Playing with Offcuts

Firstly, I apologise for not  blogging for a fair few months.  Unfortunately, my camera gave up the ghost a while ago.  I was beginning to despair when I found that one of our old mobile phones has a macro setting.  The quality isn't quite as good as my camera but it does mean I can blog once again.

As I make quite a lot of cards during the year I have found that the cheapest way to do this is to buy my card in bulk and cut my own card blanks.  My favourite being the 5x5 inch square.  If I cut these from an A4 sheet of card I end up with loads of offcuts at just over 3inches wide.  Originally I put them all to one side and used them to rubber stamp onto.  If I was careful not to add to much water I could colour them with watercolour pencils with a fair degree of success.  Then, one day, my very generous friend Jeanette brought her Cricut machine out for me to play with.  I'd never used one before, being an avid fan of the Wizard die cutting machine, but I was really impressed when she showed me how to cut little gift bags.  I was so impressed I spent the rest of the afternoon and a good portion of my card stock cutting lots of them. 

You see, the reason I'd cut so many was that I knew just what to fill them with.  If I turned my offcuts into little square cards they would fit nicely in the bag when it was made up.  I worked out that I could use photocopier paper to create a little envelope (if you measure it carefully the off cut from the envelope can be cut to make an insert for the notelet) and you could get five notelets and envelopes in a bag.

I decorated them very simply - if you look closely you can see what else I used the Cricut to cut -

and put them together as little gift sets.

And here's another one that I made earlier

They don't have to be decorated with die cuts, I've made sets with my favourite rubber stamps.  I decorate the bags on the back and front with the same design as on the notelets.  All of the ones I've made so far have been the same on all 5 cards but I'm toying with the idea of a set with themed quotes on.  If I can get together 5 quotes on a certain theme I may give it a go.  Of course, I'll have to cut a lot more 5x5 card blanks first.  I'm going to need all those offcuts.

Love Dawn x

Been playing

I thought I'd better get used to playing around with the computer if I was going to stick with this blogging lark.  I've been on so many blogs by other crafters and they all look so much smarter than mine.  Anyway, I was trawling the web for digistamps and found myself on Digital 2 for Tuesday's blog ( they have vintage digis from old magazines and can be found  here).  At the top of their page I found a link to 'the cutest blog on the block' and decided to play.  Their site can be found  here.  They have some lovely blog backgrounds and - more importantly - really easy to follow instructions.  So now my blog has a brand new look.  I hope you like it.

Love Dawn x

A bit of a sew and sew

I must be the worlds worst blogger.  When I signed up I had wonderful intentions of blogging regularly and sharing my craft projects.  I now see that I haven't posted for several months.  It's about time I altered that.

Some time ago I was very lucky to receive my mother-in-law's old sewing machine.  Now it has been years since I did any serious sewing (over 20 years, in fact).  As this was the case I duly popped the machine into my craft room and there it sat.  It sat for quite some time as I went through various blogs and galleries on websites, noting what good use other people made of their sewing machines.  I even used a pricking tool and a ruler to make a lovely border around a card, which I then painstakingly stitched by hand.  Finally, I decided that enough was enough and, after an hour with a reel of thread and the instruction booklet I can say that using a sewing machine is like falling off a bike.  When you've done it once it all comes flooding back to you when you do it again.

Here is the rather shaky result.

and a closer view

and finally, the machine that brought it all back to me

Thanks to my mother-in-law for my new crafting tool. 

If anyone is interested in the lovely tulip stamp it is a free digistamp from Bird's Card Blog.  It can be found here along with some other lovely florals.

Thanks for reading.

Love Dawn x