It's all Downhill from Here!

Well, this is exciting! It's my first ever post as a Design Team member. The challenge over at Aud Sentiments is to use any sentiment you like! We are sponsored this fortnight by Inky Impressions Rubber Stamps and we were provided with a very cute downhill skier to showcase the store.

So, here is my creation!

I used my ProMarkers to colour the skier, and my Sakura Jellyroll Stargazer pen to add little glints of glitter to the metal clips etc. The sentiment was made up in Inkscape - check below for a cheeky wee steal, if you like!

The border of blue paper is just a Martha Stewart Doily Edge punch done on two sides of a strip of paper with some gems added.

I added a couple of wee flower punches, some faux stitching and extra glitz.

I really hope you like my first Design Team creation - I've been so nervous that I won't live up!

Love, MC xx

My most amazing home decor project ever...

I've never been much of a home decorator. I always fancied having my own place and doing it up exactly how I wanted, but life gets in the way. To start with, I only actually got my own house about a month before I got married, and it was in walk-in condition. We had no real reason to decorate, tear out carpets and fittings, and put ourselves through that hassle. And there was no need. We were too busy saving up to buy bits of furniture that we needed let alone making the place look the way we wanted.

And then our little bundle of joy was conceived.

And for some completely MENTAL reason we decided to decorate just about the entire house.

Yeah, I know.

But there was reason behind the madness. We had a two bedroomed house, one being ours, and the other being lovingly named the LibraMusiCraft Room. It was party central - sofa bed, coffee table, huuuuge craft desk, bookcases, window seat, the works. It was always a riot, mind you, but a brilliant room. It had to become a nursery, but it would be FAR too big for a baby, by miles.

Plus, we would have a ton of furniture to move out of it and find new homes for. We worked out that we could get the desk and sofa bed stored, but we could put bookcases and coffee tables into the living room. Which meant reshuffling the living room...and decorating. And we could put some of the furniture into our bedroom...which meant reshuffling that too...and decorating.

Oh dear.

And so began our lovely redecoration (in about three months) of the three major rooms of our home.

My pride and joy is what we did with the LibraMusiCraft Room. We built a large walk in cupboard for storage but when I saw how handy it was it was adopted as "The Nook", or my craft room, where I create all of my things now. The little guy's nursery isn't even babyish - it's very much a room that will grow with him. Finished off after he was born, and we knew what we had, it's the ultimate in stars and guitars and zig zags.

So if you'll indulge me, I'm going to post a wee craft room tour and then a wee series of handcrafted items in the little man's nursery. Hope that's ok!

Christmas Presents - Doll Bags

Oh dear. I might have splurged on some fabric paints and jute bags. Look what happened:

Christmas Presents - Personalised Shadow Box Frame

This one was commissioned by a friend of mine, and I know she hasn't passed it on to the person it is for yet, so I won't put all the pictures of hers up! I stole the idea for my sister in law, as a present from our wee fella, and she had a tear in her eye when she opened it. The nicest thing about personalised handmade presents is that they are so specific to the person and the situation. Here is my "Everything is nicer with..." frame:

Christmas Presents - Personalised Subway Art

Now that Christmas is over I can post some of the delicious Christmas presents I was commissioned to make this year!

The first thing I was asked to make was a personalised subway art frame. I love these things, and I especially love coming up with the things to write on them with the person giving the gift. They're such a personal present. This one is for a lady called Angie.

I usually make these in Inkscape but I ventured into Serif this year and I'm delighted with it. I hear from the person who ordered it that the recipient absolutely loved it!

Christmas Card 6

Last one! This was made off the back of the popularity of my "wine fairy" range. For some reason she always seems to go down well and I love the idea, so I made myself a cheeky card from my wee boy! A crafter's got to do what a crafter's got to do, right?

Here she is:

This is fairly heavily based around the sentiment. I just used my stickles on the "mummy" to make it stand out. The fairy is a cutout from a Serif embellishment. I can't wait to get my Christmas present as I have some exciting things I can do...wait til I tell you about it...

An Art Deco Christmas Tag!

Hello! This is an exciting post as I've applied for a design team! I don't know if you know about these - there are lots of brilliant challenge blogs and they recruit a team of crafters to come up with inspiration for each challenge. I've applied once before years ago for a design team but I didn't have any luck and I've always thought my stuff was too basic so I've shied away from applying again. Anyway, I found this one through a Facebook group, and it's a blog I didn't even know about, which is actually perfect for my style!

The blog is based heavily on sentiments, and lots of my cards depend on sentiments, so I'm going to go for it. Wish me luck!

The challenge is to make a tag. This stamp is called 'Vintage Tree Party' from A Day for Daisies and I fell in love with it. It's so Gatsby and the dresses just cry out for some lovely shaded colouring.

This is in the middle of the making - I positioned the stamp and used a font called Bergamot Ornaments for the art deco style line, and a font called Benthem for the sentiment. I tried to use art deco style fonts to match the stamp. The sentiment is a lyric from Etta James' Santa Baby, which is such a sultry wee Christmas song! I thought these girls would be looking for a classy gift like the ones requested in the song!

I tried to go for a silver and gold theme so the dresses are my caramel and sandstone Promarkers and the greys (mainly Ice Grey 3 and 1). I put the presents in the same colourways, and used Brilliant Silver and White Gold glitter to embellish the tree with my quickie glue pen (I love that wee pen).

Then the whole thing was cut out in a nice art deco shape (using a hi tech sellotape roll to draw the curves, hah...I'm such a cheapskate), mounted on silver mirriboard, then black, and wrapped with a huge black organza ribbon bow. I'm quite pleased!