Tattered Lace Ornate Reindeer Christmas Cards

When I got my Sizzix Big Shot cutter two Christmases ago, I also received a beautiful tattered lace die called 'ornate reindeer'. I cut out several reindeer from sparkly cardstock almost right away, with a view to making cards for the following Christmas, but then that Christmas (last year) I made a few cards but think I forgot about these die cuts! So when I came across them earlier this year I made a few cards that I am now able to send out this year.

I've written before about using the die cutter and tattered lace dies. This one was particularly fiddly in places so my poking tool came in handy!

What I hadn't realised initially was the size of these dies - they take up most of the size of a standard 6x4 card blank, not leaving much room for other embellishments.

 

I did try out some different things though I'm not sure which of these works best and I don't feel like I'm really doing justice to the tattered lace die cuts. If you have this die and some good ideas for how to use it, please let me know!

For these first two cards I used large gold card blanks so I wouldn't need any other background. For one card I cut a gold oval with scalloped edges using another die, and mounted the reindeer on it - the reindeer is cut from sparkly red card. I added the words 'winter joy' which are from another die - I think it's actually a die of Christmas baubles with the words in the middle.

For the card on the right, I cut the reindeer from sparkly black card and mounted it using the smallest adhesive pads I could find which I even cut in half but you can still see them behind the reindeer. The ornate shapes around the edges are offcuts from die cutting - as this was so long ago I can't remember if they were the bits that came out from the spaces in between the antlers or from another die altogether. I used a 'merry Christmas' gold outline sticker to finish the card.

Here I covered the card blank on the left with two pieces of printed paper in complementary light blue colours - you can't see too well but I think they both have a snowflake design. I cut the reindeer from sparkly gold card and stuck it on the top half of the card, and a wooden gold card topper saying 'joy' - from a pack from The Works - on the bottom.

For the second card, I turned a gold card blank sideways and put two reindeers facing each other - one made from sparkly bronze card, the other from sparkly gold, with a 'merry Christmas' outline sticker in the middle and two little gold stars in the corners.

Finally I made a CAS (clean and simple) reindeer card using a green card blank and a reindeer die cut from gold card (non-sparkly this time) and a 'merry Chrismas' out line sticker.

I found the last of these in particular quite masculine so am linking up with the Cardz 4 Guyz challenge where the theme this week is reindeer.

Scrabble Name Picture for a Londoner

I like giving homemade gifts and ever since I discovered Hobbycraft's box frames I haven't run out of ideas. I first made a picture spelling out a family's names in scrabble letters several years ago; now they are much more common and it's easy to buy packs of the wooden letters with flat backs which are easy for gluing (for instance Hobbycraft, Amazon and the Works sell them quite cheaply).

I wasn't planning to make another one any time soon until I found this piece of wrapping paper with a fab London design. I thought it would look great in a frame, and it made me think of my friend Alice who had a birthday coming up, as she lives in central London.

 The wrapping paper, from Scribbler, features London landmarks and various city skyscrapers which I recognise from around where I work. I decided the picture needed something to stand out against the background and so I found a design in the Silhouette store and used by Silhouette Cameo to cut out a few shapes from black card:

 

The umbrella was part of the set but I decided not to use it! I mounted them on top of the backing paper and put it in the frame.

My husband thought that the scrabble letters would be the finishing touch and I wasn't sure, as they would stand out better against a plain background, but personalising a gift definitely makes it more special. I hope Alice liked it!

Sailing Family Scrabble Name Picture

 

There’s something special about handmade gifts as you know that extra attention has gone into them – all the more so if it was handmade by the person giving the gift.

 

Several years ago I made a scrabble name picture for my now-husband’s brother and his family. I think it’s a lovely thing to have, and when it was my friend’s birthday this summer and I was struggling to think of a gift, I remembered this and thought she would like it. (Luckily, she did!)

 

 

I found it much easier to purchase a frame this time, that was both a better size and price; Hobbycraft had these white box frames for £8 – which are currently only £4 in the sale, in fact I think I might buy a few more.

 

 

I bought the scrabble letters from Amazon; they are not real scrabble pieces with the little legs on the back to fit into the holes on a scrabble board, but instead are flat, which makes them much easier to glue.

 

 

 

My friend and her husband are really into sailing so I bought some sailing patterned paper from Ebay to use as the backing paper and used my Silhouette die cutter to cut out a sailing boat.

 

 

I used the letters to spell out their names and that of their son, and the words ‘family’ and ‘love’ and placed the sailing boat at the bottom. I was really pleased with this and my friend said she loved it.

 

 

DIY Wedding: Photo Booth Props and Guest Book

 

 

Having a photo booth at your wedding has become quite popular, and I can vouch for the fact that they are great fun!

I got the idea from a friend's wedding as I thought a photo booth would be a fun thing for guest to do in the evening other than drink and dance. I'm not talking about when you get your passport photos done - these photo booths are creative, fun and personalised. You can choose your background and a style for the photos to be printed in, and they usually provide a whole host of props, hats and wigs and so on. Our guests had great fun piling into the booth in pairs and small groups throughout the evening!

Some photo booth hire companies give you two copies of each photo - one for the guest and one to go in your wedding guest book. But I knew that sometimes groups of friends would go in who all wanted a photo so I searched until I found a company that would give you unlimited copies of photos so everyone could have one.

I was also advised to make sure the photo booth had a good quality camera and printer - some apparently are only webcam quality and not very good! I decided to use a company called Funky Photo Booth who were local to my wedding in Wiltshire and was very pleased with their service - they even did a cowprint border for the photo prints!

 

Funky Photo Booth provided a selection of props ranging from giant sunglasses to silly hats, but I wanted something a bit more classy and also a few cow theme props, so I bought a couple of cow masks to add into the mix!

I also bought a set of cardboard chalk board style signs for a couple of pounds on Ebay. I stuck each one onto the lolly stick provided and wrote different slogans on them in chalk, which made for some amusing pictures.

As for the guest book itself, I bought a 12x12 black scrapbook from Hobbycraft which was perfect. There was plenty of space to stick the photos in the book and for people to write messages next to them, using the silver pens I also bought from Hobbycraft.

I used my Silhouette die cutting machine to cut out our names to stick on the front of the scrapbook, for an attractive personalised touch.

Looking through the guest book after the wedding was hilarious and reading the messages was lovely. It's so much more fun and memorable than a book where guests just write a message, and even though it wasn't cheap to hire the booth, it provided great entertainment in the evening for the guests as well.

 

 

DIY Wedding: Homemade Table Confetti

All the weddings I can remember recently have decorated the dining tables with confetti – not the same kind that you throw over the bride and groom, but shiny metallic pieces shaped like hearts or bottles of champagne and so on. It is a relatively inexpensive way to brighten up a plain tablecloth and add some interest and colour to the table settings – even better if you can get it to match your colour scheme or theme.

 

Places like the Card Factory sell cheap table confetti at 99p per bag – one bag is enough per table. But if you want something specific – a more unusual colour or shape – it can get expensive. Even just spending £3 per table when you have 12 tables will cost almost £40, which seems a lot for something so tiny that most guests won’t even pay close attention to.

 

We had a bit of a cow theme for our wedding – as our last name is Cowe. We didn’t go over the top – at least I don’t think we did, other people may disagree! We had a cow-print wedding cake, and each table was named after a different breed of cow, and the wedding stationery – which I made myself-  had cow print hearts and mini cows which were actually table confetti.

 

I had some of the cow confetti left but it was £2.25 for a small bag so I used what I had left, along with some purple hearts – again this was a little more expensive as most places had pink, red and silver, but I really wanted purple to match our colour scheme.

 

 

I decided we needed more and found a mini hole punch for crafts in the shape of a cow on Ebay, so bought some purple paper and made my own! It did take a little while but I left it in the kitchen and every time I went past, punched out a row of little cows, so it didn’t take much effort at all. Then I was able to combine the black and white cows, purple hearts and purple cows into little bags which I sealed for our venue coordinator to sprinkle one on each table. I think it was worth the effort!

 

 

 

 

Sailboat Happy Birthday Card with Silhouette Cutter

I was very lucky to be given a Silhouette Cameo by a friend earlier this year - she'd decided she didn't want it any more and offered it on Facebook, and as I love card making I jumped at the chance, even though I didn't really know what it was!

Silhouette America is a company that makes various die cutting machines but unlike my Sizzix Big Shot cutter which I wrote about here, they are electronic. And rather than using metal dies which you have to purchase, you can create your own designs, or download ones other people have designed, sometimes free of charge and sometimes not - though most only seem to cost 65p. That sounds a lot cheaper than spending £10 on a die, doesn't it? The part I haven't mentioned is that the Silhouette Cameo machine which I've got cost £250 - which is why I felt so lucky to receive it!

I thought I'd already blogged about something I'd made using the Silhouette but don't believe so. I got it out to use for another project, which I'm not going to write about yet as it's a birthday gift for a friend later this month, and while I was there I decided to do a few other things.

Once you have the software for the Silhouette loaded, it's really easy to go into the (small) library of free designs (though there is an extra free design every week) or into the store where you can look up any design or shape. I wanted a sailboat for my other project which cost me 65p to download, and since I'd done that I decided to use the same template again (you only pay once, to download it) to cut out a few more boats, and use one to make a card.

Here you can see the screen on my laptop, where I've placed and re-sized the different templates I'm using onto an A4 sheet. One thing I like is that you can copy and paste and cut out more than one diecut from the same template at the same time, which you can't do with the manual cutter (though the manual cutter is quicker!).

Here you can see the Silhouette Cameo machine - it looks like a printer but is narrower. You feed in the piece of card you want to cut, stuck onto the sticky backing paper which keeps it in the right place. When it's done you peel it off - you can see here one boat has been cut out; I reused this sheet the other way around for the designs above.

Some of the pieces I've cut out - the centres still need removing

It's great to be able to cut words in different fonts. You can write your own words which I have done and will blog about separately but it's trickier as you have to make sure all the letters are joined to each other!

For the other project I keep mentioning I had bought some sailing themed backing papers from Ebay - a pack called Sail Away by First Edition. I used one page from this, showing a wave design, as the backing paper on a large A5 card. I also cut a circle using the Silhouette and as the boat was patterned - a triangle design that reminded me of flags and therefore sailing - I mounted the boat on a plain blue circle.

 

I'd cut the words 'happy birthday' out of the same patterned flag paper but realised this wasn't going to show up on the patterned background, so I mounted it on blue paper and cut around that. I like the effect it gives - rather than flags it now looks to me a little more like rope which is also linked to the sailing theme.

 

 

I'm sharing this with Cardz for Guyz as their theme this week is methods of transport.

DIY Wedding: Personalised M&M Favours and Placecards

 

Traditionally at weddings, guests are given little packets of sugared almonds. Apparently there's a reason for this: almonds are slightly bitter but with the sugary coating, they represent the hope that married life will be more sweet than bitter. It's also traditional to give five almonds exactly, as the number five can't be divided so symbolises a strong bond between the couple.

Having said that, I've been to enough weddings where the sugared almonds get left behind - I'm not sure how many people actually like eating them. We weren't on a tight budget for our wedding but I didn't want to spend money on things that we didn't feel were worthwhile, so we considered not giving out wedding favours at all.

We also considered charity wedding favours, as we wanted to support the Young Epilepsy charity and I knew that some charities sell kits where you can make placecards for the table and each one has a little pin badge, like the pink ribbon breast cancer logo. At the time Young Epilepsy only had plastic wristbands and we weren't sure if they would be suitable so we decided instead to make a donation to Young Epilepsy which we put on our gift list and wedding website, as this would raise awareness and we could give more money this way.

I decided that I wanted to combine the guest placecard  with a little gift or wedding favour, and for it to be homemade, at least partly. I came across a website where you could personalise M&Ms and they had a 25% discount and when I explained to my fiancé, he loved the idea.

We could get M&Ms in our wedding colours, printed with pretty much whatever we wanted. We wanted to go for a cow theme so decided to have a little clipart cow printed on half the M&Ms and our names printed on the other. They can't print on black so we had white and purple (as the bridesmaids dresses were purple) and then separately went to the M&M World shop in Leicester Square (easy enough as we both work in London) to buy a big bag of black M&Ms. They have sweets in every colour imaginable and you can mix your own combination and we couldn't find anywhere online selling just black ones so my fiancé went and did it himself.

I bought clear plastic 'pillow' gift boxes for about £12 for 100 on Ebay, so we weighed the M&Ms and worked out how many we could have in each packet, and spent an evening filling the packets. We used my die cutting machine to cut out gift tags from purple card and my mother-in-law, who does beautiful calligraphy, kindly agreed to write the name of each guest on the label. I then took some purple ribbon, which I already had in my craft cupboard, and tied it around each M&M packet, attached the name label and used a pair of scissors to curl the ends.

 

 We bought the M&Ms as a bulk bag of 1.5kg which cost £85 before the 25% discount; you can also buy a bulk bag of 1.5kg and 100 pillow boxes for £105 but I don't think they offered this at the time and in any case it was cheaper to get the boxes from Ebay.  You can also buy plastic hearts which are £119 along with the 1.5kg of M&Ms and we might have considered this had they been available at the time. 

I costed them out and we made each one for about £1 which is really good - if you look at websites selling wedding favours you can easily pay £2-£3 for nice ones, which doesn't sound a lot but when you multiply that by 75 guests - we ended up spending around £75 rather than £225 which is good!

 Each packet was left on the dining table on each place setting so guests knew which was their seat. I think some people ate the M&Ms at the table and other people took them home - I hope they liked them, I think these were a bit quirky and fit really well with the theme of our wedding - if you want to read more about it, click here!

Tattered Lace Especially for You Pink Sparkle Card

Among the Tattered Lace dies that I received for Christmas (and then bought a few more of in the January sale) was this beautiful ‘especially for you’ die. It’s very pretty but what I didn’t realise is that it’s quite large; if you use it on a small card (this one is 6x6) there isn’t room for much else. But I didn’t just want to use the die cut on its own.

My Sizzix die cutter

I made the ‘especially for you’ die cut in pink, and realised it wouldn’t stand out on a pink card so used a cream coloured one instead. I had an off cut from a border which I stuck on the right hand side of the card, and used another die in my machine to cut out the shape of a butterfly, which I overlapped over the bottom of the ‘especially for you’ die.

It still looked quite one-dimensional so I decided to add some sparkle with tiny pink gems, which I dotted about the die cut and on the butterfly. Finally I added a little pink bow in the bottom right corner.

This is quite a girly card and I think one that my friend’s 7-year old daughter might appreciate more than the adults!

Sizzix Big Shot Die Cutter and Tattered Lace Birthday Card

I got the Sizzix Big Shot Plus machine for Christmas – which I imagine a good proportion of you have never heard of. It’s a die cutting machine – still none the wiser?

OK, I like to do papercrafts, in particular card making (when I can find the time which isn’t often). As well as using items like stickers, ribbons and so on, you can cut out your own shapes or buy ready made pieces of card – known as die cuts.

For a while now I’ve been buying packs of die cuts on Ebay, generally sold by people who have die cutting machines. I thought it would be nice to be able to cut out my own dies – it will only become more cost efficient when I’ve done an awful lot but I couldn’t particularly think of anything else I wanted for Christmas so it seemed a good a gift as any!

The way the machines work is quite straight forward – you put in the metal die (like a template) and some card and it cuts out the shape for you. You can get two types of machines – manual and electronic. The manual ones require you to turn a handle to move the die and card through the machine but it’s not difficult. The electronic ones do it at a push of a button, but they generally cost more and it didn’t seem worth the extra outlay. You can get machines which connect to your computer and allow you to design your own shapes then cut them out, which sounds pretty cool, but the last time I did what was known as computer-aided design (CAD) was in year 9 at school and I’m not actually that artistic so again I didn’t think this was worth the extra money.

The machine I got for Christmas was the Sizzix Big Shot; Hobbycraft were selling it with a free starter pack including some of the basic kit you need that doesn’t always come with the machine (like adapters and cutting pads) but also some dies so I could get started right away. My fiancé also bought me a few of the Tattered Lace dies which I think are absolutely beautiful – they are quite expensive but very intricate patterns and designs that look great on cards.

To begin I just practised using all the dies, cutting out various shapes from different coloured card. I found the ‘pokey tool’ (it’s actual name) very helpful with the Tattered Lace dies in particular – there are such tiny pieces that don’t always come off in one go when you peel the card away from the die, and you need to poke them through.

I realised that I needed to send a birthday card to a friend and didn’t have anything so used some of the die cuts I’d just made, without spending too much time thinking about design, but the quality of the die cuts means even that looks good (though I intend to spend more time next time thinking about the design!).

Shoe birthday card

I made this birthday card for my sister using a gatefold card - a card that opens outwards from the middle. It gives some interesting opportunities for design as it means you have two symmetrical rectangles on the front, which you can either treat as mirror images of each other, or put different things on each side, or put something across the join to connect the two sides.

That's what I've done here - I had bought a few sheets of shoe-related die-cuts and related backing papers a while ago. I covered both sides of the front of the card with the backing paper and used a large shoe die cut which I glued to one side of the opening. I used two matching square die-cuts on the front to give a symmetrical design.

 

I also decided that the inside of the card needed something so I covered it with a piece of printed paper that was like tracing paper, so I could still write on it without having to worry that the words wouldn't show up without the background.

So when the card stands up, you can see part of the inside as well as the front. Simple but I quite like this one.