Minibook for a pregnant friend

A special friend is having a baby and I thought I'd make her a mini book. There is plenty of space for journaling and/or photos, either for during the pregnancy or after.
Beware this is a photo heavy post......

Cover

First page with pocket and space for tags

Second page with fold out accordion booklet for journaling or photos

pocket and tag

More pages with journaling spots, photo spaces and tags

pocket and tags

Clever kind of pocket hotding three tags, two at the side and one on top. Design by Laura Denison of "Following the Paper |Trail"

I used mainly Pink Paislee Butterfly Garden collection, which sadly seems to be out of print. I think it is one of the most beautiful collections out. If anyone reading this knows where to get it still, please let me know! Sadly I ran out someway through putting the mini together so I had to add other bits that matched more or less here and there.

Wendy Vecchi Studio 490

This months we are showcasing Wendy Vecchi Studio 490 products over at the Snazzys DT blog

This week it is my turn. Here's a little sneakpeek of my shabby chic projects using the Art Parts sample pack. Full projects can be seen on the Snazzys blog and if you are quick and enter our challenge, there is a change to win some Wendy Vecchi stuff!!

For a child

Over at the href=http://fashionablestampingchallenges.cottagecrafts.ie/>fashionablestampingchallenges the theme is "for a child" You can find some amazing samples on the blog
I made this for my nephew's third birthday and thought I would join the challenge this week

It was an alternative to a birthday card. I covered the letter in light blue acrylic paint and decoupages a paper serviette over it. Highlighted some of the wrinkles with gold and edged with dark blue chalk ink. The little stamped image is from a dutch stamp company. I stamped it on white card, cut it out and coloured with water soluble pencils. Then further embellished with some little collage bits from my stash and a few pearls.

Friday freebies

I have decided to post a freebie on Fridays. I can't promise to do it absolutely every week, but there should be something most weeks. Images used are from files I have had for years and that were mostly donated as freebies by others like the Graphics Fairy, so I want to say thank you for that. I have also made another paper but the file is too large and blogger will not let me upload it. You can find it on my flickr photostream and on Pinterest (see my side bar)

Paper take weekly challenge

One of the lovely ladies that run the Ribbon Girls online shop told me about this challenge blog. I have not taken part in a challenge for months and as I wanted to do a card anyway, I thought I would give it a go. The random winner will win £10 of goodies of their choice from the Ribbon Girls shop.

Here's my card. The stamp is from Crafty Individuals. I stamped it twice, cut out the butterflies and then glued them on top the first stamping for the  three D effect. I coloured them with Copics. Sorry the photos are really bad but I had to take them at night....

Shabby chic skinny

Here is a shabby chic skinny (3" x 5") for a swap I am in, in one of my art groups. Each month we have to make a shabby chic creations that gets traded and then by the end of the year we can bind them together into a little book.

This month the theme was "hearts".
The heart was covered in antique lace, the little image is from Paper Whimsey and the key is Tim Holtz

A little project using my papers

Thank you for all the lovely comments on my new paper and tags!. I decided to make a project actually using them lol, here goes:

I found that using my printer the paper matches Pink Paislee's Butterfly Garden pretty well so I used both.
A tutorial on how this make this and a beautiful example can be found on this site http://stampartic.blogspot.com

Some Springtime freebies

It's been a while since I have posted some freebies, so as a kind of belated Valentines gift, here are a couple which you may be able to use in your springtime projects. I love making these kind of things, it's so relaxing and makes a change from messy paper, ink and glue...

Big changes ahead!!

As many of you regular bloggers will have heard already, it seems we are losing the google friend connect facility on the 29th of February I think it affects Wordpress and other blogging formats but not Blogger. I've signed up for the new Mr Linky Followers button, please sign up if you would like to stay following me :0) You will find it right below my current followers button.

There is more information available here: http://www.linkyfollowers.com/default.aspx . I will follow all of you back as I certainly don't want to lose all my faithful blog friends!!

You can find out further back ground information if you follow this link http://shellymc2.blogspot.com/2012/02/found-this-at-its-so-very-cheri-and.html

Thank you!! And pass this on!!!

My Spellbinders Entries

Here are my three entries for the Spellbinders competition. We had to make one of each for each of the different stages of the competition, a card, a Scrapbook LO and an altered/3D project.

First round

Second round, (I am NOT a scrapbooker as you can see...) The kids are my niece and nephew

Third round where we had to use the products they sent us and had to use them in a non obvious way. I guess that's where I went wrong lol....

We could only sent one photo and it had to be smaller than 1MB

Some good and some bad news...

Happy Valentines Day everyone

First of all I want to share a card I made yesterday with you. You can find a great tutorial on Sue Wilson's   blog here: http://particraft.blogspot.com/2012/02/fancy-nesty-tutorial.html

Now for the bad news first (then that's out of the way....) Sadly I did not make it through the final round for the Spellbinders DT contest. Obviously I was disappointed, but also just a little bit relieved as no doubt it would have been a huge commitment and now I can concentrate on other things. I will share the projects I made for the contest in the next few days.

The good news is that as I said earlier, Crafty Secrets has commissioned me to design some papers for them and this morning I noticed that Sandy, the owner, has put the first few previews on her personal blog. You can find them here: http://heartwarmingvintage.blogspot.com/

Hope you all get to spend some wonderful time with loved ones today!!

Love is in the air

I have been commissioned by the American company http://www.craftysecrets.com to do some design work for them, so all week I have been busy with my PSE and mouse designing papers for them. I love doing that but have also missed doing some "real" crafting. So, it was great this afternoon to get papers and stamps out and get my fingers dirty. Here's the result, a pop-up card. I'm sorry the photos are so bad because it's a really dark day here

Front of card

Inside

It's inspired by an article by Helen Chilton in the March issue of Craft Stamper.

Tag book to use up scraps

If you are anything like me you will also have boxes full of scraps, too lovely to throw out. I decided to make a whole lot of tags to use some of them up. I put all the tags together into a booklet, now every time I need a tag I can just open it up, take out the tag I want and make new ones when I feel like it.
Here is the booklet

And here are the tags individually

Friendship booklet

With Valentine's just around the corner, I decided to create a friendship booklet for someone special.. Images and stamps are from Crafty Secrets.

Here you see the complete booklet

And here are the individual pages from the largest to the smallest