I'm back (Hopefully to stay)

Hello! I cannot believe it has been over a year since my last post, so much for me posting once a week. I am sorry for not being on here in such a long time but normal life sort of caught up with me, shortly after starting my new job we found out I was pregnant, which after everything we had been through was a terrifying prospect. So with a new job, a new pregnancy and trying to spend as much time together as a family without thinking of all of the things that could go wrong again, I just didn't feel like crafting. Now however our wonderful little cub is coming up to six months old, it's such a relief that he is here and our family finally feels complete. I can also get back into my crafting now that I have moved all of my craft stuff into a new spot in the house and I've actually organised it! 

As this was my first card for a little while that wasn't for someone in particular I decided to look at some challenges for inspiration. I actually found two that I wanted to play along with.

For my card I flipped the sketch around and took the sentiment Shine from the GDP card. I'm not sure why but shine just made me think of butterflies and one of my favourite butterfly sets at the moment is Watercolour Wings. I love it, you can do so many different colour combinations with it and always come out with something different.

As my theme was to shine I added some silver embossing powder to the butterflies so that they caught the light. Here is a close up.

I really enjoyed making this card and hope you have enjoyed looking at it. If you would like to have a go yourself all of the supplies I have used are shown below and the images link straight through to my shop. Hopefully it won't be as long this time before I post again.

Thank you for reading.

Supplies:

Mothers Day - Part 3

Morning everyone! Don't worry I haven't forgotten it's Wednesday, the weekly deals will be in a separate post but I thought following on from yesterday's butterfly creation I would share the third Mother's Day card which just so happens to have another lovely butterfly on. I apologise for the quality of all of the Mother's Day card photos, these were made about a month ago when I hadn't had a chance to set up anywhere decent to take photos and well the result wasn't exactly my best. Hopefully the photo quality won't distract you from the card itself though.

Now I admit this butterfly isn't quite as pretty as yesterday's but I do still really like it. Although it looks black in the photograph it was actually cut from Blackberry Bliss card stock as this coordinated well with the Painted Blooms DSP.  

I'm not usually one for busy backgrounds but I felt this DSP worked really well behind the hexagons as it means it doesn't cover the whole of the background. The sentiment is from the Painted Petals stamp set and could easily be used for a card for a friend or for birthday's as well as Mother's Day.

Just a quick post today (ok not that quick but smaller than yesterdays!) Thank you for stopping in to read my blog. I'll be back later with some brand new weekly deals but if you can't wait until then just follow the shop link at the top of my page to take a look now.

Supplies:

Here are the links to all of the supplies I have used to create today's card, please feel free to click on them to go through to my shop.

Built for Free Using: My Stampin Blog

My first training session

Morning everyone, did you all have a good weekend? It feels so long ago now that it's Tuesday! I had a fantastic weekend, I went to my first ever Stampin' Stars training session on Saturday then one of my lovely friends came down to stay. We all got very muddy on Sunday as we went for a walk in Queen Elizabeth Country Park and chose possibly the muddiest path! You should have seen us trying to get uphill while slipping and sliding! We had a great time and definitely earned the cake Donna treated us to afterwards.

I may have been a demo now for over a year but as I said, on Saturday it was my first ever training session. All the way there I was so nervous and excited and was wondering whether I had made a mistake booking onto it but as soon as I arrived and got chatting to some of the other ladies I was so glad I went. Everyone made me feel so welcome and I wasn't the only one there who hadn't been before. It was just a great day, we spent the morning talking business, swapping cards and congratulating people on promotions and top sales then after lunch we had 3 hours of solid crafting (or just chatting if you wanted to!) We were given instructions and materials for 10 different cards, I have never made that many cards in such a short space of time. I came away feeling so enthusiastic and full of ideas for my business and for cards I want to try out, I really can't tell you enough how great it is being a demo. (Check out my previous post here to see more reasons why you should join my team right now!)

As part of training we were invited to make swaps for everyone that attended and that way if everyone made one you would go home with 24 different ideas, I received some gorgeous ones and now have lots of inspiration to build on. The swaps could be anything we wanted as long as it used current Stampin' Up! products. Now as many of you know I love butterflies so I just had to use the butterfly basics set for my swaps, I want to get the most out of this set now in case it doesn't roll over to the new annual catalogue. I'm not usually a gold person, I prefer silver (or white gold if we're talking jewellery!) but I received a lovely swap from Emma Goddard at the sale-a-bration demo only event back in December where she used Crumb Cake and Gold and I thought the colours went together beautifully and so decided to try them out myself.

I have added a close up of the butterfly as you can't quite see from the first photo that the butterfly is made up of two layers. The first layer is stamped in Crumb Cake onto Very Vanilla and the second layer is made from Vellum with Gold embossing powder. I was really pleased with this one and I think people liked it when I handed it out. I will be sharing the swaps I received gradually over on my Facebook page so if you want to get some more inspiration please pop on over to take a look but for now I must get back to making wedding invitations. Thanks for stopping in.

Supplies:

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A friendly butterfly

Hello everyone, well I managed to squeeze into my craft room the other night to have a go with my new goodies. I couldn't believe the size of the box when it turned up as I'd tried to be really good this time, although lots of it was free! I love sale-a-bration and hostess credits! I'm determined to keep it all in the box until I come to use it so that I make sure I use everything I bought at least once! 

So here's the first card I made:

I have always loved butterflies on cards so when I saw the Butterflies thinlits in the Spring/Summer catalogue I just had to buy it, especially as it could be bought as a bundle with a gorgeous stamp set. I think several of my cards are going to be using this bundle! Here I cut the butterfly out in Whisper White card and then used sponge daubers to colour it in with possibly my two favourite colours at the moment. To get it to stand out a little I just used a small about of tombow on the body of the butterfly so that the wings weren't stuck down. This was then topped off with a pearl from the artisan embellishment kit, which I love. The sentiment came from the set Simply Wonderful which is one of the offerings in this years sale-a-bration (free with every £45 spend, so that's two free items if you spend £90 etc)

Thanks for stopping by, I already have one card lined up to show you and I suspect there will be plenty more on the way.

Supplies:

Built for Free Using: My Stampin Blog