Sewing, stitching, baking, cooking, gardening, shopping and general homemaking.

Monday 26 January 2009

Latest Cards

A few months ago I went to a craft fair at Newark Showground. I was hoping to get some sewing and stitching stuff but the majority of stalls were selling card making items - so - of course I had to treat myself! One stall was selling a punching system and doing a very interesting demonstration of how to use punches in a way that I hadn't seen before. These three cards show how to use one of these punches to make quite a novel design of card.
The punch you use is a normal corner punch with the removable guide.

I've also incorporated some dry embossing and some paper pricking. These three cards are what I've made as example cards for my craft group. I've kept them simple so that they are fairly quick to make once the punching and embossing/pricking is done. Peel-off stickers are great for a bit of quick embellishment, here I've used glitter to colour them.



Wednesday 21 January 2009

More Scissor Fobs

I received my scissor fob exchange this morning. It's a strawberry shaped fob that I'm very pleased with, I'd wanted a scissor fob this shape but hadn't got round to making myself one so this is just perfect for me. I also received a lovely note card and two lengths of ribbon that will come in very useful for my cq. Thanks Amanda, I enjoyed receiving your package.
This is the scissor fob I sent to my exchange partner at the Tiny Treasures Exchange blog.


Sunday 11 January 2009

Blackwork


I've been stitching scissor fobs lately, for an exchange I'm in here. I belong to a couple of Yahoo groups, one of which I do swaps with regularly but this is the first thing I've done for a blog exchange. This isn't the fob I'm using for the exchange, I don't want anyone to see that until it is received by the person I was assigned. The three that I have made are done on linen evenweave fabric, two are blackwork stitching and one is canvas work. The blackwork ones turned out nice but the canvas work one didn't look so good because the linen was a bit slubby and the strands of thread tended to look a bit uneven in places. The method of sewing the back and front together was the same as in this tutorial, a very neat way of finishing this type of work.

This is the canvas-work fob, it is adapted from a free pattern - I had to leave off the border for two reasons, one, it made it too big to use as a scissor fob and the second reason was that I have trouble with counted work and kept going wrong!!! The butterfly is a fancy paper fastener, you can get some lovely ones for using in card making but I think they are also useful on stitching.