Painted Blooms

Hello there, we are having very stormy and rainy weather here in Northern Ireland but not to mind, it's a good excuse to stay indoors and craft! I am having great fun playing with all my lovely new products from the Spring catalogue and thinking ahead to spring time. I made this little card using a beautiful paper out of the Painted Blooms pack, so many lovely painted flower images in this pack. Have a look at it on page 19 of the catalogue, really pretty.
The Lotus flower is from a free stamp set from the Sale-a-Bration leaflet, for every £45 spend you get to choose any free gift from this leaflet.

Hope you all have a nice cosy crafty weekend!

Inspiration from the new Spring Catalogue & SAB

Hello there, thought you would like to see this little card I made, I took inspiration from a card on page 17 of the Sale-a-Bration leaflet. There are loads of ideas in both the Spring catalogue and SAB leaflet, email me if you would like a paper copy or have a look at the spring catalogue by clicking on the photo of it on the right side of this blog.

Have a lovely evening

New Spring Catalogue & Sale-a-Bration freebies

Today's the day! View the new spring catalogue by clicking on the photo of the catalogue on the right, if you would like a physical copy please email me with your address and I'll get one in the post to you. 

It's also time for a wonderful promotion from Stampin' Up, for those of you who don't know what Sale-a-Bration is, let me tell you.  It's Stampin' Ups way of giving back to its customers by rewarding them with free gifts. For every £45 you spend between now and the end of March you get to choose a free gift from a large selection. How exciting is that!  Click on the image of the Sale-a-Bration leaflet on the right side of this page to view all these great gifts.

I'll be back soon with lots of ideas using all the yummy new products.

Happy New Year

Good morning and a very Happy New Year from me here in Northern Ireland! Hope you all had a good Christmas, we had a lovely one with family and friends but now the hustle and bustle is over I'm ready to get back into a normal routine.

Kicking off the new year with Stampin' Up is very exciting, tomorrow is the start of our lovely new Spring catalogue and our Sale-a-Bration promotion!! For every £45 you spend from tomorrow until the 31st March you can choose any item free from the Sale-a-Bration leaflet, I think this year has the best choice ever! 

I am hosting an open afternoon today, if you live anywhere near me and would like to attend please contact me for details, I would love to meet you.  If you are too far away and don't have a Stampin' Up 

demonstrator already I would be happy to send you the above catalogue and leaflet in the post. From tomorrow you will be able to look at the online version by clicking the link on this blog and you can place an order with me by clicking my "order online button". Everyone who places an order, either in person or online will receive a handmade thank you card from me.

Here's a little sneak peek of I card I made using some of the new products-

Sale-a-Bration is great from my customers but it is also a good time to join Stampin' Up too, perhaps you love paper crafting and maybe already enjoy using our fantastic products, you might consider a part time job with us. Perhaps you just want to get your craft supplies at a discount or maybe you would love to start 2015 with a nice little part time job to supplement your income. Join us during Sale-a-Bration for just £99 and get a starter kit which includes everything you need to start off and get TWO free products! If you would like to chat things over with me and talk about the options please contact for further details.

Thanks for stopping by today and I hope you come back soon.

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! 

More from the wedding

Today I am sharing the order of ceremony I made for my daughter's wedding. I bought the large stamp on line (just loved it) stamped and heat embossed it with cherry cobbler embossing powder to give a lovely shiny raised effect.  I used the same lace as the invites but cut it in half so that it just trimmed down the side of the card and finished it off with ivory ribbon along the spine. These were quite big, a full A5 size.  I was please how they turned out.

I'll be back next week with some more of the wedding projects. In the meantime have a lovely weekend, we're spending the day putting up our Christmas tree and decorating the house, I love Christmas and the family that arrive with it!

Wedding invitation

Hello there, sorry I haven't posted in awhile but over the last few months I have been working, along with my daughter, on her wedding.  Any of you who have done this for a family member will know that it takes over your life! I've thoroughly enjoyed it though and I am happy to let you see what I made. My daughter wanted a rustic/vintage wedding and she got married in a beautiful barn in the middle of the countryside. 

Firstly I had a stamp made online of their names as I wanted to heat emboss it with cherry cobbler embossing powder rather than just print it off from the computer, it looked lovely and made it more special.  I used Stampin' Up products where I could including their Kraft card for the card base and layer, also the tag on the front of the box with the recipient's name on it.  I choose to put the invite into a box, mainly to protect it but also so we could tie a nice ribbon around it (Stampin' Up's chevron 132982) and add one of the very vintage cream buttons tied on with twine.

The printed words "wedding invitation" were computer generated and I die cut the little tag using Hearts a Flutter thinlit die (130159) and finished it off nicely using twine tied around the lace.

I have lots more projects from the wedding to show you so come back soon for those.