Christmas card #1

I made this card in under 10 minutes.

How, you ask?
Well, I had left over from the 12x12 masterboard I made yesterday,
cut it to size,
added this cute little girl (which I already had stamped and colored probably a couple of years back) 
and stamped the border and sentiment.
Christmas card 1 (finally) done.

snowangel

I splashed out this week and bought me an early Christmas present, a Silhouette Cameo. Off course I've been testing it ever since. And I've managed to find the right settings to cut through my transparencies to create stencils, big hoera!! (and lucky as this was the main purpose for investing in it in the first place)
As this week challenge over at The Craft Barn is snowflakes I downloaded a snowflake background and let the machine do its work, the results are amazing, how it's able to cut even the most intricate designs.
I started out with a 12x12 piece of patterned paper and sprayed some Dylusions ink through my brand new stencil

Looking FAB!

I stamped different snowflake stamps all over in different shades of blue, black and white.

I cut a piece of this 12x12 to fit in my journal and punched a snowflake border top and bottom.

I used a picture of my son in the snow as a focal image. This picture is from last year, we don't often get snow here but we drove 1.5 hour south (to the ardens) and there you have some hills with snow, so you can go sledding, walking or cross country skiing.

My son loves to make angels, whether it being snow angels or sand angels J

The winter fun is also cut with the cameo.

You'll definitely see more projects in the future using the cameo because I just might have fallen in love with it (hopefully the love stays).

WOYWW338

My desk is yet again unusually clean this week, this is due to the fact that on Sunday we had another celebration and we needed the extra table to seat everybody.

Still on my workdesk is the owl canvas in progress.

I want to add large leaves to it, but as I don’t have such a large leave stamp I carved one myself

On the right is my haul from Saturday, there was a bookfair where they also have a large amount of crafting supplies, each year I go and fill up my basket.

This year with an assortments of stickers and embellishments, decorative scissors, a paper cutter, a stencil and some craft books.

Now I’m off on my trip around the world from desk to desk.

Don’t know what I’m talking about, go here to find all the nitty-gritty details.

envelope clasp book

Somewhere in the summer I held a tea dying/coffee staining marathon together with my then 5 year old son.

We took a whole bunch of paper, a bowl with tea and a bowl with coffee, old sheets to lay on the grass and off we were.

Now I have a huge stash of new  “old” paper.

I used some of these papers to make this journal.

The cover is a folded envelope which I slit open to create an extra insert ( the back already has an insert where the envelop closes)

I used some pretty vintage papers on the cover and on some of the inner pages.

Initially this journal was one for me, but I eventually gave it as a b-day present to my mum. It was accompanied with this b-day card

I must say, I love looking at all those beautiful journals on fb, pinterest, youtube,… and would like to be able to make such wonderful journals myself, but once I start it seems not really my thing (don't know where to start or how to finish, what to add...). I think I'll stick to making mixed media pieces and getting my hands dirty with paint, inks,… 

Guinness World Record: largest chocolate coin

Wen I read that the weekly challenge for week 47 was Guinness World Records I immediately knew which one I wanted to use, I had just read in the newspaper that Leuven ( which is only 20 minutes from where I live) was trying to beat the world record for largest chocolate coin. Now that is a record that should belong to Belgium, and they did it, yeah! 

So, now how to translate that into my journal, I searched my stash but have nothing to do with chocolate: no pattern paper, dies, embossing folder or stamps. Next I searched the net for some inspiration and found cute pictures of kids faces filled with chocolate and then it dawned upon me, I have such pictures of my son (from a couple of years back).
So I printed one out and created the page around this. 

I painted the background brown (color of milk chocolate), 
stamped the letter M all over (for mmmmm), 
found these pieces of gold metal in my scrap bin (which remind me of the gold packaging of the coins),
stamped a ruler across the page (because a lot of measuring will have been done to verify the record: 2.5m diameter; 22cm thick and 1 ton)
Finally added some chocolate looking hearts to the page, because I just love chocolate.

WOYWW#337

YES, It is Wednesday.

That is great for 2 reasons, one the week is in half and the weekend is just around the corner and two and most important I can snoop around desks from fellow crafters around the globe (don’t know what I’m talking about go check Julia’s place out here).

So, what is on my workdesk on this wednesday, well, actually not that much.

We celebrated my son’s 6^th birthday on Sunday with the family and needed an extra table, hence I shifted everything from my craft table. Since then I haven’t had much time or energy to do a lot of crafting.  What you can see is the start of a canvas inspired by the owl from Julia last week (thx)

I got a lot of remarks on the great space I have available for crafting and that is true. So I wanted to share some pictures of the complete space, not only my desk.

As you can see it is total chaos.

I share the space with my son, his side looks like this

And mine like this

BUT although this is a great space, I’m counting down to move all my stuff to my new craft room in the attic. All year my DH has been working hard to create this wonderful space

Now the builders need to do their work, the staircase should be ready tomorrow, next week flooring and then the painters.

So I hope to move by year end, I’m very busy with sketching and planning how everything should go and my Ikea shopping list is ever growing.

Now I'm off for some desk hopping, till next time, bye.

fireworks

This page for the weekly CraftBarn challenge actually started as another project I’m currently working on, more will follow in a later post.

I first did some collaging with gelli prints, then came some stamping  

and then suddenly I saw fireworks in the page, just needed to add a crowd watching.

WOYW#336

Goodmorning curious, nosy people (and that is meant in a good way)
It is wednesday again and I'm lucky to have a day off of work because it is Remembrance Day.
And double lucky because wednesday is the day we get a peek at the desks of fellow crafters, not familiar with the concept, hop on over to Julia Dunnit's blogspot to find out all about it.
So what is happening on my desk today, let me show you

and here are some close ups

This is my very first attempt at coloring a magazine picture, didn't turn out like I wanted, but think I'm going to use it anyway and fight the urge to throw it away. Will need lots more tutorials and practice though.

Here I am trying to figure out what to do with this week's challenge over at The Craft Barn, fireworks.
Thanks for passing by and now I'm going on a trip around the world from workdesk to workdesk.

patchwork book

If you don’t already know, you know now, I am an absolute horder, I even keep my used kitchen towels.

What on earth can you do with those I hear you say? Well, for one you can use them in your collages, they have nice color and texture.

Or you can turn them into little canvases.

Here is a step by step (credit for Jennibellie, find her tutorial here)

You take a paper towel, apply a generous amount of glue all over the surface, fold it and smear all the airbubbles out with your fingers (o yeah, did I mention that this might get a little messy)

Repeat, so add some more glue and fold.

Now you have your little square canvas, let it dry (this can take a couple of days) and you'll have a sturdy little canvas.

Once dry I place some heavy books on them to flatten them.

My idea was to stitch 4 squares to form a patchwork page, once I have made all the pages I will bind them together with the Bind-it all.

But as you can see my stitching is rubbish, so I thought maybe I can staple them together

But didn't really like the look, so I just glued them to a page, this way however I do loose the back of them.

In each square I will be writing funny stuff my son tells or does.

Some examples
What are we eating tonight? veal. you mean the veal has laid some meat. euh, no, we are eating the veal. That's not nice, the veal should grow up first and become very old.
or we were playing a guessing game and I gave the description of a car: we have 2 of them and they have 4 wheels, he answers the garbage bins :-)

WOYWW#.335

Hello and welcome to my desk or actually I should say welcome to our desk, because this week I'm sharing it with my son. He has his own desk but currently we are working on the same project. We are following the free workshop from Carolyne Dube permission to play. 

It is so awesome to see how free he still is in his play, no limitations in his imagination or abilities, hopefully it stays like that.
here is a close up of his pages in process

and of mine

Thanks for stopping by and I will visit as many other desks as possible because it is just plain old fun to see other people's workdesk. If you want to find more out about WOYWW, check out Julia Dunnit spot here who hosts this awesome bloghop.

grey and owl

I believe this is my quickest entry for the calendar challenge so far. This month the prompts are grey and owl.
I mixed up some grey paint and scraped it on my page with a card.

Next I stencilled a black forest

Totally how I imagined it, my winter forrest at night.
I stamped a doodled owl on white paper and colored him in and stamped 3 other owls on some gelli prints. These give color to the page, but I decided it needed some more bling, so I added some gold and silver embossing.

My son Kasper (next week turning 6) sat next to me and also colored the owl and even fuzzy cut him, this is his result: