Off The Rails - Calendar Tutorial

The year is drawing to a close and it's now definitely time to be thinking of getting your dates in order for next year. Well that's where my tutorial today might just help you out a bit. Why not make your own desk calendar so you never loose track of the date, plus this is the perfect project to de-stash your ever growing pile of leftover scraps.

You can see my full tutorial on the blog.

ScrapPlezier - Christmas Tutorial - Star

My last tutorial is up today on the ScrapPlezier blog... all about making a star for the top of my tree which is now all beautifully decorated too.

I decorated my tree with ribbons and bling sprinkled all around. Just a fairly simple decoration for this year.

ScrapPlezier - Christmas tutorial - Tree

I found some amazing DIY ideas on pinterest for making Christmas decorations and thought to try a few this year. This one has intrigued me for a while... folded magazine Christmas Tree.

These trees can be various heights and fullness depending on the book you start with. To see my full tutorial, head over to the ScrapPlezier blog.

I will show you more next time on how I decorated and finished off my tree.

ScrapPlezier - Christmas tutorial - Foiled Ornaments

I put up our Christmas tree on Monday and added a few new ornaments that I made myself to the tree. I made a simple tutorial that is up on the ScrapPlezier blog today to show what I did... go take a look.

The one surprise I got was when I hung the foiled ornaments near one of the lights, they glow and change colours...the gold one even turns into various rainbow colours... super cool.

ScrapPlezier - Christmas Tutorial- Wreath

I have a tutorial to share with you today that is up on the ScrapPlezier blog... a very simple (but fiddly!) Christmas Wreath.

Go check it out for all the details.

Off The rails - October tutorial

Today I am sharing a tutorial over on the blog on how I made the rainbow strips for my card boxes.

I made these boxes to store 7 rainbow cards and envelopes in. They will make a lovely gift for someone. I made 15 boxes in total... mainly to use up some of my ever-growing stash... though I only made a dent in the pile! I only managed to sell one of my boxes at the Heritage Festival at church (the whole reason I made them), so if anyone wants one please let me know. These are the cards I made:

So head on over to the blog and check out how I played with ink and made some lovely rainbows.

Happy birthday card: step-by-step

When The Wholesaler turned 10 last month, they had a competition on Facebook for everyone to wish them a Happy Golden Birthday in whatever manner they wanted... well I was sort of inspired but didn't really get butt into gear until the very last minute almost (competition closed on Monday!). I spent part of Sunday creating this golden card:

Here's more on how I made this:

1. Stick 9 buttons and string onto the background white card using gel medium. Make sure it is very dry before trying the next step. (yip I learnt the hard way by not using the right glue and it all came undone when I tried to dry it with my heat gun... hehehe!)

2. Apply gesso over everything to give a solid base to work on.

3. Using Tea Stain mist and Perfect Pearls in Gold I sprayed the whole card... I of course was in a bit of a hurry and hadn't let the tea stain dry too much before applying the perfect pearls spray, so a lot of it ran and mixed.... but in the end I actually like the mottled effect. As they say there are no mistakes in scrapping, only new techniques.

4. As the buttons didn't take the spraying too well, I then applied the gold paint dauber to them as well... worked like a charm.

5. Next up I applied that same gold paint to some white cardstock and used it to cut out the girl and boy from my Couture Creations die set. I also embossed the Happy Birthday greeting before punching it out with a circle punch.

6. Once everything was nicely dry I stuck the happy birthday circle on as the final balloon and then stuck the whole piece onto a folded card.

Thanks for looking... hope you get inspired to make a card too.

Create Wall Art - step-by-step

I have been doing a sort of scraproom makeover (or reshuffle) over the past few months... I push stuff this and that way till it works. I have also added in a few extra drawers... reorganised some stash and made space so that I can have my cutting machines available all the time (maybe then I will use them more!).

As part of my planning, I was pinning loads of ideas on pinterest and not really doing much with them. Well I did collect the toilet rolls and tuna tins for two projects, but haven't made them yet. Another project I pinned, was to make a new word for my wall... I really like this one and used it for my starting point.

As I really wanted to make it my own and didn't have the letters as above, I knew I would have to make another plan. That's just what I did last week while on my long weekend break and now this is what my scraproom looks like with my new word up on the wall.

In more detail, here is how I went about creating my new word art:

1. Firstly I kept some old milk box cartons till I had enough for all the letters.
2. Using Coreldraw I typed out my word, chose the fonts I wanted and resized them. Once I was happy,I reveresed some of the letters and then printed a letter per A4 page.
3. I then stuck the letters to the back of the cardboard and cut them out.

When it came to decorating them, I treated each letter differently... as follows

I covered all the letters,except the A, in gesso first to give me a good starting point.

I started with the C and the last E... I applied some embossing paste which I tinted teal, through a stencil to part of each letter. For the C I added strips of some Couture Creations Vintage Christmas paper and then a few ribbons. I finished both letters off with some coffee stain stamps, plus a layered flower on the E.

Next up was the T... this letter I left fairly plain... covered it in full with a sheet of dotty paper, added a strip of stripes and then some buttons. Once I started the coffee stain stamp on the other letters I decided to add some here too... just subtly finished it off.

Next up was the R... this letter I wanted to pick up the reddish colour of the dots and strips, so started with a base of red stain then used orange distress ink to apply a chevron pattern over the while letter. I added in some white word stickers and then using some dimensional glaze stuck on a few blue beads to add interest.

The next fun letter was the second E... this one I turned blue with a demin stain and then while still slightly wet went over it with a pale blue distress paint... it ended up with a funky pattern. Well I didn't stop playing there... I then applied walnut ink to a Couture Creations pinstripe embossing folder and used it to stamp a plaid pattern all over the letter... first stamped the one way and then turned the folder and stamped the other direction... pretty funky. Once it was all dry, I stuck on a layered flower.

The last letter that I did was the A... this one I applied a mixed media/art journalling technique that I learnt a few weeks back from Jowilna... such fun to be able to apply techniques to different mediums. To begin I stuck various bits of ribbon to my plain letter with gel medium. Once that was dry, I gesso-ed over it all and allowed to dry. Next up, I applied paint and distress stain in three colours in various parts of the letter. Once it was all dry I stamped a bit on the edges with an alphabet stamp.

I then put all my letters together and took a pic while it was drying... and again after it was up on the wall... pretty chuffed how it all turned out.

So there you have it... making art from an idea off the internet.... why not give it a go too?

Scrapbook Challenges - Technique Challenge

For the month of November Scrapbook Challenges has been running Gratitude themed challenges.  I have a challenge in dealing with our abundance of "stuff" ... so head over to the forum, check it out and take part.  As a bonus you will also get another tutorial from me on how I made my "recycle" layout from earlier this month.

Recycling for scrapping

Over the years I have kept and horded various items with the idea that "one day" I might use them on a page.... well look at that the day finally arrived!  The November Recipe at Paper Mixing Bowl called for a recycled/found object.... so I dug around in my stash and found some lids off the coffee can that I had been keeping.  Now what to do with them?

First up I thought of punching flowers, but that didn't really go with the theme of my page, so in the end I found a chipboard frame in my stash and decided to alter it... here is how.

 I took the lid and cut it into strips just a bit wider than the frame... then wrapped them around each side.  As the strips weren't quite long enough to go from end to end, I then cute small bits which I added to the corners.

For extra effect I also wrapped some wire around the frame in places...

The finished frame stuck down.

The tab top of the lid also got added as a sort of "tag" under the top photos....

 I twirled a few smaller strips to make "ribbon" liks tendrils... and curled some wire around toothpicks to match too.

And there you have it... a finished layout using up a bit of tinfoil ....which by the way was the subject of this page too!