Happy Christmas

A very happy Christmas to all my readers and a big thank you to all my Stampin' Up customers who continue to support my business from year to year! I really appreciate that you keep ordering from me and attend my classes.  I also want to say thank you too for new customers who have found me through my little blog world, I love it when a total stranger finds me here and goes on to become a customer and sometimes even a friend, makes me very happy....

I hope to blog much more in 2015, as many of you know I spent most of this year organising and making lots of things for our daughter's wedding, so I hope to have a lot more time to write more frequently and share with you lots of paper craft ideas. Stampin' Up have some new fantastic products due for release with their Spring catalogue and Sale-a-Bration both starting on the 6th January so I'll be back with those very soon! 

Lastly, as promised here is a photo of my Christmas tree, which turned out to be quite difficult to photograph, this was the best I could do. Lol

Wishing you all a very happy Christmas

Tilda Santa

My first love will always be paper crafting using Stampin' Up's fabulous products but I do like to dabble in other crafts from time to time. Back in September I joined a little sewing group in Donaghadee, Northern Ireland which is run by my good friend Betty. It took me some weeks but I finally manage to finish a sweet Tilda Santa, I love him and it was worth the effort!

I also made star ornaments for friends's Christmas presents.  I made them using the largest Star die from Stampin' Ups set Stars (133723). They cut through the hessian material with ease, I stitched them around the edges using a zig zag stitch to stop them from fraying.  I stamped the word sparkle onto a piece of linen and cut out then sewed a little button on the linen and added a gold bell to the bottom, I think I managed a nice rustic memento for my 

friend's trees and even manage to include some things from my paper crafting!

I am going to try and find time to come back tomorrow with a photo of my Christmas tree so I hope you join me for that.

Christmas crafts

As a Stampin' Up demonstrator, although independent, I have the pleasure of getting together every so often with other demonstrators to share ideas and generally just have fun.

Well last Saturday was one of those days! In Antrim, Northern Ireland 31 of us from all over NI met up and spent the whole day together. Our manager Paula and her assistant Kelly had flown in especially for this event.  They were joined by my upline Natalie who give us a very interesting talk and they showed us lots of lovely new products which are coming out with our new spring/summer catalogue, can't wait for that!

Part of the fun of getting together is swapping ideas, we did this by making 31 of the same thing and swapping those with the 31 ladies who attended, that way we all came home with 31 new and different ideas! Below is my basket of swaps, I made little box type envelopes with the envelope punch board, leaving the top part open. I put in a lovely sachet of Malteaser drink and added a festive candy cane, what do you think? Everyone seemed to like them.

Here's a close up, I used the Perfect Blend stamp set (131392) I stamped the cup and coloured it in using Stampin' Ups Blendabilities. The stamp set comes with two sentiments but as they aren't suitable for Christmas I choose Christmas Cheer from the very useful Endless Wishes stamp set 136829

I'll be back soon with a photo of all the lovely swaps I received in return, come back for that.

Last of the wedding projects

I'm showing you the last few wedding projects, don't want to bore you and also I have some Christmas things to share.

 

For the table plan I used an old picture frame and painted it with Annie Sloan paint then backed it with hessian look wallpaper, printed the names onto very vanilla card and added a little pearl trim.

These are the table numbers which I made using my Stampin' Up oval dies, very vanilla and crumb cake card adding some pearls to finish them off.

This photo shows the lovely Stampin' Up bunting I made using the celebration kit 333007 which I placed across the beautiful  fireplace in the stable room (where we had our coffee after the ceremony) Hard to see in the photo but I used mini clothes pegs to attach photos of the bride and groom, from the first photo they had taken together to their engagement photo which I thought was a nice touch.  Above the fireplace are little jam jars filled with flowers, I decorated the jars using Stampin' Up's lace, burlap ribbon and very vintage cream buttons.  So although I wasn't able to do everything for the wedding with products from Stampin' Up, I certainly did mange to do a lot!