Happy New Year!

I'd like to wish all my blogging friends a

Happy New Year

and share with you the one and only New Year card I have made for 2009 .... unless the weather deteriorates further we're hoping to go to a New Year party tonight, so this card is for the hostess and her family. The pic doesn't show up very well, but the message inside the (very wonky!!) star is "Let's celebrate!"

I made this card in line with the sketch over at Stamp Something Challenge, which I have rotated by 90% to the left. I would also like to enter this card into 3 New Year Challenges that are around at the moment ... namely Everybody-Art-Challenge #20, Lili of the Valley Challenge #12, and A Spoon Full of Sugar #29. Last but not least, this is one of my first two purchases of FF stamps, so I would like to enter it into the current Forever Friends Challenge, which is an open theme.

I used: Forever Friends stamp coloured with watercolour pencils and Sakura sparkle pen (green), and decorated with holographic circle peel offs for the bubbles; background papers by FF (dotty) and Disney (sparkly stars); sentiment is from the "Celebration Messages" See-D; numbers are cut from holographic card using Cuttlebug "Hippie Chick" alphabet.

Look forward to seeing you all next year!!

Husband's Christmas card

Just thought I'd post a quick pic of the Christmas card I made for my darling husband Graham ... always a bit of a challenge as he doen't like the colour red, so I cannot let it predominate on my card. However my fave image this Christmas is my new PB stamp called "The night before Christmas" (which i bought after i was sent some images by Sharon, cos I loved them so much !!) so I just has to use it even though it has a red Santa's hat .... I coloured the image with watercolour pencils, and Santa's hat with USArtquest red pearlescent paint. I added white peewee glitter to the hat's "fluffy bits" and little red Papermania heart shaped gems to the image and sentiment (which is also by PB). The gorgeous embossed tree paper and other background paper were both from my stash; the iridescent red/green ribbon was from my local craft shop Craft In Time, and the modern ribbons by Paper Studio. The lettering is E-Z rub ons.

This card isn't for any challenge ...... just for Graham :-)

Spiral Whisper new stamps blog candy

Spiral Whisper is releasing some gorgeous cute new stamps in January, and to celebrate they are offering the chance to win some if you leave a comment and link to them.

Merry Christmas and Thankyou

I hope everyone has had a wonderful Christmas Day with family and friends, and that you are all relaxing this Boxing Day. I had a fab family Christmas with my husband and parents yesterday, and today I am really relaxing.

I'd just love to say Happy Christmas to all my blogging buddies, and to thank everyone who has visited my blog this year and left such lovely comments. I love visiting so many blogs it is too numerous to mention, and I hope to carry on visiting all my new bloggy friends and getting more inspiration into 2009.

Many heartfelt thanks to all my blogging and non-blogging crafty friends who have sent me a gorgeous selection of Christmas cards, which I have made into a slideshow above : that is to say

• my PBFC friends Angi, Carol, Cathy, Helen, Jo, Kaz, Mand, Samantha, Sue (of Sutton), Sue (Rachelsmum), Shaz, Uma; not forgetting Squirrel who was kind enough to send a card even though she didn't feel up to making them this year (hope you are soon feeling more bushy tailed hun!!)
• my dear new blogging buddies Sharon and Emma
• my non-blogging crafty friends Clare and Lil
• my husband's colleague's daughter Michelle

I would also love to thank Emma and Helen for the gorgeous gifts they have sent me .. the beautiful beaded bracelet from Emma and the fantastic bookmark with charms from Helen. You are both so thoughtful and talented I was quite overwhelmed!!

Helen's bookmark
Emma's bracelet

Last but by no means least, thanks to Tracie for inviting me to join the DT for the Penny Black Saturday Challenge back in November which was like a dream come true ... I'm really looking forward to getting to know the rest of the DT better during 2009 and getting into a whole new set of challenges :-) - so Merry Christmas & a Happy New Year to Beth, Carole, Debbie, Domi, Jackie, Jacqui, Kath, Marcea, Nat & Tracie.

So now the Chrimbo stamps and papers can go away for another year (including any I might be tempted to buy in the sales LOL!) .. let a Happy New Year of crafting begin !!

Hugs

Penny Black Challenge #28 - Multi Fold Card

Well the year is nearly over, and so there is just time to squeeze in one more Penny Black Saturday challenge before the start of 2009. Thanks so much to everyone who joined in last week's recipe challenge at what is such a busy time of the year ... we loved looking at all your entries .. you were all really "cooking with gas" LOL!! Don't forget to look in on the challenge blog later to find out who won last week's fab stickeroo prize.

So onto this week's challenge which will be the last one for 2008. We are having a little festive break next week, but will be back raring to go with new challenges from Saturday 3rd January 2009!! For those of you who can manage to squeeze in a little crafty time, this week's challenge is to make a

multi-fold card

We have another great prize on offer, donated by the lovely Kath.

For anyone who isn't yet aware, Kath has just been voted Cardmaker of the Year (yes, that's right!!) in Simply Cards & Papercraft magazine. Woo Hoo!! Many congrats to you Kath - very well deserved. I would highly recommend anyone reading this to pop along to Kath's blog to view her fab range of cards - not only PB's of course but many others as well.

As usual the DT have been busy as bees and have come up with some fab sample cards ... please do pop over to their blogs to take a peek. Unfortunately naughty disorganised me hasn't managed to make one this week, but rather than be a total disappointment I thought I'd share with you "one I made earlier" .. (ie a LOT earlier ...in fact slightly before I started this blog!! LOL!! )

Although this is an example of my "earlier work" I've always kinda liked it ... hope you do too!!

I used: images are Penny Black "Dream a Dream" (sleeping teddy), "Polka Wings" (butterflies) and "If.." (teddy with balloon). All are coloured with watercolour pencils and Twinkling H2O's. Sentiment is by Hampton Arts; paper, sparkly gems and ribbon from my stash. Sparkly flowers are diecut using Cuttlebug "Hippie Chick" alphabet set.

So it only remains me to wish everyone

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year

... look forward to seeing you all in 2009.

Hugs,

New Challenge Blog Launch Candy

A fab new challenge blog is going to launch on Monday 5th January - called Sketch & Stash - the idea is that we will be able to follow a sketch whilst using our newest stash instead of just stroking it LOL!! How good is that? And even better .... to celebrate the launch the team is offering a gorgeous WOJ stamp - "Willow with Umbrella" - to visitors who link to the new blog and leave a comment before midnight on January 3rd. So what are you waiting for? New year .. new stash .. new challenge - looking forward to it already :-)

Special Christmas card

I always tend to be on the last minute with everything ... and last night I finally sat down to make mum & dad's Christmas card. I had already made a card that I thought I would send, but then decided against it as I wanted one that was more personalised plus I wanted to make them a "heartwarming" card as they have had an incredibly difficult year. Obviously I couldn't leave it any longer as the last posting date is tomorrow, so I set to work.

Having made the card I have decided to enter it into 2 challenges: Cute Card Thursday is an open theme this week, and also BasicGrey Challenge #15 which is Going Green (recycling) - the sparkly holographic card used to die cut the letters is taken from an Asda tissue box!!

I used: main image is PB "The night before Christmas", coloured with watercolour pencils and Twinkling H2O's, and the fluffy bits of Santa's hat decorated with white peewee glitter; sentiment is also by Penny Black; background papers are all BasicGrey "Figgy Pudding" (one of them may be "Dasher"); letters are diecut using Cuttlebug "Hippie Chick" alphabet; flowers are Prima Christmas bubble; ribbon and gems from my stash.

Hope you are all getting organised for Christmas ... I've only got my husband's card left to make now .. then the Chrimbo stamps and papers can go away for the next six months!!

Different sketches, same style

I keep saying I'm not making any more Christmas cards, but I sat down yesterday afternoon to make a few more. I decided to have a bit of a change of direction, and pulled out a beautiful Hero Arts collage stamp I hadn't used this year. The result was two dark blue cards in the same style, but following different sketches.

The first one was this week's Friday Sketchers,

and the second one is Sketch Saturday.

For both cards I stamped the Hero Arts image using Versamark and embossed with silver pearl embossing powder. I also embossed a sentiment by Stamps Away in the same way. For both cards I matted my image and sentiment onto silver holographic mirri card cut with my nesties, and layered onto torn printed pearlised vellum by Papermania and dark blue pearlised background paper by Reminisce. I decorated the images (and second card vellum) with Papermania gemstones. On the first card I also cut a snowflake from vellum with my Cuttlbug, and I decorated the second card wtih two Dovecraft snowflake brads.

That's all for now .. hope you are all getting your Christmas preparations done ... I'm off to do some more chores now LOL!

Update: seeing as it's so near Christmas and we're all as busy as bees, I'd like to enter this into a challenge that only popped up one day after I posted the card ... namely PTW which this week is monochromatic... well I hope the cards above are self-explanatory on that score LOL! I rarely do mono cards, esp. for Christmas, so thought this was too good to miss :-)

Penny Black Saturday Challenge #27 - Recipe!

Yet another week has flown by and here we are again, ready for another Penny Black Saturday Challenge. Thanks once again to everyone who entered last week - there were some fabulous interpretations of Beth's brilliant sketch. Don't forget to look on the challenge blog later to see who won last week's great prize.

For this week's challenge it's time to get cookin' with your PB's, because the theme is

Recipe: 3,2,1 (3 flowers, 2 papers, 1 Ribbon).

As always you can make whatever you like to fulfil this challenge, so long as it contains at least one Penny Black stamp or stickeroo. Hope you will find time to pop along to the other DT members' blogs as their designs are sure to provide some inspiration.

Talking of Stickeroos, this week's fab prize is two sheets of stickeroos ... so what are you waiting for?? Let your creative juices create a great recipe!!

Here is the card I made for the challenge: no surprise it is another Christmas card LOL! I used an image from the PB Transparent set "Christmas Critters" coloured with watercolour pencils and matted onto matte red mirri card cut with my nesties. The sentiment is by Stamps Away matted in the same way, and the iridescent red/green ribbon is from my local craft shop. I particularly chose the image to co-ordinate with the background paper that is printed with words from carols, though alas both the papers are from my stash and i don't know the make. Flowers are from Prima Christmas bubbles, with silver, gold and antique bronze brads by Papermania.

Have a good weekend everyone :-)

Red, Green, Gold ..... and blue * 2

Well I sat down last night to do a few last minute Christmas cards, and managed 3 - which is about as good as it ever gets for me in the course of an evening's crafting. Nearly there now though ... just a couple of special ones to do next week.

Blue always tends to feature quite heavily in my Christmas cards, so I would like to enter the first two cards last minute for this week's One Stop Craft Challenge #7, which is ...er ... something blue ! LOL!!


My third card falls in reasonably nicely with the theme of this week's Stamp Something Challenge, which is red, gold and green.

I used:

Card 1: main image is Penny Black "Let It Snow", coloured with watercolour pencils and Cosmic Shimmers, and decorated with white pee wee glitter and Glossy Accents on the puddle; sentiment is by Make Your Mark; background papers are by Craft Creations; white snowflake felt ribbon & 3-dimensional blue/silver snowflakes are by Papermania; sparkly button is by Doodlebug.

Card 2: main image as per card 1; background papers from Forever Friends "Christmas Snow" pack; ribbon from Hobbycraft; snowflakes diecut with Cuttlebug and decorated wtih Papermania gemstones; peeloff greeting from my stash.

card 3: main image is my new Sugar Nellie, watercoloured; papers are by Imagnisce (red) and My Mind's Eye (trees); ribbon is from Sir Stampalot; flowers from Prima Christmas bubble; sticker free with a craft mag.

Hope you like them :-)

Totally amazing blog candy

Karen is offering the most mind-boggling blog candy - an assortment of K&Co papers and other prodcuts plus all sorts of other goodies worth an eye watering £130!! The blog itself links to teh fabulous Charmed Crafts - I hadn't visited before but it is well worth a look!

Dawny P's blog candy

Dawny P has issued a wail, saying "oh no! Five -Oh!" ... it's the big one coming up on Monday. To celebrate (though she seems to think that may not be the right word) she is offering a totally fab set of blog candy. If you haven't checked out Dawny's blog yet then you should, cos not only are her cards fab but she has a wealth of brilliant and funny stories that would brighten anyone's day. So why not brighten her day by popping over to say hello, and letting her know that being 50 is absolutely not the beginning of the end LOL .. merely the end of the beginning !!!
Have a great day Dawny :-)

One card eight challenges .... is this a record??

I sat down last night to make a card based around a li'l monthly challenge that I participate in with a group of (mostly non-blogging) crafty friends: this month it was my turn to set the challenge, so I sent each person a little kit containing the following items and rules:

Contents:

Two 15cm square pieces of double sided BasicGrey "FiggyPudding" paper
One 10 * 15cm piece of white pearlised card
One snowflake brad>
Approx 0.5 m of blue ribbon edged with silver
One small white paper flower

Rules:
Use at least something of each of the above items
Three of the four paper patterns must be visible
Use at least one Penny Black stamp or stickeroo.

Unfortunately the naughty postman lost one of my packages, and after I rushed out a replacement Irealised I'd only got a teeny bit of one of the papers left LOL, so I looked around for a sketch to help me out!! And in the spirit of Christmas I decided to see how many challenges I could fulfil - my previous highest was 6, but I think I have managed 8 this time .. pretty spooky cos the photo is number 888 on my digital camera. So here we go ....

1. The card is for my "bits & pieces" challenge, as above. I used all the elements in the package, and both my main image and sentiment are PB. I coloured the main image with watercolour pencils and red H2O, and glittered the "fluffy bits" of the hat with pee wee glitter.

2. PTW is Dawny's Sketch #4 - fab sketch, and the curved bottom edge made me think of snowdrifts so i ripped and glittered the bottom edge accordingly.

3. BasicGrey Challenge #14 is Oh So Charming - I felt that the gorgeous snowflake charm nicely filled the gap beneath the ribbon in accordance with the sketch layout. My papers are of course BG "Figgy Pudding".
4. Talking of snowflakes ....Everybody-Art Challenge #17 is snowflakes ... so I used a double whammy with the charm and the brad.

5. This week's Secret Crafter Challenge #10 is embossing - the photo doesn't show it very well, but the sentiment is embossed wtih detail silver powder.

6. ArtyGirlz Challenge 64 is my favourite medium. Well that's a hard one for me as I love watercolour pencils, H2O's and glitter ... so I used all three!!

7. Cute Card Thursday #39 is hearts ... not so difficult to incorporate on a Christmas card as it's a lovey dovey image, so I have got a heart in the sentiment and another heart crystal gem decorating the the flower.

8.Last but by no means least ... this week's ABC Challenge is U for Underneath. OK, so this is a bit of a stretch, but in order to hit the magic number 8 I would say that my snowflake charm is hanging underneath the ribbon & the paper is underneath the image ... need I go on LOL??

Hope you like it :-)

Penny Black Saturday Challenge #26 - Sketch by Beth

Wowee .. the weeks are flying past, and here we are again at Saturday already ... which of course means it's time for another Penny Black Saturday Challenge. Believe it or not this is Challenge 26, which means that 6 months have already gone by ... what did we used to do with our weekends before the challenge came into being??

Thanks very much to everyone who joined in last week - it was amazing to see just how imaginative everyone could be when forced to work with no patterned paper! Don't forget to call by the challenge blog later to see who won the gorgeous embellishment box prize so kindly donated by Tracie.

Without further ado, let's get onto this week's challenge, which is Sketch 4 - created by Beth.

I know a lot of us love working with sketches, so we're really looking forward to seeing your interpretations. Please also pop along to the other DT members' blogs to have a look at their fantastic samples, which are sure to give you some great ideas.

This week we have another brilliant prize kindly donated by Becky, which consists of 3 sets of sentiment stickers, and 3 stamps. Here is my interpretation of the sketch. This is a birthday card for my greatest schoolfriend Helen, whose birthday is next Monday. I think I'm safe showing it on here as she is not a blogger .. hope she has a wonderful day.

I used: PB image gifted to me by my crafting friend Karen called "Cheesecake Parade", coloured with watercolour pencils and the flowers decorated with seed pearls. Sentiment is by Stamps Away; background papers by BasicGrey "Two Scoops"; flowers by Prima; ribbon from Hobbycraft; gems by Papermania. The central paper strip was matted onto pink pearlescent card punched with my Multishaper punch.

Hope you like it, and that you all have a good weekend.

2nd post for today: Secret Crafter

I loved this week's Secret Crafter #9 sketch, so I made yet another Christmas card with my BasicGrey papers and my current favourite stamp which is "Fantasy" by Penny Black. Hope you like it!

Image: Penny Black "Fantasy" stamped with blue pigment ink and embossed with silver pearl powder, decorated with Papermania gems.

Sentiment: Penny Black, stamped with silver ink.

Papers: Basic Grey "Dasher" and "Figgy Pudding" (I think!)

Corner and bottom strip are white pearlescent card embossed wtih Cuttlebug Swiss Dots folder.

Ribbon: Hobbycraft

Flower: Prima (thanks to Cathy & Mand)

Snowflake brads: Dovecraft

Sparkly white brad: Doodlebug

1st post for today ... Friday Sketchers #30

Had a full evening's crafting yesterday, and managed to make three cards .. not bad going for slowcoach me!

The first two were both intended to be identical cards that would follow this week's sketch over at Friday Sketchers ... a fab sketch cos it is is very simple and so gives lots of flexibility as to where you put your greeting, embellishments etc. However, for one of them I started to assemble it and then reaised I'd worked in the wrong order, so the paper layout isn't quite right ...oops!! Good job I had decided to make 2 really, as I didn't make the same mistake with the second one!!

Image: Crafty Individuals - inked with Colorbox Queue pigment inks

Background papers: all by The Paper Company

Diecut snowflakes: Cuttlebug

Sparkly lace: Hobbycraft

Brads from my stash