12x12 Layout

Hello everybody

2011 is nearly over, I hope you all are getting ready to say good bye to 2011 and hello to 2012. I really hope that 2012 will bring only happiness and joy to all of you.

It was probably Halloween when I did few 12x12 layouts and since then I was busy with various things those that include crafting would be cards and mini books (read gifts) and so on.

Few days ago I wanted to do 12x12 page and I did not know were to start. Complete absence of inspiration. Then I remembered Once Upon a Sketch , I like this blog because it does not give you only fab sketch to work with but also journalling criteria gives you extra help with the inspiration.
So there is a sketch:

 
Journalling criteria was to write about Christmas day - what you do on the day. So it was just perfect for the day, and here is my page:

and a close-up of my journalling:

The light was very bad here today and I couldn't do very good photos of the LO. I will try tomorrow again before it is too late to enter this into the challenge. 

Here I used:

1. Papers: Bo Bunny
2. Dies: Spellbinders, Tim Holtz
3. Stamps: Unity, Tim Holtz
4. Inks: Ranger Distress
5. Ribbon; Prima
6. Bling: Imaginisce

And the photo of 2 little darlings from Christmas 2009.

Have a nice day

Svjetlana 

Few more Christmas Cards and Christmas mini books

Hi all,

I hope you all had a nice Christmas and looking froward to a New Year now. I would like to share with you my last Christmas cards I did and few Christmas gifts I made:

 

In these cards like in all others I did this year I am using my Hero Arts musical background stamp, new Tim Holtz seasonal distress inks, Tim Holtz dies and I used Spellbinders label die with matching stamp by Waltzing Mouse Stamps. The flowers are some very old I had in my stash and holly leaves are cut by hand. 

Everybody was getting some big gifts for teachers or some people were even collecting money to buy a gift or something and a card from the class, since my kids used to go to a private school this custody was a bit strange to me but I decided I would just go for something hand made instead of material gifts. So my daughter did a cards (pity I did not take a photos of them) and I made a few Christmas themed minibooks. I hope they liked them, please forgive me bad photos as I finished them at 3 a.m. and only took some snaps with my iPhone.

And some photos of inside of the books:

In these I used Stack the Deck Binding technique presented by Laura from The Paper Trail . It is very easy binding to do and very professionally looking.

Items used here are:

1.  K & Co papers
2. Tim Holtz dies and distress inks
3. Martha Stuart and Fiskars Punches
4. Hero Arts Stamps
5. Spellbinders dies
6. Waltzingmouse Stams

And one more very simple book again done in a last minute for my lovely childminder:

For this book I used same K & Co. papers, A6 envelopes for pages, just covered them with papers and made tags. She is very creative herself I am sure she will have no problems in finishing this book up.

That would be all for now, hope you liked my projects.

Svjetlana xx

   

Christmas Cards - Christmas Greetings

Hello everybody

I always consider myself as a scrapbooker and not really a card maker. But I do odd cards for friends and family mainly when needed and they are always done in a last minute. Then I do Christmas cards again for family and friends. However when I do cards I approach to each card as an individual piece of art and as long as I do that way I really enjoy making them.

Then Christmas time comes, once a year; 15th December or beyond and I still have a long list of cards to do, and every year is the same. At that stage making cards should either turn into production or they won't be done and that is frustrating sometimes, at least for me. What about you?Should I skip my creativity and just produce lots of identical cards?

I found solution this time by buying few packs of charity cards and for my kids, I just showed them my stash and told them that I don't want to know anything about their cards done again in a last minute. And guess what, they did all of their cards by themselves, pity they closed them an I didn't take a single photo, not even a mobile phone snap.

I have few more cards to share with you that I made and managed to snap with my iPhone last second before closing the envelopes (under the moonlight, LOL) :

 

For these I used:

1. Hero Arts Stamps (musical background and Christmas bubbles)
2. Tim Holtz dies
3. my home made flower
4. Tim Holtz distress inks (new winter collection)
5. perfect pearls
6. Clear embossing powder -Ranger
7. Spellbinder die - label 
8. Waltzing Mouse Stamps (background on the label)

And this is all for today and probably last post before Christmas.

I wish all my readers very Merry Christmas and big thank you for all your support.

xx

Svjetlana

Poinsettia Flowers Tutorial from Card

Hello everybody

No matter how hard I want to be better blogger, various things always get on my way and crafting and blogging goes into second plan.


I hope I will make it up to you buy offering one simple tutorial for all those enthusiastic crafters  who enjoy making own embellishments.

I came up with this watching several different tutorial for all sorts of flowers, so it is not exact copy of somebodies work but it is sure inspired by other peoples work. I love making these using tick handmade paper, unfortunately I cannot always find this one so there is a way to achieve the texture using cardstock.

For this project you need:

1. Solid core card (red and green) 
2. some punch with at least one pointy end, I am using very old craft tonic tear drop punch
3. some water mister
4. scissors
5. Liquid glue (look for acid free one if you are making these to use on your scrapbook pages)
6. inks - optional
7. micro-beads/beads/buttons for flower centre
8. one small circle in red, could be punched or hand cut   

• Punch out 10 petals using your chosen pointy punch. Trim off sound side of 5 of them so that are slightly shorter. Then put them all on a craft sheet or some scrap paper and slightly mist them. take care not to overdone.

• Then crunch up each of them making tiny balls, see the photo above.
• Carefully unfold each ball, and you can ink them at this stage if you wish. You might find that pigment or chalk inks are better for this then distress inks.

• In next step apply glue on your circle and start gluing larger petals as shown bellow: 

• Once first layer is done you have something like picture above. Then apply glue in a middle of your flower and glue second layer of the smaller petlas and there your flower nearly done:

• Then apply more clear glue in a middle and add your chosen flower centre. If you using micro beads it is a good idea to wait until the flower and glue is completely dry then continue with this step. This is to prevent your micro beads to be glued on places you don't want them to appear.      

• Once your flower is dry you can punch out some green cards and leafs under your flower bud.

And there are few cards I made with these:

Hope you enjoyed my tutorial. Have a lovely day.

Svjetlana x

Mini Book and One Card

Hello everybody,

First of all I would like to say big thank you to everybody who still reads my blog and even bigger thank you to those who leaves me comments, they are really appreciated.
I know I haven't been blogged for while and I did not craft much for quite long time. I am not looking for an excuse, but since I started my could computing and database administration course, my evenings are taken by the course. 
But what about my weekends:
Well we had a couple of these: 

so two weekends listening only load Irish music, but it was all worthwhile, you can judge yourself from the photo, (just noticed there is some littler in the photo, will have to do some editing before I print it out)
Then my DD2 got new cabin bed, one with  shelf, drawer and desk all integrated in one unit, and all came to us flat packed, nobody would think that it will take us two weekends to assemble the whole thing.  Again, a smile on the little face when all project was done confirmed that everything was worth of effort.
Now, back to my paper crafting, a friend, who also has some interest in scrapbooking had a birthday and decided to make her simple mini book that could hold in big photos as well. I decided to go for vintage shabby look, and there are some pages:

I used for the mini old but nice Papermania kit (papers and stickers) and made all flowers myself using my Sizzix big shot, dies, punches, handmade paper (pastel blue) and distress inks; aged mahogany and fired brick (for the flowers), then walnut stain, vintage photo, old paper... I cannot remember all I used. Anyway, she loved the book and the cards as well:

Lots of stamping, misting and inking went into this card. No pattern papers either, only stamps, Hero Arts for the images and the Unity stamps for the music massage. The flower was coloured by Derwent Inktense pencils, love love these. My DD1 got a pack of of them last Christmas, since then she is adding new colours to her collection every time she is in some art shop, so I decided to check out why she likes them so much, honestly, they are like a ink in a pencil, and you can guess, the pencils moved to live in mum's tote bag (LOL).

That is all for today. Have a nice day and thank you again for visiting me.

Svjetlana x

Kitchen Rolls Mini Book

Hello Everybody

I did not make any new stuff recently but I thought it would be high time that I share mini book I did out of empty kitchen rolls for my swap partner Suzie. Suzie and myself agreed to do shabby style mini book kit, by decorating the first page (the cover) and keeping the rest of the book simple and adding few matching embellishments.

So this is my cover:

   
and few pages inside, I could not resist but put few flaps and one extra mini accordion book inside:

 

 

And as I said this is a kit so there are few hand made embellishments I added:

and close up of my hand made roses:

And finally I needed something to put a note on so did this tag:

So for the mini book I used Pink Paislee papers, Tim Holtz - Sizzix dies, Hero Arts stamps, Tim Holtz Ranger distress inks, bids and charms are by Cousin, Doilies are made by my Mum long time ago and pearls are from my stash - old stuff.
For the roses I used pink handmade mulberry paper, EK Success punches, Tim Holtz die and distress inks. If you are interested in having go with these yourself there is very good tutorial on You Tube  by Jannaviles here and finally the tag is made using Glimmer mists and distress inks, stamps and Hero Arts and Autumn Leaves and one of my roses and butterfly, again made with Tim Holtz Sizzix die.

I hope you like this, Suzie loved it anyway.

Have a nice day
Svjetlana x 

Hello Nanny Goat - more summer pages

Greetings to all my readers


It is getting very cold over here and everybody is getting into Halloween spirit and there are sings of Christmas everywhere as well.
I am trying to worm up myself buy scrapping summer and even Easter photos (LOL). I have one page for you today that is based this time on the pencillines.com sketch. Pencil Lines is one more great sketch blog and I would advise everybody to visit it, they do new sketch every week and have fab designer team.
Now, this is my take:

Once again I used Fancy Pants papers, Tim Holtz dies, inks and stains. Background was a plane white paper once. I took a stamp that I had for ages, but never seen ink before, stamped and heat embossed (not seen very well on the photo) then I inked the paper, I am very pleased with the results. Funny thing about this page is that I started off to do clean and simple page, ended up with this messy background, but then what 'clean and simple' has common with farm, LOL?

And one close-up:

Oh, it seems I am not even late to enter this into RAK challenge, so I will try to do that.
That is all for today, I hope I will write something soon again. Have a nice day.

Svjetlana x

Together

Hi Everybody

One quick post today. I managed again to make a page for Once Upon A Sketch Challenge and I thought I better post it on time and play along. Now I just realized that I did not meet the journalling criteria for the challenge, suppose to write something about 2 events from the past week and I didn't do that. Never mind I still like my page and I hope you will like it too.  Next time I will refresh my memory about the rules when doing writing.

This is the newest sketch:

And my page is: 

 

 And now few close-ups:

I used once again one old Fancy Pants kit, flowers are hand made using Sizzix and Spellbinders dies, tiny tags are by Sizzix (Tim Holtz),  buttons are Basic Grey, pearls and alphas from my stash - some old no-name stuff, border is made using MS punch, ribbon is by Pink Paislee. 

What a coincidence, just found a new challenge blog: Bird is the Word by following Helen from Scrap Addict and the word is 'Together'' for the current challenge. So I will enter my page into this challenge, it is not that I think I have a winning page, but it is fun doing those.

Thanks again for reading my blog and have a nice day. 

Svjetlana xx

Once Upon a Sketch - 15th Sep. Challange

Hello everybody

After longer break from 12x12 I am back with freshly baked page and that is not even all, I am ready to participate in  Once Upon A Sketch Challenge  again. This time the sketch is:

 
and a journalling criteria is to write on the photo.

Now, the most important part- they changed the voting criteria and the winners will be chosen by YOU, all readers. I am not much in favour of that, but never mind I always end up with beautiful page and for that reason I can consider my self as a winner. I am not going to say go over and vote for me, but I would definitely recommend visiting the Once Upon A Sketch   for your own inspiration, it is full of amazing work. The sketches are fab and the designers are top class. If you decide to vote for me you can do it on 30th September  Once Upon A Sketch  andI will certainly appreciate that and say one big THANK YOU for everybody who did for me. Now, without further delays there is my page:

   
The photo is of my two little darlings, papers and rub-ons  are very old Fancy Pants and flowers as usual my own - have an indoor garden full of these (LOL). The rest is made using Sizzix dies and border is made using Martha Stuart punch.
And one close up:

So this will be all for today. I will have few more posts in following few days, so keep an eye on them. Thank you very much for the reading and one big thank you if you voted for me (this will be possible only on 30th September -Australian time) on Once Upon A Sketch.

Svjetlana xx