🎼 ♩ ♫ Daisy, ♫ Daisy ♩ ♫ ♪ . . .

. . . .  ‘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.

Sending love and squidges your way ….

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Roses, Lace and ‘Shabby Chic’ . . . a handmade, uplifting card.

A ‘Shabby Chic’ look to a warm, uplifting, loved filled card with a nod to spirituality.

Shabby Chic – anywhere –  can sometimes go too far or in the wrong direction and end up looking a miserable mess of things which don’t have any relation to each other – but this card, I feel, found the right place and it almost made itself.

I started purely with that bit of rambling rose backing paper which I had left over from a scrapbooking project.  I decided that I’d make a card with what was left over.  This pretty, uplifting, warm hug feeling card was the result.  I love this card and actually wish that someone else had made it and sent it to me.

 

For those who wish to read the details of how to make something like this, here’s the ‘recipe’:-

Ingredients  (I used):- 

• Craft Card, cut to the right size, scored and corners rounded off.
• Red/brown ink pad – but any colour you want would be fine
• A little square of creamy white card
• Sheena Douglass  “Your Wings Exist – Fly” unmounted stamp (from the ‘Divine Inspiration’ set)
• A scrap of creamy coloured lace
• A length of rayon seam binding – but any ribbon you choose to tone with your own card
• Creamy white paper rose and paper rose leaves
• One large(ish) pearl for the centre of the rose (and some glitter, to drawn attention to the pearl.)
• A die cut frame (behind the rose, but you don’t necessarily need if you don’t have one)
• Two flat back pearls for either side of the die cut frame

Method

In a large mixing bowl ...  oops,  wrong type of recipe.  Let’s start again  . . . .

1.  The first thing I did was to distress the edges of the paper by scraping down the edges with a scalpel to rough them up and make that lovely ‘furry’ edge which I love. 

2.  I then used a rosy pink ink pad and a cheap make up sponge to further distress the paper but this time by blending in some ink around the outside edges, as I wanted to ‘antique’ them a little, but not using the usual browny shades.  I wanted to really warm the card up and make it blush.

3.  Choose your cardstock:  Although I have tons of white cardstock, I felt that I wanted a more vintage feel so used Craft Card to make the card itself;  Cut it to size; scored it; rounded the corners and then gathered together some Rayon seam binding, a bit of left over lace, a rose and some leaves.

4.  I attached a bit of the lace to the bottom of the card.

5.  Rayon Seam Binding.  It was the right colour but I felt it lacked something – so decided upon using the word stamp saying  ‘Strength’ from the same Divine Inspiration.  Using a reddy brown ink pad, I stamped the word onto the rayon seam binding, and then fixed the ribbon to the backing paper.

6.  I then stitched the background paper (with the attached lace and ribbon)  to the card, using my cheap little £12.99 sewing machine which I think is meant as a childs introduction to sewing machines – which I bought a few years ago specifically for sewing paper and card stock (didn’t want to use my big sewing machine as I a) didn’t want to have to drag it out every five minutes to sew a card, and b) didn’t want to mess up the mechanism of my big machine with paper and card ‘fluff’).  It’s the same as –> this one <– from Hobbycraft – but I bought mine from Aldi (one of their Thursday special offers) about three or four years ago so was cheaper.  Works brilliantly for sewing on cards.

7.  I stamped the Sheena Douglass words stamp saying  “Your Wings Exist, FLY” onto a square of creamy white card and then ‘aged’ the card by using the same reddy brown ink pad that I’d used on the roses backing paper.  using the sewing machine again, I fixed the sentiment to the card front.

8.  Distressed and then, using foam dimensional tape, I mounted the die cut frame to the centre of the card, and added the flat back pearls to each side.

9.  Using the hot glue gun, I fixed the rose into the centre of the frame, and once dry, I added the rose leaves, which I tucked under the lowest petals of the rose.

10.  The PVA came into use next, and I used it to add a large brown pearl to the centre of the rose, then sprinkled a tiny pinch of brown glitter into the glue where it had risen up the sides of the pearl – so that it helped to drawn attention to the pearl.

11.  Finally, I used a glue pen and added a few curves of glue here and there and added a tiny pinch of glitter to the glue, just to make the card catch the light and sparkle.  Added an insert, cord tassel and ‘signed’ the back.

It was a really easy, quick card to make.  Tapping out the steps to making it to share with anyone else who wants to make one the same as or similar to it, makes it look complicated.  But take another look at the photo, and you’ll see that it really wasn’t difficult at all.

I really like this card.

Thanks for coming to visit.  Have a look around the other categories while you’re here – you might like some of my other stuff.

(Menu for the categories can be found over to the right —>, towards the top of the page.)

Have a truly lovely rest of your day!