National Cupcake Week

If anyone has visited my Facebook page or Tumblr blog, you will see that I have been celebrating National Cupcake Week. I have been watching and have become addicted to The Great British Bake-off. This gave me lots of inspiration for making some baking themed cards. 
I began making some simple paper pieced cards. I found some corrugated cards which worked perfectly for the cupcake case. I finished these cards off with ribbon and patterned tape and topped the paper cupcakes with paper icing and floral embellishments. 

An evening of baking without even turning the oven on!

For my third card, I found some cupcake embellishments from my German craft stash that were just what I needed. I sketched out a cake stand and outlined it with black pen. After adding the cupcakes, I finished the card with some pink dotty paper and topped the cake stand with a paper heart. Despite papercraft being my thing, I am also having a go at the baking and had the excuse to bake (with help from a roommate) a birthday cake for a friend. So proud of it! (Not sure what Mary Berry or Paul Hollywood would make of it though!)

On a different note, I have some very exciting news to share. I have signed up to start an on-line shop. 4 days and counting. As of Tuesday, I will be selling my cards (hopefully). Of course, I have this dream that I will have hundreds and hundreds of orders although I doubt that is going to happen. I'd like to get a few though, to keep me busy. Once I am up and running, I will add a link to my Facebook page and on here. So excited!!

CAS-ual Fridays

CAS-ual Fridays

I am slightly amazed that I have managed to find the time to make this card today. In a matter of hours, I am off to the Lake District for a week with my family (Really, really, really hoping the weather turns out nice as we are hiking most of the week). 

So, the theme for this week's challenge is the Sea and things seen in or by it. I have done a few sea-themed cards recently: I entered another challenge a few weeks back and of course, there is the sailing card for the Olympics. 
I made this one a really quick card by using a pre-made embellishment as the central focus of the design. These dolphins were given to me by my German room-mate last year whose family owned a craft shop. I finished the card with some blue fabricy-paper stuff and some paper ribbon. A Happy Birthday tag was added to the bottom and as an after thought, I had an experiment with some glitter glue that my sister found by creating a wave pattern up the length of the ribbon.

Crafting in the Sunshine

Today, I was left with a dilemma. I don't know how the weather's been where you are, but here, it's be gorgeous. I have also just finished all of my university work so I have nothing to do except chill out. My dilemma was this: enjoy the sunshine, as I should seeing as the sun is rarely seen in the UK, let alone Manchester; or, spend the afternoon making cards. In the end I decided that if I couldn't bring the sunshine into my room, I would take my craft stash out to the sunshine. So, grabbing my beach towel and my kit and went and sat out in the garden at the front of my uni digs. 

 Overall, I had a rather pleasant and productive afternoon. The six cards I made today included an anniversary card for my parents, a new baby card (made using some of my German stash) and another card made using recycled materials, this time a Flake Easter egg box. 

 I was particularly pleased with the butterflies card. I had seen cards using little butterfly embellishments and only attaching the body of the butterfly to the card, leaving the wings stood up from the front, almost as if it was about to fly away. For the two butterflies, I used peel-offs on some patterned paper and then cut out the shape. I actually use foam pads to stick them to the card to really make them stand out. The smaller butterflies were made using a shaped punch and there were some other peel-offs as well. All that was left to do after that was glue a nice piece of paper to the front and add a message. 

International Stash and Kimonos

I am lucky enough to live across the hall from a girl from germany who's father owns a craft shop back in Hamburg. As well as being a very good friend (and very bad influence, may I add!), she brought me back plenty of stash after she learnt of my hobby. After Christmas I received a huge carrier bag full of papers and embellishments to use on my cards. Its always exciting to get new stuff to work with. Coming back to uni after Easter also saw me with some brand new papers and really really cute animal embellishments for me to use.

I've never really bought myself any embellishments to use as I find I am reluctant to use them because if I use them on one card, I won't be able to use them on another. I realise how ridiculous I sound, don't worry. Having said that, these animal embellishments are so cute I cannot wait to put them onto a card or two.

Usually, any embellishments I use, I make my self. I fairly recently designed my self a template to create little kimonos to attach to my cards. I found these to be so easy to make and I can easily spend an evening watching TV and making kimonos.
I found the best way to 'mass produce' them is to chose however many sheet of matching papers. For these ones, I used Eastern Promise from Dovecraft. Cutting out all the parts of the kimonos and them mix and matching them allowed me to make unique cards but also made a set of cards.

 If anyone would like the template, leave a comment and I'll upload my template and how to assemble the kimono.