It's been a while

Hello all, I hadn't quite realised how long it had been since I posted last so apologies for this, but I am back as a Stampin' Up! Demonstrator and getting the chance to play with my crafting goodies again. So a really quick catch up, I've been back at work after having Pickle for over a year now and we're back in a good family routine. Monkey loves his little brother and it's lovely to hear them laughing and playing together. With both of us at work we're trying to make the most of family time at the weekends as well as trying to squeeze in a little bit of time for our hobbies. I'm not 100% impressed with the fact that Craig has a sign on the door of our shared hobby room that says 'To the Trains' but at least we're able to spend time together while still doing our individual hobbies. Although I may have to make my own sign soon!

As my order from the holiday catalogue has arrived I am starting to think about Christmas, I know it's only September but we crafters like to think ahead! The first set I started to play with is the new Merry Patterns set, this is a gorgeous two step set that creates some lovely patterned images. While playing with the candles in this set (aren't the candle flames so cute!) I may have fallen a little bit in love with one of the current in colors Fresh Fig. Surprisingly I think it works quite well as a Christmas colour when combined with greens and golds. 

Originally the card had the candles above the wording and then white space underneath, it looked good but it was missing something. I didn't think that pearls or gems would quite do it and there wasn't enough space to stamp the reindeer in the set but then I remembered the foil snowflakes I had ordered on a whim. I cut one of the gold ones down to fill the space and it just finishes the card off perfectly!

So how do you get your hands on the Merry Patterns stamp set? If you follow me on Facebook or Instagram you will have seen my post yesterday about a wonderful offer that Stampin' Up! currently have running. It's called the Merry Patterns host promotion and is running from now until the end of October. This stamp set is only available during this promotion and you cannot purchase it. In order to get your hands on it you either need to host a qualifying party (£250 or more) or by placing an order for £250 or more. You get all of the usual hostess perks but the bonus is you get this fantastic set for free. As you can see from today's card I have been having fun with it already.

The lovely Lotus Blossom - Part 1

Morning everyone, as I'm sure I've said in one of my previous posts the Lotus Blossom set has to be my favourite set from the Sale-a-bration offerings this year and so for my first class of the year I just had to make full use of the Lotus Blossom set. As we made four different cards I have split these posts into four parts but they may not necessarily be consecutive as I have several other cards to show you at the moment so you'll just have to keep coming back in order to see all four cards!

This first card was inspired by a swap I received from Charry at Stampin' Stars training (to see all of the swaps I received make sure you check out my Facebook page), I really liked her mix of blue with crumb cake and decided to give it a go myself. I'm really liking the idea recently of using stamps to create my background instead of relying on patterned paper so I might be giving this technique more of a chance in future makes. This was my favourite card of the four and so I did get a little carried away with adding different bits to it, you don't have to do it as complicated as this you can keep it as simple as you'd like.

Don't miss out on your chance to get this gorgeous stamp set. It is only going to be available during Sale-a-bration so get your orders in quick before it's gone for good.

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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.

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