All my Love & some Chocolates too!

Hello everyone, hope you're all having a good week so far?. 

Lots of lovely new goodies have been arriving in the shop after the trade fairs so Ive been busy changing displays around & finding space for everything.

I've also brought home a few of the new craft products to play with, so hopefully I'll be posting a few projects made with those on here soon. 

Today's project is a little heart shaped hanging chocolate box I made for my little girl Daisy for Valentines Day.

She was so excited when I gave her this on Valentines Day, especially when she discovered the chocolates nestled inside!.

It was made using the Tonic Verso Affections dies we've been working with at our Workshops this February.

It was very easy to make, cutting plain hearts for the front & back then adding the decorative die cuts & sentiment to the front panel.

These were then joined together with a scored strip of red card with little notches cut all up the sides & glued into place in between the front & back panels.

I used festive berries distress ink to add a touch of red to the white areas & also some ribbon with tiny sparkly hearts printed on it for a bow & a tiny punched heart.

I used the same ribbon attached to the sides of the box & tied at the top in a bow to hang.

Here's a picture of the beautiful red roses Nick gave me on Valentines day.

Hope you enjoy the rest of the week, I'll be back soon.

Amy x 

All You Need Is Love Imagination Crafts Inspiration Project Feb 15th 2015

Hello again, I'm back today as promised with another 'Love' themed project.

Here's my 2nd inspiration project for this month for the Imagination Crafts Challenge Blog.

This card was made using spot stencil, heart stencil by Tim Holtz & the Imagination Crafts Panel Stencil Birds in a Cage.
First I blended dusty concord & festive berries distress inks through the spot & heart stencils, blending the colours darker towards the edges of my piece of white card.
Next I distressed around the edges with black soot distress ink.

I then inked through the panel stencil with black soot & stamped the All YOU need Is Love sentiment to the right of the card with black archival.
I used the scroll part of the stencil in the top right & bottom right corners of my background.
I used Imagination Craft Sparkle medium in black stars over the top of just the birds on the panel stencil by masking off the surrounding areas first.

Finally, I punched  black & red hearts & added the sparkle medium as well as inking around them & stuck them in place in the bird cage & underneath the sentiment.
I then mat & layered onto red & black card.

Please pop over to the challenge blog to see what the other members of the design team have created & also to join in with the challenge where the theme is always anything goes.
There is a prize to be won too.

Thanks for stopping by
I'll be back soon


Amy x

All My Love on Valentines Day

Hello crafty friends, thank you for all you lovely comments on my last post & also for your get well wishes.

All fine in our house now but my Mum & Dad have both had the lurgy this week, so its definitely been doing the rounds.

Today as its Valentines Day I'm sharing a tunnel card I made using Verso Affections Dies from Tonic Studios.

We're using these dies for our February workshops for Out Of The Blue & as its Valentines the theme is love!. 

The card is made up of several layers of white card embossed with heart lattice design & festive berries distress ink.

The back panel is red card stamped with a small part of an Imagination Crafts stamp set heat embossed in white.

The layers are held together at the sides by concertina folded pieces of card. The layers are fixed to each fold to create depth & the 'tunnel' effect as shown in the next picture

This next card is the design my half of our crafty group made on Thursday night at the workshop.

As you can hopefully see, it has more layers than the red card.

It was inspired by a card Carole & I saw on the Tonic stand at last years Stitches trade fair at the NEC. 

We both agreed at the time it would be great to make one for our Valentines workshop.

Unfortunately I don't know who's card it was we saw to give the recognition to but I think it may have been by Ruth Hamilton.

So, thank you for your inspiration!.

All our ladies thoroughly enjoyed making their tunnel cards & there were no scissors or inky fingers in sight, just lots of die cutting & concentration going on!.

I hope you all enjoy the rest of your Valentine weekend, I was surprised with a beautiful bouquet of red roses this morning!.

I'll be back again tomorrow with another love inspired card for my second inspiration project for Imagination Crafts.

Amy x

Twit Twoo, Love You!

Welcome back friends & followers.

Well, my week has been as hectic as ever & we are still trying to get over this cough & cold virus that is doing the rounds at the moment.

All of us have been suffering with it for over 3 weeks & just when you think its on its way out you start to feel rubbish again.

My 3 days up at the NEC didn't help as it was very tiring, but it was great to see lots of lovely new things to order for the shop & we're looking forward to everything we ordered arriving soon.

My post today is the first of a few Love/Valentines themed projects.

I've been playing around with some ideas for this theme whilst coming up with the project design for our next workshops for February.

For this card I used a mixture of Sam Poole stamps & a leaf stencil from Creative Expressions.

I stamped & heat embossed the Owls several times before colouring them with Promarkers & decoupaging them to add dimension.

The leaves were die cut using spellbinders & the hearts were punched & edged with Distress inks.

The finishing touch was altering the owls eyes by changing their pupils to heart shapes!.

I'll be back soon with more 'Love' inspired projects!.

Thanks for looking & commenting 

Amy x 

Imagination Crafts Inspiration project. 1st February 2015

Good morning crafter's. I hope you are all having a good & relaxing weekend?.

Today we are up at the NEC in Birmingham for the Spring Fair. 

This is the trade fair for the gift trade & we will be ordering lots of lovely new goodies for our shop Out Of The Blue.

It's a great opportunity to spot new trends for the coming year & see what are going to be popular themes in gifts, homeware & the greetings & card sectors.

It's a huge show & covers pretty much all of the halls at the exhibition centre so comfy shoes & coffee pitstops are a definite must!.

We'll be up there for a couple of days so we're hoping snow doesn't affect our journeys too much.

Thank you all for your lovely comments on my last post featuring the mirror I altered for my DT tutorial over on the Imagination Crafts blog.

Thankyou for taking the time to pop over & leave me a comment there too, it was much appreciated.

Anyway, here's my project for today

As it's the 1st of the month it's my DT Inspiration project for Imagination Crafts Challenge Blog.
It's also the card I made for my Mum for her birthday.
I used purple & turquoise card distressed around the edges.

The stamps are from the Imagination Crafts decoupage stamp range & I used the Dragonfly set.
This is a beautiful range of stamps perfect for layering.
Here I have stamped & heat embossed the design in white detail embossing powder onto vellum & coloured the back of the vellum with inks.

I stamped the design again & coloured just the dragonflies & then cut them out. These were then stuck I'm place on top of the original design.

I added some stamping around the edge of the purple card & finished with some stickles glitter glue & pearl gems.

I decorated the inside too.

Hope you are inspired to join in with the challenge.
The theme every month is anything goes & there's a great prize up for grabs.
Please also check out all the other design team projects over on the blog.

See you again soon

Amy x