Khalessi

Fiftieth birthday Game of Thrones x French Bulldog Card. (Not for sale) Mainly done on the PC using images from Google image search, I can't locate all the image owners so this is for personal use only.

Ten Year Cardaversary?

I have been making cards now for ten years. I thought it would be fun to find photos of the first cards I made, photographed and showed online! It's kinda cringy but I am going to do it! Here are the first three card pictures I posted!

These 6x6 blanks and topper kits were £1 a pack from a cheapy shop I used to visit. Actually, not a bad buy, but it does explain the rather large use of odd embellishments, they are probably the ones that came in the kit! I laminated the cake toppers... I am not sure why. lol.

I made this as a thank you card I think, for someone that had two minature schnauzers! Actually I quite like it! But once again I have no idea why I needed to laminate the dog topper.
 

This was the first decoupage set I purchased, don't think it was a diecut one either. I loved these sets and made a whole bunch of cards using them however I don't think I did much more than place them on a white card base... obviously matting and layering hadn't been discovered yet, lol.

So I encourage you to now do the same! Hope you cringe too! I know some people will have started off doing something brilliant but I'm hoping other people had a rapid learning curve like me! :) What were your first official card makes? :)

Variation on a choir!

Another version of the choir card, but with a Charlie and the Chocolate Factory theme! (Not for sale).

Sneaky Hunkydory Goodness.

I really like these Pretty Pansy pot cards from Hunkydory! It's a kit, so it's kinda cheating, but it meant I had eight very quick cards suitable for ladies of a certain age. I seem to need alot of them :)

The kit has eight pansy pots, two in each colour, and I have been adding a personalised tag and greeting inside (as per the pot on the left).

They push out really well (no rips or tears) and everything fits together perfectly. (Mini review! lol). The only problem with them is they don't stand up very well, once you understand how to get them to stand straight it's fine, but until you do, it seems wonky is the only option! :)

A bit of a cheat....

So it's a bit of a cheat because I have made this card before, but as the customer asked for a copy, I thought it might be ok to post it again! :) I think it's been about 2 years since I made it last and luckily had kept all the choir drawings so I could use them this time too.

So it's a standard pop up box blank which I decorated with musical score and then added the choir (my own images) to the centre, so they popped up! :)

*sigh*

It’s actually with a heavy heart that I feel the need to make this post. It’s not often customer service is so bad I want to warn people away from a company, but this time I think I should.

I am talking about a company called Sprinkle Twinkle Ltd sometimes known as Sprinkle Twinkle 24 (online).

*****11/05/2019 UPDATE. The links for Sprinkle Twinkle no longer work because the company went bust in 2017/2018. Apparently they are now running a care business. A lot of people were left with orders and refunds owing, apparently they stopped responding to people entirely shortly before going bust. Their facebook page is covered in bad reviews and irate customers, they didn't even delete it when it went out of business, not a surprise.*****

I can’t say they were ever anything other than polite with me, they were always quite quick to reply but if I tell you that I placed an order on the 24^th March, and after a long chain of emails they still couldn’t provide me with a eta on my order by the 1^st June. 68 days later!

I believe they have changed some of the policies since I ordered, but even though items appear to be in stock they actually are not, they wait for a group of orders to come in and then they place their order with the supplier in America. I only know they do this because of an order I placed with them at the end of last year that took 3 months to arrive because of “customs issues” and the delay in placing the original order. Basically they had waited a long time to place the order due to the Christmas rush and them relocating their company and then it was further delayed by customs, so a 3 month wait. I didn’t think this was the normal amount of time it took to get things from them; I thought it was a one off!

I place my order two months in advance of when I needed it. As I shared with them via email, this was because I was working out it would take 4 weeks for them to place order, 5 days for the American Supplier to post, 3 weeks for customs to hold things up, 2 days for the item to be posted to me. Two months seemed like plenty of time to get things done. It takes less than that amount of time to order from Supermart USA and Chinese suppliers via ebay.

In their initial update to the order they themselves state:

Due to the volume that we order we would expect a worse case scenario to be around 3 weeks from your order date. We do now order on a weekly basis from the larger suppliers and this should cut down waiting times on delivery to our customers however there can be cases where our suppliers cannot complete every order due to them not having stock in to supply us, in this situation we will make you aware as soon as we know.

So they were actually predicting a date far sooner than I had imagined when I placed the order.

On the 2^nd of June after emails saying there was still no eta I cancelled the order, and on the 6^th of June they eventually refunded me. They didn’t bother to follow that up with another email, or reply to the email I had made asking them to cancel, or the one chasing the cancellation when they still hadn’t refunded me a few days later.

So yes, I got refunded in the end, but I think the reason I still couldn’t get an eta was because the items had still not been ordered. They discouraged me from contacting Lawn Fawn (who I assumed were the supplier for the goods) because they said goods were not coming from them, but actually I think it was because I would have discovered the order hadn’t been placed, or hadn’t been placed 2 months ago, but recently.

The co-owner of the company did ring me personally and left a short sharp message on my answer phone, at the time I was hoping it was going to be an apology and an eta for my order, but after an email later I actually think he was ringing because he was cross that I had offered to ring Lawn Fawn and chase them about the delay.

I am not ordering from them again, and I am actively going to discourage people from using them and to try somewhere else instead. There is no other time when I have to wait longer than 2 months for something I order online, even a sofa would arrive sooner than that. It’s not on, it’s not reasonable to offer no eta when it’s requested and I hope Lawn Fawn realise, the company in the UK representing them and their products is performing so awfully.

Mazda mx5 2.01 niseko roadster

Another commissioned card for a 70th Birthday. The Dad in question is an enthusiast of a very specific car, and I added the numberplate of his version to the front of the card.

I collected the images from google and then recoloured them and made a photomontage. Added some silver studs to finish. Hopefully he will love it!

Happy Father's Day

I only had one commissioned Father's Day card to do this year, so I thought I would share it on Father's Day. :) The remit was "Roman Legion" themed, so I had this awesome digi from Dr. Digi's House of Stamps! The stamp is called Gluteus Maximus and he was fabulous to colour!

I used polychromos on kraft card and just added some red enamel bling at the end. The sentiment was also from Dr. Digis and is called Fathers Day Sentiment Sheet.

 

Cactusness.

It's a bit of a cactus themed post today. I want to share with you a link to my friend Olga's new wordpress blog where she has very kindly uploaded a fab "Cacti and succulents" image that you can colour yourself! It's awesome! Please pop by and have a look at her new blog!

Prior to her posting that I had been on the hunt for some Cactus stamps! After a lot of looking at the huge choice of cactus/succulent stamps out there at the moment, I decided on the Hunkydory, For the Love of Stamps, Prickly Plants set! I love it :) Made this card for one of my besties. The "Luvyoo" is a long standing joke, I'm not sure any explanation will make sense!

One of the craft mags had a similar idea to this and I've had a look online but can't find who to credit the idea with but shall declare this as "inspired" by someone else's work.

I also got a chance to use some cute stickers and washi tape I have collected on the inside. The washi tape was from Hobbycraft and the stickers were cheapy ones from The Range.

I coloured the images with copics. I printed and stamped the greeting onto vellum.

Recommended.

Bit of a different post from normal, but I had such good service from my friend's business I just wanted to share a picture and a link so you could check it out too! 

After a really rubbish experience with one of the major retailers of american craft products I cancelled my order and decided to try my friends new shop instead. I was a bit worried about ordering because she lives in Croatia and I thought postage would be awful.... but... No! Postage was completely reasonable, her die prices were alot cheaper than elsewhere and I managed to get three die sets for half the price I would have paid at the major retailer!

I paid for expedited postage (It was still under $10) and they came less than a week later.  Fiki was great with comms so I even had a tracking number to check. They were well packaged and there was even a freebie inside for spending over $25!

I was really impressed so thought I would share my experience and recommend her to you, she has lots of "on trend" dies at the moment and some cool stamps! Check it out! :)

More Nail Art.

I think I might be a frustrated nail artist because I love making these cards! Any excuse to rustle up a new Nail Card!!

So I started with a card featuring Marvel Nail Art. (in 2015)

And then, later in the year, a set featuring "on trend" Pink Nail Art.

And this time, it's a little bit more Purple-ish Nail Art!!

So just like the other times, I used the templates I had luckily saved from the last nail card. The fold style will be more obvious in the next pictures, but I printed out two sets of fingers and layered them onto the front panels of the card. Then I used a "nail template" and painted ten designs using acrylic paint onto the mock nails. When they were dry, I curved them slightly and sprayed with clear gloss varnish. (They become really tough after that). Then I added some bling and stickles to brighten things up! Nails were added with a couple of layers of 3D tape.

Inside I mocked up a nail varnish bottle with the recipients name (blurred here) and the birthday greeting.

Family Tree :)

Made this for a bestie who is researching her family tree :) The professions/descriptions relate to various discoveries she has made along the way (Not always as they seemed at first or in this order lol).

I sprayed Cosmic Shimmer sprays over a wooden laser cut tree to make the background. Then I stamped Lawn Fawn Bannerific banners is Memento Ink and coloured them with copics. I added pseudo italic style text by hand. Embellished with a few punched oak leaves to finish.

Baked with Love.

Been dying to use this stamp set by Lawn Fawn called "Baked With Love" (Helen got it for me for Christmas! Crafting friends are the best!). It's ridiculously cute! I saw this gorgeous card by Chari Moss and decided to use the basic layout to make a card using the same set. Being very careful to credit her on this, her work is amazeballs.

Stamps - Lawn Fawn Baked with Love
Coloured with Copics.
Papers: Lawn Fawn 6x6 Perfectly Plaid Fall.

Added: Stickles and Glossy Accents.
( A good match to this Lawn Fawn font, that I used inside the card, is CAC Pinafore.)

Mini Review!

This card also gave me the chance to use my new "Press to Impress" stamping platform from crafts-too.com. It's basically a much cheaper version of a Misti, but seems just as awesome.
Here are a couple of photos of how I used it for this card.

Placed all the elements on the section of the card that I wanted to stamp, including the clear cling stamp greeting, straight and central, where I wanted it to go.

Then I closed the lid to pick up the stamps. Inked them up in black ink and then closed the lid again to stamp the greeting! This is brilliant for so many reasons, and reduces the "is it straight" angst and the "omg a bit didnt stamp well, can stamping it perfectly over the top to fill in the gap?". I am sure other crafters must have faced that a few times! It's not just me is it?

And the result! And as you can expect, it stamped perfectly first time, and I didn't need to redo it, but if I had, it would have been easy peasy! :) I am sold on this gadget. Worth every penny. (I am not handy enough to make one from dollar/pound store products but there are plenty of people that do if you want to track down how to make one yourself!).

Window Box Commissions.

Had two commissions waiting that could both have a catty theme so made two of these window box cards using the super die set that Helen bought me for my birthday! The die is by Sue Wilson from the Kinetics Collection called "Window Box and Accessories". (CED22003).

Papers are from a freebie kit in Making Cards (Springtime and We love llamas set). I coloured the flowers etc with copic pens.  The bricks are from a 12x12 Joy Paper pack called Tough Textures.

Font is "Script MT Bold". Added some stickles to finish.

 Close up of the flower box.

Challenge 37! Bring on Summer! :D

Time for another Crafty Addicts Challenge!! This time we are delighted to have Décosse Dynamite Doodles sponsoring us and Lisa (Décosse) has kindly offered us any element from her "A Taste Of Summer Kit" to make a DT project with. If you would like to enter this challenge, for a chance to win the whole of this awesome set, please pop by the blog and enter up to 3 projects. The theme is ATG or Summer Colours!

Fish, waves and water spurt are all part of the general elements set. Lisa has allowed me to recolour one of the fishes for my card, so I can make one unique! The awesome wavey background was one of the papers in the Bonus Natural Textures Set and I also used one of her sentiments too (Not part of the summer set).

The only other things I have added are Nuvo Jewel Drops, Glossy Accents and Stickles. I also 3D foam mounted the topper onto an A5 white card blank.

If you would like to preview everything in the set, please use this link and scroll down to see everything in the "A Taste Of Summer Kit". (Right at the bottom are also the sentiment selection). If you click on one of the images you can view everything in a bigger scale and scroll through the images.)

If you would like to buy this set please do so by clicking here!

 Sponsor Badge.

Couple of Minecraft Cards,

Just for me/my family to send to my nephew. He is VERY into Minecraft at the moment :) Both cards are pretty simple but I think he will like them :)

Creeper Card. (created my own double sided paper to use, so I could slash the middle and fold it out to reveal the pattern inside). Added sentiment in computer-style font and some papermania star bling.

TNT card. I think blowing stuff up is his favourite bit of the game. Inside it says "Hope your birthday goes with a BLAST!" I decoupaged some of the tnt's using 3D foam tape, so in real life, it has a bit of a trippy dimensional thing going on :) Layered it onto red and then some red spotty card I had in the stash.

17th birthday commission.

So trying to make cards to appeal to teenager boys is never easy.... but I am hoping I have done ok on this commission. I went for an "app" style layout and included his passions of "computers, music, keyboard and driving lessons".

I used a service called Freepik to make the icons on this card. I couldn't find a set that exactly fitted what I needed so I used artwork from several sets that I shall list below. As long as you credit the work to the right people you can freely use these images. This is my first time tho, so hope I have done it correctly!

Mechanical Icons (Steering Wheel & Car Key) Designed by Freepik
Keyboard in background Designed by Freepik
Tecnology Icons (Laptop etc) Designed by Freepik
Music Icons (Guitar, Keyboard etc) Designed by Freepik
Gamecontroller - Designed by Freepik

Font is Breamcatcher.

18th Fifa Fan.

Card for an 18 year old Fifa 2017 fan. Sentiment inside was " Hope it goes without a glitch" and all the images on the card are funny glitches people have taken screenshots of whilst playing the game.

Hope it'll make him laugh!