybe you got to feel some lovely, early spring sunshine warming up your cheeks.
At least, that sort of sums up the weekend I had. Not too shabby!
I was busy this weekend putting the finishing touches on the wedding invitations I’m making for our friends N & P, for their woodland wedding celebration this summer. Jed helped me out by putting no less than 210 foam squares on the punched out hearts (see picture above). Yeah, the man deserves a medal! It all went splendidly! Until I ran out of some mauve card stock. And then the striped washi tape. And then the white ribbon. Cursed ribbon! I even bought extra to start with, but I must have calculated it completely wrong. We’ve taken a few quick trips to the crafting store this weekend, hehe, but we also had time for a couple of lattes and baked goods. Anyways, they’re all done now, and lovingly wrapped and cared for and ready to get shipped to the U.K. Hoorah!
Happy Valentine’s Day! Or, as my dear friend Vanja chooses to call it: Friendship Day! I like her take on it much, much more. It’s more including, and of course you can celebrate your friendships! I don’t usually do handmade valentine cards for this particular day, but this year I decided to make a few for my closest family and one for Vanja and her daughter Nikki, to celebrate our friendship and the fact that whenever we hang out we have a great time, and always leave me happy and energized.We haven’t had a chance to hang out much for a few years, but are now a bit more back on track, which makes me incredibly happy.
Go check the series out and definitely watch the video where she makes the cards. She has such a great teaching style! (And makes a lot of her projects upside down for her videos. Serious skills, ya’all!)
Hope you all are having a great day, be it with your valentine or your family and friends. Stay safe!
I should have posted these pics at Christmas, but here they are, a bit late!
My mum is such a sweetheart, and I love her so much. So, of course, if I can custom a gift for her that is unique and shows her how much I care, I will try my darndest! And as a crafter, giving a gift to ones mother is of course the optimal thing to do. Nobody loves your handmade gifts as much as your mum *wink*
I wanted to make my mum a PMC (precious metal clay) silver pendant for Christmas, and I thought about the deign for quite some time. I’ve just started out making things in this material, and just started out making my own designs, so, of course, I wanted to get it just right. I wanted it to mean something.
This is how it turned out in the end:
The front is quote simple, making the hearts more visible. The rectangular shape finishes off is in a scroll-like manner. However, if you turn it around, it looks like this:
The backside has an intricate, swirl pattern that is stamped by hand. I just loved the idea of it as a little secret, a hidden detail just for my mum to wear. There is also my signature, of course, and the PMC 999 stamp.
It’s always a bit nervous giving someone a handmade gift. The handmade look is not for everyone, naturally, and what I think is beautiful is not in everyone’s taste. But my mum seemed very happy, and I a got a big hug, and I think she got a bit teary-eyed (so did I), so I think she liked it. Which makes my heart very happy.
Yesterday I started my 365 project (read more about that here), and I started it off with making this tiny little grungy squash book (2×2 inches). I didn’t get a good photo yesterday so I wanted to add some. I’ve never done one of these before, but thanks to this awesome tutorial by Rach0113 it went totally OK and I’m pretty pleased with mine!
Have a look at her tutorial on YouTube and don’t forget to give her thumbs up!
Neat, huh? Get those inks out!
I hope to put some tiny family photos in this sometime in the future, it’s perfect for small wallet sized photos and some tiny notes!
Happy new year, everyone! 2012 is here, and with it a whole new fresh year full of blank pages and ideas and possibilities. Awesome!
I’m not one for New Year’s resolutions. But I knew I wanted a project to focus on this year. So when I found Noah Scalin’s 365: A Daily Creativity Journal (also available as Kindle edition) I just thought it was the perfect thing for me this year. 365 prompts for doing something creative every day. And a small space to make a note of what you did.
Noah Scalin started his project Skull -A-Day back in 2007 (hello, SKULLS! I see it as a sign I’m destined to do this…) and somehow, some way, by himself or with the help from his friends, made a skull every day for a year. He used every technique he new and then learned new ones.
I don’t think I have a theme quite as clear, but on the other hand I’m really going for “no rules and if there are any I’ll change them and I’ll make it up as I go along and will try to be a bit laid back”. I know if I start by drawing up a lot of rules and stuff I will just cripple myself. I will try to follow the diary and make notes in it but as Noah says in the introduction, it’s fine to change the thing of the day to something else. But I do want to create something every day, and there are a few things that somehow feels connected or relevant in the overall framework of this project:
I want create something every day, but exactly what does not have to be something big or huge or everlasting
I will mainly try to use materials I already have in my stash or recycled materials
I work in a lot of different mediums and therefore all techniques and mediums are fare game
It can be something handmade
It can be something written
It can be something musical
It can be a photograph
It can be a self-portrait
It can be a beautiful home made meal or a pretty desert
It can be a frikkin’ doodle in a notebook
It can be the act of simply documenting my life
It can be private, it can be public
It can be any act of creativity even if it’s dressing up as a living statue and pretend to be the ad hatter and have a tea party at the train station
I will take a photo every day, even if it’s just a picture of my boring breakfast
So, you see, it will simply be a whole messy mess. The point is not to go on a crazy artsy rampage (well, maybe a little) but to learn something new, to try and actively think about ideas, their origin and what I do with them. About being aware. About becoming a better photographer. It’s about trying to finish a few things I’ve been thinking about for a long time, and by the end of this year I hope to have a rather extensive documentation about my life in 2012, and a record of me moving forward and… I don’t know, grow as a person? Letting myself nerd out and be happy?
I won’t make any promises to myself to always have time to blog about it, though. I will try, but it is not likely that the Internet will break if I don’t. A simple recap will do just fine.
So: TODAY. Day 1. January 1st. I took a photo of myself. I made porridge and took a photo of that. I spent a whole lot of time cleaning up my crafting space, sorely needed. But that’s my go-to thing when I try to procrastinate, so…
Today’s prompt was to start small and get over that first threshold. To make something small that would fit in the palm of my hand, and to use materials close by. No problem there…
I saw this tutorial for a squash book on YouTube a few days ago, and have been itching to use my distress inks, so I decided give it a try. I don’t have a lot of photos of this, it got a bit late and I couldn’t get any good light (maybe I’ll try again tomorrow), but this is what I made:
Handmade decos are always a nice touch to a card or a scrapbook layout, I think. It just feels great to be able to make something from scratch from the supplies you have, and it gets a little more personal, which is what I always want with my Christmas cards. Sometimes a Christmas card is only thing you send someone that year, maybe to a friend or a loved one that lives far away and you’ve haven’t had a chance to see or talk to in a while. That’s why it feels important to me; I want the recipient to know I’m thinking about them.
So here are some of the Christmas cards I made this year. I decided to hand paint some baubles with watercolour. I really can’t paint at all, but this technique is fairly easy: Draw a circle on some watercolour paper, dampen the circle with water, then add colour, a little bit at a time.Make it a bit darker around the edges and leave a little spot where you don’t put any colour at all, which makes it look a bit shiny.
When deciding on size, I punched out a circle with one of my punches and used that as a template. That made it easy to punch out the baubles perfectly circular after I’d painted them. Also, I used some of my small snowflake- and heart stamps to make a decorative pattern. I stamped the pattern in water resistant ink before I added the watercolour. Lastly I sprayed the baubles with some shimmer mist. To make the card a little dimensional I adhered the baubles with some foam dots.
I was really pleased with these cards, I wanted to make more like them, but I went on to other ideas, more posts to come!
The Christmas cards needs to go in the mail next week if they are to arrive in time, especially the ones I’m sending overseas. So I have to get a move on! I thought I’d done rather well so far, but when I sat down and reviewed my list I realised I still have a few to make. Gah! Glue glue glue! My problem might be that I never like to make the same type of cards more than a couple of times, 2-4 for the most of any card. It’s much more fun that way, getting to try new techniques and motifs and colours. But I guess it’s not so great when it comes to speed and productivity, hehe…
I like to add handmade embellishments to whatever I make, if I can manage. So I tried to paint these X-mas baubles in watercolour. I don’t really know how to paint but painting different layers of the different shades worked out quite well. I made them the same size as one of my circle punches, do cutting them out was a breeze. I have soem pics of the finished X-mas cards to post, I just need to get them off my camera. But here’s a sneak peek at least! Have to get back to stamping and gluing and making more cards! *Hurries back to my crafting nook*
P.S. What’s the chance of me setting up a Craft Signal light, like in Batman? It could be a monkey. I could flash it towards the ceiling and make an alarm noise and run to my work space shouting: “To The Craft Cave!”… Seriously have to look into this… It feel very important… Maybe I should write a theme tune…
I have started making some Christmas ornaments, and of course the most fun is to make something for your family. I decided to make these little hearts for my mum and dad to put in this tree, and I wanted them to look a bit vintage, so I painted the hearts in several layers of paint and then sanded the edges down a bit. When I decoupaged them I added some crackle glaze on top.
The photos are of me and my brother when we were growing up, and there is also one of our old family dog, who we all miss dearly. I thought this would be a nice way to add some memory keeping to our Christmas, and something a bit different than a mini album or a scrapbook page. There are so many fun ways to preserve those memories!
Summer is over in Sweden, but were having some warm days still with sunshine and beautiful foliage. Here and there you can still see some stubborn flowers peaking out, which reminded me that I completely forgot to post the flower brooches I made this summer! (I had a little sneak peak in this post) So here they are, a bit late, like those late blossoms in our autumnal gardens.
They were made especially for a combined hen night/bachelor party. I wanted to make something special for the couple, and on top of making them a distressed and vintage looking treasure map for the day I also made these paper corsages for the entire party.
I cut out a whole bunch of flowers from green, orange and red paper, crunched and curled them and glued them together. I punched out some hearts in black, to pose as pistils, and attached them in the middle with some black stickles.
It really was a lot of fun to make them, and I’m rather impressed with myself that I finished them in time! Most of all it felt great to be able to bring a gift to that special day that was hand made.
