CD Rom – The Art of Cobwebs

. . . . ‘give me your answer do. I’m half crazy …..’ . . . . come along now. join in!

Aw what are you like?!! What a place to leave me hanging! – “I’m half crazy” indeed! Mind you, it’s about right. fnar, fnar.

Well, since last we met for coffee together, many things have taken place here at the Cobweborium, amongst them:

I had a Birthday.
Mr. Cobs had a Birthday (it’s jealousy. He’s copying me. He does it every year! pfft.);
My littlest furry purry puddy-tat has been in a fight with we know not what or who, but the end result is a chewed ear, injuries on the top of her head and under her poor little neck. However – she’s now proficient at detecting me approaching her by stealth, whilst holding cotton wool with antiseptic on it in order to bathe said injuries. Boy oh boy can she MOVE!
. . . and . . . my craft room computer died. The Beast is deaded. Totally. Even the computer whizz kid son-in-law failed to give it the kiss of life. I sat for days, in misery, mourning the loss of this wonderful machine. It was the best computer I’d ever had. SUPER DUPER fast – it knew what I wanted and had found the page before I’d finished typing the words in the search bar. But … brace yourself, here’s the stoopid … I hadn’t backed up my stuff. [sigh – yes I know what you’re thinking because I’ve already thought it myself]. I’ve lost everything. All my photo’s of family and friends, and pictures of things I’d made, and stuff I was working on. Stuff for my albums, waiting for me to decorate up. All gone. There is a very small chance that I might be able to recover some things – and I will get some investigation done into that possibility.

I’ve now got a new computer which is an OK(ish) machine – but it’s not The Beast. I’m loading things onto it and fiddling with it, trying to make it work for me in the way I like a computer to work. I’m sure I’ll probably love it, one day, eventually, however, for now, it’s just a piece of machinery and I’m trying to make friends with it.

Anyway, – that’s what’s been happening in my corner of the forest – and you’re not here to read about that, you’re here to see something crafty orientated, so I shall zip the lip and share some photographs of a card I made to keep myself out of mischief.

The Daisy, Daisy card

I started with white cardstock, cut & scored – but didn’t fold straight away, so making it easier to work on a flat surface. (This is to be an Easel Card – so an extra score line is added at the half-way mark on what is going to be the front of the card.). I used some papers for the background which I’ve had in my stash for a good while, and printed out various bits from a CD Rom: Shabby Chic by Katy Sue – (I used the daisy set on the cd).

I fussy cut some of the daisies and a ‘postage stamp’, so that I could give depth and dimension to the card.

Top tip for fussy cutting: Buy a DECENT pair of manicure scissors and use those instead of regular scissors. The blades curve at the bottom and so you don’t end up cutting into your image. You can hold the scissors curving in, or out – so can use them according to the ‘bit’ you’re cutting.

I got to work sticking and fixing. I ‘built’ the front of the card on a separate piece of 6″x6″ card stock, which matched the exact size of the card, but was flat and totally un-scored.

I added some cream cotton lace, in two designs and two paper doilies, and also cut a piece of grey/blue card stock, just a little larger than the postcard size, and embossed all around the edge, in a sort of scratchy, scruffy way. in gold embossing powder – in order to pick up the warm lemon shades in the papers, and also to give a nod to some Stickles, which you’ll see I’ve used, a little later.

In the ‘assembly’ stage, I added, from my stash, some blue twine, buttons, a little wooden blue frame (from Docrafts), and some paper butterflies cut from old book pages.

Once everything was in place, I then mounted this now made ‘front of card’ to the card itself. But glued it only to the bottom half (below the score line I mentioned earlier) of the front of the card – in order for it to be an Easel Card.

I added Stickles – in a warm yellowy orange colour, to the centres of all the daisies (see the photo above) – to make them ‘ping’. Once dry, it was time to work on the inside of the card.

Then, using some of the ‘daisy’ backing paper, again from the CD Rom, I loaded it into Photoshop and copied and pasted a yellow based postcard [from the cd] onto the daisy paper. I wanted a postcard so that the ‘greeting’ could be written on it, but I didn’t want to add depth, so doing it this way worked perfectly – as you see below: (you can click on any of the photos here and they’ll open up big size so that you can see them better)

To the bottom (roughly) third of the inside I added a strip of mottled card – again printed from the cd, but this time I fixed it in place with foam tape, so that when the easel card was opened, it would give the front of the card somewhere to buff up against, and keep it open.

The blue ribbon is rayon seam binding, the button was from my stash, and the beautiful white butterfly is actually an embroidered one, which [I think] I bought very cheaply from The Works (Britain’s leading discount book store – which also sells a variety of crafty things, amongst other ‘stuff’).

Yay …. an easel card is born! Now to make a box for it to go into….

A matching daisy box – but with a difference. I concentrated on more yellow tones for the box so that it ‘talked’ to the card, but was just different enough to make it special in its own way. (Actually … after taking this photo above, I added a few more fussy cut postage stamps to the box, sprinkled around, in different sizes – which I felt gave the box a little more character).

Well, that’s me done and dusted. What about you? What have you been making or doing in the last three or so weeks? If you’ve made a post on your blog that I’ve missed, then please add a comment to this blog post with a link to your creativeness (be it crafty or ‘bakey’, or written word) so that I can get straight to it and have a good ol’ read/look! (And other readers can come and visit your blog too!)

Thank you SO much for coming and sharing a bit of your time with me. I am, as always, very grateful to you for coming and when I say ‘thank you’ to you here, I really do mean it.