Hand Painted card

What I love to do most is to show people how easy it is to do things that look quite hard. Take this card – it’s hand painted and it looks difficult to do but it really is quite easy. I made it for Get Creative magazine together with full step by step instructions.

The next weekend I made cards for all my family. Each was hand painted in this style and each was customized to suit the recipient. There was a bird decorating a tree with a heart decoration for my mum, my brother who lives in the tropics had a tree which was a palm, my nephew got a tree on a computer screen and so on. They were so much fun to make.

If you don’t think you could paint a card, I challenge you! Try this one, you’re guaranteed to succeed.

 

Turn a photo frame into a mini book

This book features my cat Molly who is just so dammed cute!

It is a photo frame which has had holes drilled on one side and had large wooden tags added to it to make it into a mini book. It stands on a book case in our living room.

It was also featured in Get Creative magazine in Australia and the article includes full instructions for making one for yourself.

Book about Me

This book is titled Unashamedly All About Me and it’s one of my interactive book designs. You can write on it with chalk, stick things to the notice board and hang things from pegs. I love designing these books and this is one of  my favourites of all time.

It appeared in Get Creative magazine in Australia together with full step by step instructions for making it.

Wire worked card

I love working in wire – it’s such a fun medium. I have a cool technique for twisting wire into a bicycle shape which I use every now and then. Here is one incantation of the design on a Bon Voyage card which featured in Get Creative magazine in Australia.

The full instructions  are here including details on twisting some wire into your own bicycle.

Eddy – Heritage mini book

My Great Uncle Eddy was killed in WW1 in France. I made this mini book to celebrate his life.It is made from corrugated cardboard – my all time favourite medium as it is inexpensive, fun to work with and recycling is always a good thing to do.

The book was featured in Get Creative magazine in Australia and here are detailed instructions for making it.

Stamped silhouette card

 

Here is a fun card that I designed which makes use of a masking effect to keep the stamped bird from being stamped or inked over. It is simple to do and it lets you turn a single sheet of cardstock into a great card by simply stamping and inking it in layers, bird first!

Here are instructions for making it from the Get Creative web site.

Purse Mini-book

 

This mini-book was made for Get Creative magazine in Australia. I don’t typically work with what I call “bubble gum” colours like these pinks, greens and blues but for this project because of the clothes the kids are wearing it worked so well.

The photos were taken one day when the kids were playing in the park so I went along to photograph them. Ali was showing off her prowess in swinging across the monkey bars, Ginger was having a little trouble – arms too short was the problem – and Katyann was still playing on the slides and things – waiting for the day she could even reach the monkey bars!

The book is chock full of modeling paste so its lumpy and there is fabric and layer upon layer of chipboard too.

This is one of the inside pages – featuring Katyann. You can see more of the book and read how to make it yourself  here: Purse Mini-Book.

Packing tape transfer card

 

I made this  bon voyage card for Get Creative magazine as a simple way to show how easy it is to make image transfers from plain old clear packing tape. I think I used tape I bought from the Post Office – talk about easy to find! It also uses thick twill tape punched with heavy duty sewing eyelets and those metal tags you can get that I seem to have a heap of and never use very much.

Here you simply pull the insides out of the tags and replace them with your transfer. The instructions are on the Spotlight web site here: Image Transfer Card.

Short of ribbon, no worries!

What do you do when you need to tie lots of ribbon to a project and when you're short on ribbon? Well, I for one, don't panic. Here's a trick for making small pieces of ribbon go a long way:

Instead of tying all the ribbon to the project - tie one ribbon and then lay shorter strips of ribbon across the knot and knot twice again to secure. You'll get the bunch of ribbon look you want but with less ribbon than you really have in hand.

So, now you know you can use scraps of ribbon, instead of consigning them to the rubbish bin, bag them in small zip lock bags for use on your next project.

Adding dimension to craft projects

One of the biggest challenges when crafting paper projects such as cards is adding dimension but still ensuring the project can be mailed or a mini book can shut. For this reason I try to avoid using a lot of metal accents that aren't flat or things that will poke through the envelope.

However, I love foam dots. A few foam dots can lift an accent off the page and make it all look so much more interesting. It seems that just the smallest shadow that they provide makes items look like they're stacked. Foam dots also travel well - when they're squashed down the pop back up.

They work well with stickers, simply add the foam dots then dust the remainder of the sticker with talcum powder to remove the 'stick' then adhere the sticker to the card with the foam dots.
When you're stacking lots of flowers on a scrapbook layout or a card you can add dimension to the grouping by using foam dots to lift some of the flowers higher. This technique lets you add lots of less expensive sticker flowers and intersperse them with some more expensive embellishments and get good mileage out of all of them.