Cards for Mums

I finished making a couple of cards last night, both of them, in different ways, cards for mums.

 

The first was my card to send to my mum for Mother's Day:

 

 

I had the idea for this card when my latest order of Stampin' Up! goodies arrived the other week. I love love *love* the new Bitty Butterfly punch that coordinates with some of the stamps from the Papillon Potpourri stamp set (one of my recent favourites - I love butterfly stamps! :D) and it's sooo easy to make pretty butterflies using these stamps and the coordinating punch. I've seen cards recently in blogland using e.g. punched flowers to make a shape, such as a heart shape, and decided to try and do the same using punched butterflies.

 

So I stamped a whole load of butterflies in 3 different colours and then punched them all out. Sooo quick and easy! Can you imagine how long it would have taken to cut out all these butterflies by hand?! :lol:

 

I printed a heart shape on my computer and cut it out and then set to glueing all the butterflies onto it until the shape was covered. I added a little sentiment that I made using the Simply Serif Mini Alphabet stamps, Pretty Petites stamp set and coordinating Petite Curly Label punch, all from Stampin' Up!

 

 

To make the card, I cut a panel of white card and embossed it with the Elegant Bouquet embossing folder from Stampin' Up! and attached it to my card blank then attached my butterfly heart shape in the middle of the card.

 

 

Et voila. I hope mum likes it. :)

 

The other card I made is for a new mum. DD1's keyworker at pre-school went off on maternity leave at half term.. and on Monday this week she gave birth to a bouncing 10lb(!!) baby girl. :) She's a lovely lady and DD1 really likes her so I thought it'd be nice to make her a card (and I got her a small gift too) and ask the school to pass it along to her:

 

 

I used an adorable digi stamp from Dilly Beans called Bunny Suit. I coloured it with Promarkers and a white gel pen and, for a bit of added dimension, I decided to *kind of* decoupage it. I very carefully cut around the little bunny girl, separating her from the stripey background. I then cut a pretty scalloped edge frame from white card using my Cameo and attached the background and the figure to it, gluing the background down straight onto the frame and attached the figure using foam tape.

 

 

I covered my card blank with some pretty pink dotty paper (another freebie with a craft magazine!) and added some pretty lace and some pleated pink ribbon (from Stampin' Up!). I attached the framed image using foam tape and finished things off with a couple of flowers and a word art sentiment that I made myself using my Cameo (more through necessity than choice as the Silhouette online store has been messing about and wouldn't properly download the word art sentiment I had bought!!).

 

 

I'm entering this card into the current Stripes challenge at the Dilly Beans challenge blog.

 

Happy Mother's Day..

...to me! :)

I had an unexpected Mother's Day present yesterday. I say unexpected because DH hadn't actually planned to get me this present... however, the fates took a hand and on Saturday night my laptop suddenly and unexpectedly died a death and proved to be beyond even the restorative powers of my IT-bod DH. All of which left me with the prospect of being essentially internet-less (noooooooooooooooo!!) apart from in the evenings, when I could use my desktop.

DH immediately started looking online at a replacement laptop for me but it was going to take a few days to be delivered and of course he wouldn't be here to set it up for me until next weekend. The future was looking bleak. :lol:

So, bless him to bits, DH decided that I would probably go slightly batty home alone all week with the kids with no internet during the day so he looked around and found the same laptop that he'd been planning to order online in stock at PC World for only £30 more so he went out yesterday and bought it and spent most of the afternoon setting it up for me (meaning I spent my Mother's Day kiddy-wrangling, which I hadn't been planning on, but it was worth it to have my snazzy new laptop up and running).

So here it is, my brand new pride and joy:

It's luvverly. It's faster than the old one, it's got more memory, bigger screen, and - most importantly - I can actually flipping type on it! The old laptop had a major design flaw... even when you plugged in an external mouse, the in-built mousepad remained active. And because I effectively touch type (after years of working in admin roles) I kept finding that whilst typing my hand would keep accidentally nudging the mousepad, making the cursor jump to wherever the mouse pointer happened to be... this would very often result in the cursor jumping within the text, meaning I was suddenly typing in the wrong place and I would continually have to stop typing, delete the text from where it shouldn't be, and move the cursor back to where I wanted it. It would also occasionally result in me accidentally clicking on links/opening up pages that I didn't want and on several frustrating occasions, it would result in the page I was typing on either being shut down or backpaged! It was infuriating!!

But shiny new super-duper laptop is cleverer than the old one and DH has configured it so that when the external mouse is plugged in, the in-built mousepad switches off. So finally, I can type properly again! Hurrah!

So this post comes to you courtesy of my lovely new Mother's Day present. Happy Mother's Day to me. :D

P.S. Considering the only other Mother's Day present I got was a pot plant (and I have the kiss of death when it comes to houseplants!), I'm actually kinda glad my old laptop chose to expire when it did! ;)

Mother's Day cards and more..

It's that time of year again and I've been making a couple of Mother's Day cards... one for my mum to give to my grandma and one for me to give to my mum.

This was the card I made for my mum to give to her mum:

I decided to have a go at the layered stamped backgrounds technique on the Hero Arts website. This is a fab technique and I really like the resulting effect (apols that this is not the best photo - I finished this card up late at night and had to take the picture there and then as needed to take it with us to Leics the next day).

I tried another new technique for my card to my mum:

My subscription issue of Simply Cards & Papercraft arrived yesterday and I was immediately inspired by an article on using peel-offs. I have a drawer-full of peel-offs that I've bought over the years (mostly back when I first started crafting) but which I rarely use as they just don't seem to suit my style of crafting/cardmaking... but the technique in the magazine uses peel-offs in a really fresh, modern way which I loved! I love how this card turned out. :)

In fact, I liked the paper piecing peel-offs technique so much that I used it again to make a little notecard to send out with a swap:

And finally I made a quick notecard to send to a friend...

I had a play with the Cute by the Inch stamp set from Stampin' Up! (love having the coordinating punch for these stamps - makes it so easy to throw a quick card together!) and used the brights collection cardstock, inkpads and buttons for a bold, bright card.

Thanks for reading. :)

Mother's Day Cards

Here's a couple of Mother's Day cards I made for a customer...

She wanted a butterfly-themed card for her to give to her mum:

I decided to make my first ever easel card! :D

For the central panel I dabbed Wild Honey, Spiced Marmalade, Scattered Straw and Tea Dye Distress Inks over a lovely butterfly-patterned stencil from Crafter's Workshop. I used a Martha Stewart edge punch on gold mirror card and Nestabilities to cut a plaque from gold mirror card and cut and emboss a smaller plaque from cream shimmer card and stamped the greeting onto this. I used a lovely detailed butterfly stamp by Artemio stamps to stamp butterflies with Sepia Versafine onto the base of the card on either side of the plaque and also onto shimmer card, which I then cut out, folded the wings up and attached over the stamped images on the base of the card. I stamped a third butterfly onto shimmer card, cut it out and folded the wings up and attached to the patterned panel and then added this over the top:

I made this scrummy butterfly by stamping the design onto acetate with brown StazOn and then adding gilding flakes to the reverse side. I folded the wings up and attached it over the cut-out butterfly on the patterned panel.

I printed out the Mum wording in reverse onto copy paper, stuck it to the back of gold mirror card and cut it out by hand. :)

She also wanted a Mother's Day card from her son to his Nanny:

I had a rummage through my stamps and didn't feel I had anything that quite met the brief for this card so I had a Google around and downloaded this cute digi-stamp by Eline at Cuddly Buddly Crafts. I printed it onto pearlescent white card and used Nesties to cut, emboss and ink a label shape around it. I then coloured in the image with ProMarkers. I matted the label shape onto a larger label shape cut from silver mirror card with my Nesties. I used a Martha Stewart edge punch on these cute papers by Pink Petticoat and cut out the wording from silver mirror card using a Sizzlets alphabet. I attached the image to the card with foam tape and added fabric and paper flowers.

I also made some little notecards recently using the masterboard that I started making a while back (and finally finished last week!):

I cut little strips of the masterboard to fit the cards and stamped over the front of the cards in Smokey Grey Versafine with this yummy Tim Holtz stamp from Stampers Anonymous. I then attached the strips of masterboard to the outside edge. Such a yummy, pretty effect... making the masterboard takes time but once it's made it is so easy to make a gorgeous, luxurious-looking card by just adding a piece of the masterboard.