HANDY HIPPO THURSDAY! - WEEK #7

Hello Everyone,

And happy Handy Hippo Thursday to you all too. Apologies for the delay in sharing this card with you - we had a technical hitch this week but normal service is now resumed.

Today's card is a  6” square  card ... very feminine, very pink, lots of roses, pearls and ribbons. Even the Eiffel Tower is pink! I've added a birthday greeting but it could just as easily have made a lovely Mother’s Day card. The pretty papers are from the Wild Rose Studio’s Letters from Paris paper pack and I made the white organza flower by hand using the stunning ribbon from Handy Hippo.

Inside

Back

As usual materials used for this project are available from Handy Hippo and if you would like to make the same project then simply click on the magic button below and it will take you directly to a shopping cart that contains everything you would need to make it. Once there, you can simply and easily remove any of the items that you already have in your craft stash.

It’s easy to add to your basket any other purchase that you might like and if something is temporarily out of stock you can request to be emailed once it is back in stock.

Here's how I made the card:

• Base is a 6" square white card
• The front of the base was inked with Tim Holtz Spun Sugar distress ink and left to dry before being stamped randomly with the Fresh Bloom flower stamp in Memento Angel Pink
• The inside and back are also stamped with the flower stamp
• The Eiffel Tower topper was made by trimming a section from one of the sheets of patterned paper in the paper pack, distressing the edges with the same TH ink used on the base, and matting it on to silver mirri card before attaching it at an angle. 
• The rose embellishments were trimmed from another sheet of patterned paper - I believe this is known as fussy cutting - and the edges were inked with the Memento ink pad. The pieces were shaped by rubbing with a bone folder over the back, just to give a slight curve, then they were adhered as in the photograph using glue gel.
• Make a bow with the pink ribbon and glue it to the top left corner.
• Make an organza ribbon rose and glue it above the bow - see instructions below.
• Add three pearls to the ribbon bow, just below the rose.
• Stamp the greeting in Memento Tuxedo Black on the topper.

How to Make a Ribbon Rose
The ribbon rose was made using the red extra-sticky double-sided tape - stick a 12" length of this down on the craft mat before removing the red topping. Fold the wide organza ribbon in half and adhere it to the tape and, then roll, pleating the ribbon at intervals, until it's all rolled up. This was my first attempt and it was a lot easier to make than it is to describe how to make it!

I hope you are enjoying this series of projects - my aim is to make the projects as varied as possible.  That way you will get a good idea of the range of materials available from Handy Hippo and, hopefully, there will be something to appeal to whatever floats your boat, be it stamping, decoupage, embossing, etc. I'm enjoying the challenge :)

See you next week with something a wee bit different again.

Happy Crafting,

WOYWW - Week 145 - What's On Your Workdesk Wednesday?

Greetings WOYWWers, Followers & Everyone,

Ah, Wednesday at last! On so many levels this has got to be the best day of the week - not least because it's the day an awful lot of us drop in on each other and enjoy the vicarious pleasure of a good snoop around each others workdesks. And this is all courtesy of the lovely Julia over at Stamping Ground - click the WOYWW icon, on sidebar to the left, to join in.

I hope you are all well and that last week was a good one, wherever you are. Welcome to my newest followers, Sandee, Karen,  Yvonne and Danielle ... hope all of you will enjoy reading my blog posts for some time to come.

So, what's on my desk?

Well, no actual crafting going on but then, as many of you will probably know from this previous post, I've been up to my eyes in muck and bullets :) Oh, but what a guddle I've been in ... I've promised myself never to do that again. However, now that it is all straightened out I have to say it was all worth it ... I have a lot more space to craft in. Just a few stats for you:  the old craft room (previously the home office) measured 9' x 7', that converts to 63 sq ft in area; the new craft room measures 12' x 11' - that's 132 sq ft - more than twice the area to craft in :)  Here's a photographic tour:

This is the view to the left after entering my lovely light and airy room - just love that aqua wall :) First left is the new shelving unit, the table is where the computer used to be (it stayed in the old room). That is a doll's house - it's scheduled for refurbishment some time in the future - on the CD cabinet, then there's a couple of drawer sets before you get to the worktop and the two sets of shelves that came out of the old room.

Under the window, and near the radiator of course, is a faux window seat  from which The Boss can keep an eye on me :) Next to that are more sets of drawers.

The armchair you can see beside the ancient set of blue Liberty drawers, the EM always refers to these as the Indian cupboard ... I understand the Indian, that's where they were made, but cupboard? ... I digress ... the armchair is the EMs ... he plans to sit there and chat to me on occasion, something he couldn't do in the old craft room.

The same card I was working on last week is now on the table waiting to be completed ... sorry for the glare from the windows in the photo ... I need to experiment to get the best shots. To the right is the album for the digital scrap layouts I showed in the previous post and behind that is this month's copy of Scrapbook Magazine. Under the mag you can just catch a sneaky peak of the card for Thursday's Handy Hippo share. A paper pad, a couple of rulers, an ink pad and a box containing the embossed bits and pieces make up what I'll be working with tomorrow ... got to get that card finished at last :)

I hope you enjoyed this wee tour of the new craft space. It's still a work in progress, there's still a box of stash to put away, but the worst is done. I'm sure over time I'll discover that I haven't made the best use of all this new storage space but right now I'm just pleased that I can see the table and the worktop again and I'm looking forward to hours of lovely crafting time.

At the time of typing it's still Tuesday but I'm hoping to be up bright and early tomorrow so that I can link up and get down to visiting as many of you as possible.

In the meantime, I wish you all a very happy WOYWW and happy crafting too,

Digital Scrapping ... dealing with crafting withdrawal symptoms

Hello Dear Blog Friends,

I hope you all had a lovely weekend and that Monday didn't come as too much of a shock to the system.

Here in Ayr the weather has been not bad at all ... I only know this because I had to drag myself away from the organising of the craft room/sort out of stuff ... a seemingly never ending saga task ... for a quick visit to the Post Office.

Finding the ideal place to stow stuff has been quite a task but I'm getting there and hope that tomorrow will see the craft room looking spic and span and so crafting will resume :)

I didn't have this problem with the original craft space, small though it was, but then I didn't start off with all the stash, etc., I have now ... I only had a couple of stamps, a few sheets of paper, a craft knife & cutting mat, one black ink pad, some adhesive and that was about it. Everything else has been acquired slowly ... well, alright, not so slowly, over the last couple of years ... admittedly creating the occasional need for reorganisation but somehow everything got shoehorned in somewhere. Moving, on the other hand, has been rather like opening a new box of gilding flakes ... it expands and can never be returned to the original box ... likewise my crafting stuff!

Needless to say, after a day or so of not being able to craft ... sob, sigh, sob ... I had to do something! So I've been trying out the Serif Craft Artist programme I got free with Complete Cardmaking with your PC some time ago. It fills a need :))

This was my first attempt - love this photograph of my daughter, her husband and her five children. I added a few embellishments and a title to a template layout just to get the feel for the programme and find my way round some of the buttons.

This was the third attempt ... can't show you the second, it's dire and not something I'm proud off. Love this fun digi-kit, British Street Party - it's free which is fabulous and I can see it getting a lot of use this year for recording the Queen's Jubilee visits and the Olympics, etc., the elements lend themselves to all sorts of other occasions. This layout records an Easter visit when the children all piled into Granddad's car for a spin round the block :))

And lastly, a double layout - the left page was taken when the three oldest went back to school after the long summer holiday and the right is of the two youngest on their first day at school. The digi-kit is aptly called Back to School and has all sorts of fun stuff in it, pencils, sharpeners, crumpled notes, pins, etc.

Right, I'm off for a bit of R&R in front of the TV for an hour and then I plan to read the scrapbook magazine the postie delivered this morning before turning in for the night.

Goodnight all and happy crafting,