Easel Card for Granddaughter's 8th Birthday

Good Evening,

My youngest grandchild, Shari-Ann will be eight years old tomorrow and I do not know where the years have gone and how she got to be so old! It seems like just yesterday she was born, but she is still our little pride and joy : )

For a birthday treat we took her to the biggest book shop in Ayr town where she had her pick of the books. We had a lovely time browsing there and here she is in the coffee-shop afterwards. Shari-Ann loves animals, her ambition is to be a zoo-keeper when she grows up, so not surprisingly her final choice of  books featured animals, one is about two kittens and another is about a dog called Best Mate.

After the visit to the bookshop it was on up the coast to Largs to enjoy her first experience of tea at Nardini's.  Here she is with her dessert - a horn of plenty filled with all sorts of luscious things including black cherries. The weather was a bit miserable but we had a most enjoyable day.

And here's the card I made for her. At one time everything had to be pink but her taste in colour is developing so I thought I could be daring and give her yellow and lilac. Because her birthday comes shortly after the longest day I went for a really summery theme. The Tildas came from my stock of images coloured on holiday and the gorgeous design papers are digitals from Bearly Mine Designs.

The toppers with the birthday greeting and her name were computer generated - the number 8 and alphas are from a freebie set from Scrappy Bug at Free 2 Scrap - a wonderful digital resource if you have not already discovered it.

I made the flowers using yet another freebie, a button flower stamp given away with a magazine. After stamping, using a purple ink pad, on to the leftover DP, I cut the flowers out, pinched the petals, layered them and adhered a button to the centre - a simple and inexpensive way to make flowers.

Shari-Ann loved the card and plans to keep it out on display in her bedroom forever!

I'm submitting this card to the following:

Bearly Mine Challenge No.13 - Summer is Here
Deep Ocean Challenge Blog #2 - Flowers
Magnolia Stamp Lovers Challenge - Buttons

Materials used:

Papermania textured card, lilac (base),; pearlescent card, yellow (layering); Bearly Mine Design digital papers, Spring Blossoms lilac floral & Simply Dots yellow dotted; Scrappy Bug Digital Kits (free) Alpha from Sky's the Limit set; Stamped images, Tilda with Cute Skirt & Cherry Tilda; ProMarkers; Flower stamp (free with a magazine); Whispers ink pad, Rio Purple; Anita's Christmas Ribbon, lilac; Yellow & lilac buttons from stash.

So that's it - after a lovely day I'm off to plan what to do next and find some time to check out a few of your blogs. I hope you have all had a lovely weekend whatever you've been up to and that the week ahead is a good one for you.

Happy Crafting to you All,

What's on Your Workdesk Wednesday - Week 89

Good Morning Everyone,

I trust you are all well this morning and enjoying life wherever you are in the world. Here in my own particular little patch in South Ayrshire, Scotland, it's almost like Spring and after yesterday's horrible, windy and dreary weather that's refreshing.  Many thanks to all who visited here last week. I started out well enough visiting many of you but then something radical happened to the list which threw me completely - the numerical order changed and as I'm dyslexic I got completely lost! So apologies to those of you I missed.

So what's on my desk today? Well, as you can see it's pretty much as I left it last night when I was experimenting with embossing folders. Late on I decided to put each of my small folder collection through the Cuttlebug to catalogue them. After that it just seemed pointless putting them all away again so I started to play with little bits of cardstock. I've now got a wee stock of ready embossed card to use on projects. You can see the drawer filled with off-cuts/scraps of card that I can't bear to throw away because it 'might just come in useful one day'. Well, it did last night : )

The blue card resting against my chicken cupboard (or chook cupboard as RosC would call it) is a piece of core'dinations which came free with the V&A Hanoverian folder from Docrafts. There was even a small piece of sandpaper to rub down the card once it was embossed! The effect is really very nice.

And then there is my new Ottlite. The Estate Manager treated me to this recently because 'my eyes are dim, I cannot see' as well as I used to and he took pity on me. The Ottlite casts a light like daylight over quite a wide area, certainly wide enough for me to work in, so I can now do my colouring wherever I want as this little beauty is portable.

I see this morning you can see my wire basket which is jam packed full of 6"x6" and A5 paper garnered over the year - I keep it there handy for card making. There's also a couple of plastic cartons, one has a stock of even tinier pieces of cardstock, useful for stamping greetings on or testing out colours, and the other contains stamped images waiting to be coloured in. In the background is all the bits and pieces I consider vital and so can't bear to put away.

If you have stumbled on this blog by happy accident and are now wondering what all this WOYWW is all about please pop over to the Stamping Ground blog here where the Keeper of Desks, Julia, has a lovely list of bloggers willing to show it all in the name of crafting. It's well worth the time taken as you just never know what you might find. Last WOYWW day I discovered Sandy of Keepsake Crafts who makes brilliant flowers from zips and due to the interest shown by some of us she has very kindly posted a tutorial here. Now, after seeing these on sample cards on TV but with no demo on how it was done, I did try to make them myself but I just wasn't pleased with the result so a big 'Thank You, to Sandy for this tutorial.

Right, I'm off for my first cup of tea before I do anything more.