Hedgehogs

I just had to share the birthday card I received this week from my great nephew.  I thought it was pretty impressive for someone who was only five last month.  What cute hedgehogs!

I even got a hedgehog inside the card!

Craft Fair

What a busy couple of weeks!  I've eventually found time to get back on my blog again. One new follower to introduce this week.  Bonnie of 'Stamping with Klass' makes the most beautiful CAS cards.   

I had a stall at a craft fair since the last time I blogged.  

Not exactly a success, although I was one of a few who just about covered the cost of the table!  A Saturday evening on a cold and wet November evening, in a hall tucked away in a quiet road is not the best time to have booked a stall at a craft fair, I discovered!  Only about fifty people turned up to buy anything.  But hey-ho, I'll know for next time and the £16 I paid to have a stall all went to charity, so that was okay.  My daughter has a charity place in the London Marathon next year and needs to raise £1,400.  The sale of all my cards etc will be going towards this total, so the £1 I took, after paying for the stall, is the start of my fundraising to support her.  £1,399 to go! I'm looking out for a few more local craft fairs where I hope I'll have more success.  The day after the craft fair I went to the NEC in Birmingham with a couple of friends for the Hobbycraft Show.  There were so many crafty things to tempt us with..........and we lost all our will power to only buy things on our wish list!

So, onto a couple of cards made this week, a Get Well Soon card and a Sympathy card, both for men.

I usually make my own stepper cards, but this card was done with a stepper card die, which is great for making a fairly quick card. It even cuts out the patterned paper to decorate it.  The patterned paper was left over from a previous card and I used a snippet of white card for the scalloped oval, so I'm off to play at Pixie's Snippets Playground - Week 151.

I made this design of card recently with a white base card, but the effect looks so different using black.  

Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer

Firstly, I have another new follower.  I especially love the cute images Janice uses on some of her cards.  So go over to 'Stamping Mad' to see her lovely creations. 

I decided I need to keep going with my Christmas cards, as well as making other cards, so this is my next design for this year.

I've stamped and coloured twenty of these Rudolph images, so just nineteen cards still to make of this design!  The stamp is an old Anita's one and I've coloured the image with Promarkers and a red Sakura Stardust pen to add a bit of sparkle to the decorations hanging from the antlers.  When Rudolph was coloured, he had a black nose from the stamp.  I decided I really needed to give him a shiny red nose.  The only way I could work out how to do this so it looked okay, was to cut an oval using a snippet of red holographic card. The patterned paper is from a Christmas paper stack I bought at the NEC Hobbycraft show last year.  From memory, it was just £1 - bargain!  I hope they've got some good bargains next weekend, when I visit!  Card Candi finished off my design.

I would like to enter my card for the following challenges:

Pixie's Snippets Playground - Week 149 
Stamping Sensations ~ Simply Christmas
Little Claire's Challenge #50 ~ Christmas Theme
Crafty Hazelnut's Christmas challenge #201 ~ Sparkle

Happy Birthday

It's now three months since I worked out how to add a followers button.  I just want to say thank you to everyone who has become one of my followers, I'm now up to thirty two! Thank you for all the lovely comments made about my cards.  They really are appreciated.  I thought I'd start introducing my followers from now on, so you have a link to all their lovely creations.  My latest follower is Pam, who makes the most amazing cards, so please pop over to her blog, Pamscraft, to see her beautiful designs.

I wanted to take a particular Happy Birthday die with me on holiday last week, but after searching high and low I couldn't find it.  It wasn't in the box where I keep all my dies, but as I hadn't had a chance use it, I was beginning to think I hadn't actually bought it!  So I took my similar Merry Christmas die away instead and made a batch of Christmas cards like this one HERE. After discovering the receipt for the Happy Birthday die yesterday, I knew it had to be somewhere.  Eventually I found it yesterday evening and started mass producing some cards, all slightly different, for my craft stall next weekend.  Here is a selection of the ones I finished off this morning.

The football is a peeloff, put onto stiff card, cut out and attached with foam pads. 

 I used  patterned paper for this one, punched out two flowers and double layered them, then attached a brad for the centre.

The penguin was made using my Stampin' Up owl punch.

Here is the Stampin' Up owl again - in its natural state! I backed the word 'birthday' with plain dark green paper to make it stand out.

Although I used snippets on all these cards, the owl card is my favourite card on this post, so I'm going to share it in Pixie's Snippets Playground - Week 149

 Here's that little Stampin' Up owl again, this time turned into a Minion.

Finally, a simple punched butterfly as an embellishment, decorated with tiny pearls.

I would like to enter my butterfly card for the challenge over at Country View Crafts where the theme is 'Bugs, Bees and Butterflies'.

I love this Memory Box die as it is so versatile, especially for making a quick card.  Apart from the card blanks, everything was made with snippets, another good reason to use this lovely die.