Out Of The Blue January workshops. Calendar card 2015.

Well, its been a hectic couple of weeks!. 

We're into Trade fair season in the shop at the moment with lots of planning for new stock & trips to shows to view & order.

 New displays have been taking shape in the shop which is great after all the Christmas decorations & Sale items. I love Christmas but our stock starts arriving in August/September so the novelty wears off a little after December!. 

 We've also had 2 card making workshops to prepare for & it was lovely to get back into it after our Christmas break.

This month we were missing Carole as she's been having a bit of a busy time at work recently, so rather than splitting the groups onto 2 tables I taught everyone as one big group for both dates.

We thought we'd start the New Year workshops off with a Calendar card using Jofy stamps from Paperartsy & inspired by the ones featured in the Craft Stamper magazine.

Here's my design

As you can see, I went for an easle card design.
The background was created with blended Distress inks & the flowers were painted with Cosmic Shimmer Watercolour paints garden tones set.
The calendar tab was from the pound shop & came in a pack of ten, bargain!.
The stopper is a refill notepad for some flipnotes that we sell in the shop. Both of these were stamped & decorated.

Here's how both weeks groups got on making it.

Everyone really enjoyed using these lovely stamps & pretty paints & we all agreed these calendars would be great to make to give as a Christmas gift or to sell on your stall at a craft fair.

We're all looking forward to our next workshops in February which will have a love theme.

Thanks for stopping by.

See you again soon

Amy x 

Flutterby Butterfly

Hello & welcome back.

 Phew! What a busy week its turning out to be.

 This week we are hosting our annual Christmas Shopping Evenings at Out Of The Blue, with last night being the first of the 3 evenings. 

I was kept very busy running up & down the stairs, topping up items that had sold, chatting to our loyal customers & handing out festive drinks & nibbles.

Looking forward very much to the next 2 nights which are no doubt going to be just as busy, so I thought I'd grab these few spare moments to share my card with you.

It's a pop up box card that my half of our workshop group made a little while back using Visible Image  stamps.
Visible image design & make all their own clear stamps so if you're not familiar with them, please check out their fab products, some of which we are very pleased to stock in our shop.

I've used 4 stamps by Visible Image, Large Butterfly, Butterfly, Butterfly Sentiment & Tall Grass.

I used a template to create the base box card out of a sheet of A4 cream card. There are lots of instructions on how to construct pop up boxes of varying sizes available on YouTube etc.
 Once constructed & decorated the card folds flat enough to fit inside an envelope.
 I created my own background paper by making a piece of A4 card wet & then using Cosmic Shimmer Water Paint Garden Tones set & applying the various colours in patches.
Once dry the background has a beautiful shimmer to it.
I then stamped the 2 sizes of butterfly stamps randomly with distress inks that toned in with the shimmer paint.
The A4 background card was then cut into panels, mat onto lilac card & applied to the panels on my base box.

I stamped & embossed 3 large butterflies & 4 small butterflies & painted them with the same Cosmic Shimmer paints & cut them out.
I added distress glitter to the butterflies & made antennae from craft wire with tiny beads on the ends.
I stamped & embossed the Tall Grass onto lilac card several times & then cut around it & glued it inside the inner supports inside the box & onto the back panel.
The butterflies on acetate were then glued in & around the grass so they appear to be fluttering .

I stamped the Butterfly sentiment on to the offcuts of my background sheet & chopped it up, attaching it to the very front panel with 3D foam pads.

It was great fun making this card & although it was maybe a little time consuming to complete within the 2 hour workshop timescale, many of our class members came back to show more pop up cards they had then made at home based on this design.

These butterfly stamps are some of my favourite stamps to use & are great for lots of occasions.

I'd like to enter this card in the Visible Image November Challenge.

Thanks for visiting

See you soon

Amy x