Easter Greetings

Happy Friday everyone!. 

It's Good Friday too so I hope you all have a lovely Easter bank holiday weekend lined up relaxing, spending time with friends & family & eating lots of yummy Chocolate!?.

My Easter project today features stamps by JOFY from Paperartsy.

I stamped the birds a few times from the JOFY lovebirds mini 20 set & coloured 3 of them with Spectrum noir aqua markers & cut them out along with a mini heart coloured in yellow.

I also used the JOFY collection 13 set, stamped the daisies & buds in black, coloured with promarkers & cut them out.

I stamped the Easter Greetings stamp from Woodware in black ink onto custard yellow card & die cut using a heart die from the Tonic Studios Verso set.

I inked around the edges of the heart with mustard seed distress ink & scribbled around the outside edge with a black fineliner, JOFY style.

Next, I created my background by positioning my daisies & buds onto a duck egg blue piece of card (although in the photos it looks turquoise) to form a heart shape & before they were stuck into place I hand drew stalks & leaves in JOFY style & coloured them with promarkers.

I stuck everything into place after shaping the birds & flowers to add some dimension.

I stamped the mini flowers from collection 13 in peacock feathers, mustard seed & shabby shutters distress inks around the heart garland & added touches of white fresco paint in the centres of the flowers & here & there.

Enjoy the rest of your weekend, I'll be working in the shop tomorrow & then spending time with friends on Sunday & Monday & hopefully doing an Easter Trail if the weather is OK.

Thanks for stopping by

I'll be back soon 

Amy x

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 

Stitches & hearts

Hi bloggers!, yet another busy week seems to have passed me by  in a bit of a blur. 

Today Mum & I visited the Stitches trade fair at the NEC in Birmingham to order nice new crafty goodies for the shop.

I've come away with lots of inspirational ideas, just can't wait for the orders we placed to arrive so I can have a play.

Our favourite stands this year were Creative Expressions, so many new products were showcased on their stand today we just didn't know where to begin!.

 Woodware, always such fab card samples on display. 

 Paperartsy, lots of lovely conversation & gorgeous design displays.

 Indigoblu where we watched lots of lovely Ice Resin creations taking shape by Nikki

 & Sizzix whose samples were great & we loved the retro 1950's range. 

Really wanted to share this cute tree of owls on the Sizzix stand.

The pink owl, bottom left actually had fluttery eyelashes! So cute. 

This huge wooden owl was on display at the entrance to the hall. I know a few people who would love this in their garden! 

Isn't he great?.

Just had to take a picture of this amazing creation, everything has been knitted! & that cute little pup reminds me of my sister's collie dog.

We also held another workshop for Out Of The Blue this week. As it was the day before Valentines we decided to do a heart/lovebird theme. 

Everyone really enjoyed making something other than a card this week & went home with a sweet gift for a loved one.

Here's another one of the designs I made as a sample to inspire them.

Hope you like it.

 Quite a few of the ladies were rather taken with this Heartfelt Creations stamp, I love it & am sure we will find lots of uses for it in future workshops.

This time I stamped & layered the flowers in Festive Berries distress ink. 

 Also loving that black Distress Glitter!

That's it for tonight, off to bed now as I'm back up at Stitches again tomorrow with Carole, here's hoping we don't have any car problems this year! 

See you soon! 

X