Happy Birthday to my Big Sister

I hope everyone has had a lovely Christmas and Boxing Day holiday.

Lucky for me, I also get to celebrate my big sister's birthday today. Yep, I get to do lots of celebrating in December, especially with a lovely new addition to our family with a beautiful great-niece born on 22nd December. Just to explain the extent of my December joy, I have two sisters, a brother-in-law, a niece, two great-nieces and a great-nephew who are all born in December. Yay! I may sound factitious but I love each and every one of them and I gladly offer them birthday and Christmas gifts at the same time. (The moths have flown out of my purse and are long gone by now!) No, I'm only joking!!! It's just that it's hard enough to come up with ideas for Christmas presents, without also having to double-up with birthdays.

 Anyway, I made a card for her that used a brand new Happy Birthday to You Banners cutting die set from Poppy Crafts. Since her favourite colour is green, I was able to use some Christmas patterned paper along with some old cardstock that I had in my stash. It also had to have gold on it, of course! I finished it off with some Apple Green Nuvo Crystal Drops.

Anyway, bye for now.
Love,






PS. I wanted to share a photo of my new great niece Aaliyah, as well as a photo of my beautiful boy, Alex, taken at lunch on Christmas Day.

A lesson for new Cardmakers at Christmas...

Hi, I'm back with a rather long (but very informative) video tutorial for beginner cardmakers. I wanted to do something for total novices who don't know where to start or what they need to "start" making cards for Christmas.

Using a designer paper pad, white cardstock, scissors, adhesive and simple embellishments, I created about 20 cards to display what can be made; and then I demonstrated the creation of three cards, using very simple techniques. I also introduce the use of the internet and a printer as an alternative to buying sentiment panels. I downloaded a file from www.papercraftermagazine.co.uk/downloads/free-debbi-moore-christmas-digi-stamps to use as it's chock-full of great digistamps and sentiment strips.

Below are a few of the cards I made for this exercise (the rest have been sent on to their new homes).

The video can be viewed below or watch it on YouTube by following the link.

I'll be back soon.

Love,

Oh oh!!!

I went AWOL for many weeks earlier in October/November, due to my mum tripping and dislocating and breaking her left shoulder. UGH! I happened to be away in Sydney/Melbourne on holidays at the time; but once we got back, Mum came to stay with us and I had to look after her, doing everything for her. The resulting stress caused my Chronic fatigue to flare.

The great news is that both of us are continuing to heal. Mum's back in her little place and I'm back doing some cardmaking and housework. Yay!!????

Some of the things I missed posting about included:

Angie's Digital Stamps had its last challenge for the year with a "Happy Holidays" theme.

I used Angie's Little Lila with Musical Instrument digi stamp for my card and coloured her in the reds and greens of Christmas. Some distressing and edge inking gave the card a slight vintage feel; but I just had to add a touch of glitz with the gold die cut "greetings". Nuvo Ebony Black Crystal Drops completed the card.

Get Creative Challenges also had its last challenge for 2017. Challenge #64 had a theme of "Holidays".

My card used a digistamp by one of the sponsors, Rick St Dennis called "Winter 2017". I coloured the image using my Copics and combined patterned paper, white paper roses,

organza red ribbon, some silver flower centres, leaves and a stacked red die cut sentiment. I have always admired Tracy Wray and her distressed and layered cards; and wanted to have a go at it.

Simply Create Too's last challenge for the year had the theme of CAS and I had fun creating a card using a Santoro Gorjuss "Fly Away With Me" stamp set. Did you know that Nuvo Crystal Drops will flatten? I stacked it along with some other cards (after it had been sitting out drying for several days) and when I later looked at it, the drops had flattened.

Anyway, off to have some more adventures (disasters???) in my life. I'll be back soon.

Bye for now,

Love,