Teacher gifts.

The girls made some really cute stationary at a craft class to give as a gift to their teacher. I didn't take pictures of it as it was already in a little box with ribbon when they brought it home. I did spend some time making cards for them to give to their teacher with the gifts. Elaina was using a gift bag with little birds on it and her teacher's favourite colour is purple. Coincidently? this is Elaina's favourite colour, so I found a cute little bird on my Home Decor mini cartridge. Anna-Leigh was using a pretty blue and brown bag so I created a blue and brown card for her using a dragon fly and flower cut from the same cartridge. Once again, the phrase came from Wild Cards.

More Thank You Cards

Here are a few more Thank You cards.



I am using up bits of paper and cardstock that were left over. Also, I'm trying to use up some old stock of CM diecuts and stickers, etc. I like how a diecut can be removed and then what's left can be used as a frame!
The phrase "Thanks" comes from Wild Card cartridge and the pink layered rose and the coffee cup are both from Graphically Speaking. The rose was hard to do as it tore at the size I did it at, but the cup was great. I'll definitley be using it again!

Dad's Day Gifts.

Here are the gifts the girls made for their dad, complete with cards. I think they did an amazing job. The cup and plate were both purchased at Michael's. I gave them each a coupon to use. It meant that the 2 were less than $10 altogether! They are learning to love that store as much as me!Anna-Leigh did the cup and the trophy card. Elaina did the plate and the moose card (notice the theme match?). Both cards were A2 cards from coloured cardstock that I had on hand and the coloured papers were from my little 6 x6 books from Dollaramma. The trophy and moose were old CM die cuts that I had purchase a kazillion years ago. I'm trying to use up some of my bits and bobs of old stock. Can't really justify new purchases with the old just laying around!

Father's Day.

I wanted to make a Father's Day card for my new hubby. My own father passed away one year ago in May. This is the kind of card I probably would have made for him if I had been making cards back then. It is A2 size and the printed paper was from one of my little $1.25 Make It Special pads from Dollaramma. These little pads of printed paper are great for card making as there is very little waste and there are some gorgeous prints. I used my CM corner rounder on the card and the paper. I used flocking from studio g on top of my Scotch quick dry adhesive to make it look like a ribbon. I only went in a bit further than the oval shape. The oval piece was a left over piece from some other project. I inked it with 3 different colours of Color Box Cat's Eye chalks. I inked the edges of the card, also. I also attached a little metal embellishment that I think I had picked up at the dollar store. I don't have any sentiment stamps yet, so it's hand printed which isn't perfect, but it's me!

In the inside of the card I put a piece of off white paper that I rounded the edges on. I used a little scrap of the print paper to make rounded corners like photo corners to give it a nice finish. I also inked the edges.

Thank you cards.

I finally started my Thank You cards for the wedding gifts. As this was not a first wedding for either of us and many of our guests had to travel, we had indicated that their presence at our wedding was the only present we needed. We are thankful that those who could made it, despite the bad weather. Nothing like having an outdoors wedding when it is cold and rainy! So I thought that those who did bestow gifts on us should be treated to a handmade card. That means that not everyone will get an identical card. I guess I could have done that, but I thought this would be more personal. In general, there will be 2 similar cards made each time as that makes the most efficient use of my card stock and paper. I will try to tweak each of those so that they are not completely identical.

I made a couple last night, but I wasn't very happy with the way they turned out. The flowers on the paper are just too large and I should have used less of it. Also, I used Wild Cards for the phrase Thanks and it doesn't have a shadow feature so I just re-cut it the same size and offset them. I don't think they stand out enough. To me the card is kind of dull (despite the bright flowers), but I'm sure that others will like them.



The base card measured 6" x 5". I cut the solid orange paper at 5 3/4" x 4 3/4" and the print was made 1/4" smaller. I cut a solid strip 3/4" wide and 5 1/2" long and then added the ribbon to it. Thanks was cut at 3/4" with real dial size on. I used a white marker to add some stitches to the blue and to the orange strip. I cut a piece of light blue paper and a strip of the flowered paper for the inside of the card as the dark blue is too dark to write on.

I was more pleased with the cards that I did today. They are still really simple but they are 'happier' colours.

These are A2 size cards and the printed paper is from a cute little 6 x 6 pad that I picked up a Dollar Giant for $1.50. There are some really great little prints in it and I think I bought about 5 different little pads that day. The butterflies are a felt ribbon that I picked up in the sales bin at Michael's for $o.50. I picked up several different colours and some are flowers or stars. The girls love these ribbons and at that price I can afford to let them use them on their projects. The phrase was cut from Wild Cards and at 1 1/2" real dial on, I think. I'll start writing these numbers down as I make the cards. I still haven't figured out how to gauge what size things are going to be yet and so it's always trial and error. As you can see, I added a strip of the same paper inside the card and one of the little felt butterflies to finish them off. The yellow is light enough to write directly on the card. Please ignore the glue that you can still see since I took the photo before I had to clear off the dinner table. I need a craft room!!!!

I made envelopes for the A2 cards using Plantin Schoolbook shift key 48 at 5 1/2". For the larger cards, I just used envelopes that I already had. I'm undecided as to whether it is worth it to make envelopes except for special occasions as they use a whole sheet of paper. It is probably cheaper just to pick up card envelopes.

Whew! That's 4 down only 27 more to go!

Wedding invitations

Well, I survived the weekend of camping with the Girl Guides at our Hands Across the Border camp! It started out as a wet weekend but turned out to be pretty nice and all the girls enjoyed themselves. Needless to say, I haven't got anything new to post so I thought I'd post pictures of my wedding invitations.I made these invitations on ivory cards that I bought at Michaels' (my personal craft heaven). They were from Recollections and came in a pack of 50 with matching envelopes. They were very inexpensive. I'm sure I have the receipt around somewhere but cannot find it at this moment.


I used my computer to print out the information first. It took a bit of time and several samples to get it the way we wanted it. My hubby had to approve of it as I thought it was important that he be involved. We had a 1930's theme in mind for our wedding and wanted the cards to have an antique feel.


I used Archival Ink in Jet black for the stamping. The border along the front top is a Jim Holtz stamp. It came in a package of 7 stamps from his Visual Artistry Collection. This pack is all borders and it took some playing to find the one that we thought went just right. The best part about it is that the stamping doesn't have to be perfect if you want an old feel to it. The antique cars came from a pack of Hampton Art stamps. They fit in perfectly with what we wanted our invites to look like. Finally, I used my CM Antique scissors to cut the bottom edge of the folded card.


Here are some closeups. The stamping made them perfect and everyone's would be slightly different which suited our entire wedding as it was slightly different from what is considered the norm!

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Wedding programs.

I thought I might as well continue posting some of the things that I made for our wedding. This layered program I made using a template that I downloaded from Vibride.com http://www.vibrantbride.com/article/id/414 I had to do some tweaking to get things the way I wanted them, but in general, it was an easy document to use and I was pleased with the results!For the back, I took a piece of black cardstock (8.5 by 11) and cut it in half hotdog style (for all you fellow teachers out there) so that it was 4.25 x 11. That meant I got two from each page.
Once I had the pages all figured out in my document (I recommend that you save frequently as you are designing these) , I printed them on ivory cardstock. I could print 2 pages on each piece of 8.5 x 11 cardstock. When I cut these out, I had to make them a bit narrower so that there would be some of the black showing on the sides. I think each became 4" wide and the lengths were determined by the cutline which printed out. Both the black and the ivory cardstock I bought in packages from Michael's for about $4/pack of 50 sheets.
I played with different ideas for attaching them together. I hole punched using a small punch. This is hard on the hand because all the layers together are thick, and I could only do so many at a time before I had to take a break. If you used paper or vellum for the layers then it wouldn't be so tough. The first one I tried was to thread black ribbon through the holes and tie it in a bow. This was hard to do as I haven't perfected my bowtying yet and I was using narrow ribbon. Then I tried just using brass brads but it looked kind of cheap. I added rhinestones to the brads and that still didn't look right. Finally, I decided to thread the black ribbon through the holes front to back and then back up through to the front again. I trimmed the ends and added bling to cover the holes. I used white rhinestones that I found in the $1.50 bin at Michael's. They came in a package exactly like the gold ones pictured above. I used 2 for each program that were the same size, but I didn't worry about keeping all the progrmas the same. Nobody noticed that some had larger bling then otheres! They looked great and added an old time feel to the programs. Our wedding had a 1930s theme to it so making something seem not so new or modern was important to me.

Hope that some brides-to-be find this post useful. Although it took a bit of time because I was doing it by myself. If you set up an assembly line of girlfriends it would take no time at all and I had so much positive feedback on them!

Wedding Favours.

Sorry I don't have a picture of just the favour, but for some reason (perhaps that I was feverishly making them the day before the wedding?) I didn't manage to take an individual picture of it.

On each of our tables we had this little purse-shaped container filled with mints. I used Plantin button 49 and the Tall Ball feature for the little container in ivory cardstock. I think I made it at 5". The touching glasses were cut out of plain black cardstock using the Stretch Your Imagination cart button 42. It was quite tiny and was cut at 2". It took a lot of fiddling to get all the little bits out.

This was definitely "something new" both for me to do (I just got my Expression in April) and for the wedding. They disappeared off the tables by the end of the night so I guess people liked them!