Christmas Card and Crafts

I am back at last. My husband and I are back on the road. We flew 4,000km back to the other side of the country to continue our trip around Australia in our caravan. We stayed in Perth for 4 days, settling in efore heading south. You can follow our trip if you are interested on our Robbiebago blog. I have been busy cutting out flowers and other images, In the meantime I let me show you some of the craft items I made this past Christmas. First the first time ever I made 50 of the same card design for Christmas. I really wanted to use my lovely poinsettia Spellbinders die and I fell in love with a pleated sort of card design and ends up being an almost exact copy of a card designed by Valita. Click here to see Valita's blog. The leaves were cut on a silver metallic paper with a brand new hole punch which sadly didn’t last the distance, doing less than 5 punches before breaking and punching paper only too! I took it back and replaced it with a L-Em punch that is similar in design. The swirly stamp is embossed with Gold embossing powder. It is about time too as  I don't think I have done heat embossing for a long long time. The triangular pleated feature is very simple and looks great. It is explained in great detail and on Valita's video tutorial for those who like to see it being made.
The note books were commercial notebooks I picked up at Officeworks and I covered them with lovely decorative papers and ribbons. The flowers were hand made by me and are very dimensional and glazed with UTEE. The skeleton leaf is one I bought from Print Blocks eons ago and the green leaf is hand cut and distressed. The letters hearts are chip board from my collection which I painted and/or glittered accordingly.

Camille's Scrap Album Pages 13 to 16

Getting close to the end now. Just one more installment after this one. I have gone into so much detail as each page is unique and worthy of showing.

The background you can see on page 13 is done with a crackled paint technique. It has 2 lots of tags that swing out to reveal a single word, such as Memories, Friends, Enjoy, Sweet, Celebrate, Love, Smile& Life. I have embellished with a couple of simple punched daisy flowers with a diamante centre. Page 14 is dry brushed background and has a simple stitched border tag with a heaven smiles quote embellished with metal flower, wire butterflies and hand ink dyed skeleton leaf.

 

Of course I have my favourite pages and 2 of them are right here below

 

 beautiful daughter of God

God breathes and the beauty of nature is revealed

You, Camille, are amongst His most beautiful creation & I am left breathless.

Adapted from some quote I picked up from somewhere and kept. 

I googled it and found scrapbook.com/quotes. It is attributed to S. Brown.

Camille You amaze us... is written by myself.

Now the flowers on these 2 pages are all made from combinations of flowers I have collected over the years mostly from budget $ type shops. I loved mixing the flowers together to get this bright and colourful collection. The butterfly is punched with my new Martha Stewart punch and a colour magazine which I glittered. I also added a pearl beaded string for the trail.

As I said it is one of my favourite pages!

I have been a busy little bee

This is the front cover with my adapted silk flower which I glittered before placing on a stamped background. The butterfly is an embroidery patch.

Since the new year, I  have been busy in my craft room. First off I started to do my yearly clean up though I wonder if my hobby is more along the lines of collecting papercrafts rather than making papercrafts. I have so much stuff. Then in the midst of cleaning and tidying up I rediscover a scrap album that I started for one of my daughter's 21st two years ago and so I determined that I would surprise her and finish the book. I think I procrastinated more because I was a) a bit ambitious for a first time project and b) I was stumped by the fact that the book pages had a jolly big hole in the middle of each and every page.

Pages 1 & 2. The paper was coloured using the direct to paper technique, some rub ons, stamps, a heart charm, foil and gems were added for accents

Inside the little card on page 2 was computer generated.

Pages 3 & 4. Sorry, my photography skills leave a lot to be desired.

Bible verses to live by. Rub ons and felt flower ribbon adornment with stickles as centre accents

 I found these holes to be a big part of my stumbling block. In the end I decided to cover over the holes and proceed with designing the pages. I feel this decision liberated my creativity. There are so many pages I will split the photos over 2 or more blog entries. I will post a few detailed photos that I think people might be interested in viewing in closer details.

Hand cutting and shaping the flowers

I quickly discover that to get the size flowers that I want for my explosion boxes, I will have to hand cut the larger blooms. Thankfully I am still a child at heart as I absolutely love cutting (and colouring) and so this does not present a hassle to me.

White open roses tinted with a touch of purple. Mini Photo display style.

I am so lucky in that I am able to cut, colour, shape and glue the flowers whilst on the long drives between places as I do not get car sick at all. So while I chat and listen to my hubby and watch the scenery past, my fingers are busy if I want to craft.

Pink roses on a stamped swirl background that has been glittered

Yellow tinted open roses with hand cut leaves. Swirl is a punch

Procrastination

I don't suppose I am unique but sometimes I am ashamed of how much I can procrastinate. I can start a project and then move on to something else with all good intentions to come back to the original project and it just doesn't happen. I work best to a time frame where I have a birthday or wedding coming up and that both inspires me and motivates me to do a particular project. (Actually I am the same with housework - if I have all day long to do it, then it takes all day and I still may not get it all done, but if I know someone is coming over then I will make a wonderful effort to get it done and some baking and quite often extra cleaning done (that the visitor wouldn't even know about anyway eg clean out my freezer or some such silly thing!)
 Well the point of all this rambling is to let you know that I started my yearly tidying up of my craft room and I rediscovered a scrap album I started for my daughter's 21st. Only problem is that she turned 21 three years ago. it is about time I finish it for her. I am only going to give you teasers for now and I will post the full book when it is finished and she has it in her hot little hands! I am happy to say I finished 3 pages yesterday and added a few additional touches to otherwise finished pages and now I have only the last page to do.

More Early Explosion Boxes

My husband and I were to take our caravan, affectionately called the Robbiebago after my husband,

Robert, who designed and built the van, on a major road trip up the centre of Australia

and down the coast of Western Australia as we joined the great Grey Nomad exodus.

A more formal white on white with a touch of gold. This one holds a gift card in the centre.

Another formal white on white with a touch of pink. This too holds a gift card in the centre.

As I can't travel without some crafts, I quickly decided to concentrate on making explosion boxes

and the flowers to decorate them with. 

I can't stick with just one design either. I love to experiment and that will continue as I go.

Blessings is the saying here. Purple roses adorn a rainbow brayered background.

The white layers (and on the white ones above) are embossed with a cuttlebug folder to give textural interest.

I have all my flower punches  with me - which is only about 5 at this stage -  

but mostly I end up hand cutting the flowers as my punches were not large enough for me.

Open style Floribunda roses quickly become an early favourite.

Early efforts at Explosions Boxes

Here are a few of my earliest efforts at making Explosion Boxes.

My very first one - made for my best friend. Made with commercial silk flowers & rub ons

My first attempt at making my own flowers (from Fred she said blog).

A photo box made with silk flowers

My first stamped box together with my first 3D paper flowers

  I think the silk flowers are nice but I wanted to have a go at making my own flowers.

I wanted a more creative input. It quickly became obvious that butterflies were going to be part of my 'signature' on most of my boxes. I love butterflies. One day I might even try making some.

These butterflies are printed from the internet already coloured. I cut 2 and glue them back to back.