Birthday card - 14/9/11

Today is my friend's birthday, so the other day I made a card to send to her.
The 'happy birthday' is ribbon which goes all around the card, the flowers are cut out of semi-transparent paper, and the name is made of individual sticky letters.
Can you tell that most of my card-making things are still following the purple theme?
I hope she likes it. Happy Birthday Ros.

Hopefully I will have time to do more crafty things now the summer is over. I have my sewing machine now so maybe I can even make some exciting things from fabric!

Here's One I Made Earlier: Coasters

I haven't made anything lately, so I thought I'd do a post about things I've made in the past. Quite a lot of the things I make, I give away as they're cards or presents, but here's some coasters I made for myself.

 These are the first coasters I made, they are made from a cross-stitch kit based on Rennie Mackintosh artwork. I like this type of work, as the dark outlines make it look kind of like stained glass. I made these in autumn 2006, after I moved into my own flat and had no coasters to put my mugs on.
The coasters pictured below are also from a  kit, made at about the same time as the Mackintosh ones, they are a variation on Blackwork stitching, except that while traditional blackwork uses only one colour, these use variations on the same theme. I liked making these as they were mostly backstitch, so they didn't take very long to complete!

This coaster is one I made for my boyfriend for his birthday a couple of years ago. I made it following a design I got from World of Cross-Stitching magazine in early 2009. It's a bit cheesy, but he likes it as you can probably tell from the tea-stains.

Finally, some coasters that don't use cross-stitch! These were painted onto tiles with glass paints, to my own designs.

The one on the left was based on the trees outside my window, and the right is a rainbow. These are quite simple to make, if you have some spare tiles left over from tiling the kitchen or bathroom. The glass paints need baking in the oven to make sure that they dry properly.

Wedding favour - 16/6/11

I decided to see if I could make some wedding favours which were sugar flowers, to show off my flower-making and also because I don't like sugared almonds, the traditional favour.
As the main flower at the wedding will be calla lilies, I made some and then tried to arrange them in a pretty way. They are doubling up as place names.

I was originally going to do just one flower each, but that didn't look very good so I made a little bunch of three. This does mean I'm going to have to make three times as many flowers, but never mind.
The stem is made out of half a wooden kebab stick painted with green food colouring. I made the flowers out of white paste and then painted them afterwards, but colouring first would probably give a better colour.
They are similar to the calla lilies I made before, but I bought a proper cutter so that I don't have to make the shape each time. The stamens are about an inch long and the petal is about 2 1/2 inches long by 1 1/2 inches wide. If you didn't want to buy a special cutter, you could use a similar sized leaf cutter and cut the stem end off.
(Cross-posted to Marzipan's Cakes)

Wedding reply card - 9/6/11

This is a card I made to reply to a friend's wedding invitation. Their wedding colours are mostly blue, and the flowers are going to be sunflowers, so I decided to put a picture of them both inside a sunflower shape.

I used Paint.Net to mainpulate the image as I don't have Photoshop. I couldn't draw the sunflower very well using that so I drew it in AutoCAD (though a different drawing programme would work just as well), and dropped it into the photo image on a different layer.

Template for the sunflower

Final image to print onto card

Once I'd printed the card, I embellished it with some stick-ons and hand wrote the greeting for the front.
The card is lined with cream paper, mostly so that I could write the message without worrying about messing up my lovely card!

Finished design

Card standing up

Invitations - 20/4/11

These are some ideas I was trying out for hen party invitations, to go inside the wedding invitations. I found some cards in the shape of a dress, so I am going to make the invitations in a dress shape but only one piece of card so the decorations will be on one side and the writing on the other.

This one follows more of the shape of a dress

This one uses the dress as background

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These cards are mostly made with pre-made stick on decorations. The big flower is cut out of semi transparent paper and stuck on.
I think the one with a pink background uses the shape of the dress better and is more delicate, so the eventual invitations will probably look more like that than the other.

Notelet - 4/4/11

I was listening to a programme on the radio about how writing actual letters (not emails) is good, and I remembered that I owe a friend a letter from Christmas time. (The programme is available until next Sunday 10th April from iPlayer if you're interested)

I have some notelets but I thought it would be nice to make her a card as she is quite a crafty person herself. I wrote the letter and then I decorated the card. Here it is:

The design is done so that the card is landscape but it would look just as good on a portrait card as well:

It is made from a white pre-folded A6 card, pink paper, flowers from the patterned purple translucent paper and copper coloured skeleton leaves.
I seem to be keeping the postal system in business lately, I'm sending so many cards. I had forgotten how much I liked making them!

New baby card - 2/4/11

This is a card for a new baby called Dawn, hence the sunrise:

Landscape card of a sunrise: folded card, coloured paper, gold star, silver pen and white ribbon.
You can't quite see in the photo but the paper colours are pale pink, orange and dark blue, with bright yellow for the sun's rays. The silver dots in the sky are supposed to be tiny stars.

UPDATE: the parents liked the card so much they are framing it to put up in the baby's room! Success!