Hand Crafted Memories

I had a fabulous day yesterday at the Craft Box , another of my favourite Molly Blooms classes. I had such a laugh with those ladies that I'm still smiling today. Clare comes up with the most inspirational cards and projects, I would love to live just an hour in her creative mind. Yesterday we made a piano hinge book, filled with lots of lovely images. I haven't finished mine yet, this was a mammoth stamping and colouring in session and I'm still enjoying colouring them all in. I will photograph and post it when it is finished. In the mean time here are photos of the project we made at the workshop just before Christmas, this class included some gingerbread men to put in the boxes and give as a present. No chance! I'm not giving these little beauties away, I have them in my living room to look at every day. If I do want to give somebody a special gift box I'll make them another one.                    oh and I ate the gingerbread men myself!

Where did January go? I blinked and here we are on the 28th January, I have hardly done any crafting this month. Fortunately I've got a few crafty social events planned so this lack of crafty posting should end soon. I recently posted about a mammoth card making session, so today I'm posting one of my favourites. I'm not sure why, I think its the colours that draw me to this and its featuring a stamp from one of my favourite stamp companies, Molly Blooms .

I made a batch of orange and chocolate cupcakes this morning, I wanted to practise the decorating. I made two batches of butter cream and flavoured one orange and one chocolate. I need more practise but wasn't too disappointed with the results. As it was warm in the kitchen I lifted the cakes into the fridge to keep the butter cream from melting and disaster, I dropped them.Fortunately it was into the fridge, I didn't mess them up too much but they definitely didn't look as pretty.             They were eaten while we made cards this afternoon, I can't think of anything better than cupcakes and crafting.

I think this looks like its going to be a year of posting only weekly. Seriously I like to post more often but life is busy at the moment and blogging is suffering. Last weekend I went on a cupcake making course, well I thought that's what was going to happen, in fact we ended up decorating them only. I won't say anything about the day as my feedback ended up with the lady throwing her toys out of the pram and refunding us our money, even though she agreed with everything I'd said. Shame really because we learnt how to decorate beautifully, we just didn't make anything. Tomorrow I plan to practise and use my own recipe for the cupcakes. My friends niece is just getting into card making so she is coming for the afternoon to learn some techniques and I'm going to test my cupcakes out on her. I recently bought some embossing folders in one of the New Year sales, I can't remember where I got them from. I bought them with mens cards in mind and on my recent mammoth c

I posted last week that I had just had a mammoth card making session and here I am a week later and I haven't posted any more cards. I have been to Cambridge with work for a couple of days but there's plenty more days in the week. So here we go with another card from the session. This is for a friend of mine who is having a birthday this week. I am still enjoying playing with my Promarker s and think I'm now improving the shading technique. I also called into Paperchase this week, just for a nosey and came across some lovely paper tapes, so I stocked up. There are others on the market but I thought this was a good selection, only £3 for 15m. Its gonna last a while I think. Now I've just got to find something to use it on.

I have re found my love for card making this week. I like to stamp out some images and just colour them in and cut them out. I will then make them up into card toppers and keep them in a box until I need a card. It makes it so much quicker when I suddenly realise I need to get something in the post. I recently posted that I needed to make some more cards for the boys at work, so a flurry of creativity ensued in my craft room. This resulted in apile of around 20 cards, plenty of posts will follow. I also think I need to add some of my cards to the challenges that go on and I look through regularly, I haven't entered anything for quite a while now. Over on the Allsorts challenge blog this week the challenge is about paper piecing. It so happens that this week I had made a couple of cards using this technique.I paper pieced the van on this card.   This is one of my favourite Molly Bloom stamps, its perfect for men's cards. I've teamed it up with two ranges of papers from Craft

The last of this year long project is to get 12 4 x 6 photos onto one layout, well I've been waiting for 12 months to see how this was possible. Very clever Shimelle ! I have had these photos for so long, well since 1992. I have pondered and wondered how I was going to get them all into a layout without shrinking them down so you could no longer see the detail or without adding importance to those that remained larger.  One day when we were in Washington DC we decided to walk from the hotel to the Capitol and visit all of the landmarks in between, when we go to the Washington Memorial and went up inside we could see everything from above, amazing! I managed to add in the aerial view from each side and then the close up photos of the landmarks that we then visited. Some of the pictures were not so good on the day So I had bought postcards, I have to admit this layout is a mixture of photos and postcards.  You would think that stack of 12 photos on mounts would make a bulky, page bit

I just love the Molly Bloom stamps, I've had this card in mind for a while and just needed time to sit and work it out. One of my favourite things to do is stamp a few images and colour them in using my Promarkers. Yesterday I did this for the whole afternoon while I had a film on. This card I'm going to give to either my brother or nephew, it has given me quite a few ideas for other cards.

Here we are in 2012 and ready to go back to work tomorrow, where did Christmas go? The decorations are down, the cards have gone for recycling and  everything is ready to begin again. I have another 30 odd male birthday card ideas to come up with again. This month at work we have four male and one female birthday, it is also my brother and youngest nephews birthdays. Making a total of 6 male and one female card to make for this month. My last day of holiday will be spent getting January's cards ready.  Here is the first one I have come up with.