Project 45: Cupcake birthday cards

My mom got me this great cupcake punch and I thought I’d have a bit of a play with it. I tried a few different layouts but this is the one I liked the best. It roughly follows a Mojo sketch that I attempted a while ago. 

I punched a whole whack of the cupcakes to start in pink, green, blue and brown. I’ll add more colors as I think of more layouts but for now I was using colors that I thought would coordinate together and match my glitter background papers.

The headline one is really sweet and the blue and green makes it gender-neutral (I think). Is glitter paper gender neutral? Hmm. Maybe not. 

This one is my first version where I tried mixing the tops and bases.  I’m not sure I like it as the papers are a bit busy.

 

I think brown and pink is a good combo and both convincing cupcake colors. The pink glitter paper was too in-your-face-pink so I’ve gone for a nice white-grey.

I’ve also been doing loads of Christmas cards, I’m planning a Christmas update in the next few days so I’ll let you know what I come up with! 

Project 44: Card stock canvas decoration

I saw this canvas project on Pinterest a while back and have been looking for the time to dedicate to it. I have a few days off and thought this would be a good time to give it a try. 

First I went out and got a canvas. Wilkinsons sells printed canvases cheaper than you can buy a blank one in an art store so I bought one with a photo on it for £5 and painted over it. 

After getting the color I wanted (about 5 layers of mixed paint which, of course, were a slightly different shade each time because I never remembered the proportion of white to blue to green to black) I let that dry for about 3 hours. (I used a plastic bag over a gym mat as my crafting area after getting paint on the bathtub last time I tried to "safely" paint in the bathroom.) The paint looked streaky when I stopped but it dried really evenly.

I had cut out the petals the day before; be warned that this is tedious. About two thirds of it is the Latte Matstock by DCWV and the rest is comprised of scraps.  I did a loose arrangement to make sure it would all fit. 

Then I got to bust out my handy dandy glue gun. This wasn’t as time-consuming as I thought it would be. 

And there we have it (see headline photo). I’m going to hang this on the wall in the bedroom (even though it matches nothing) to jazz that room up a bit. 

PS I have some new Christmas designs as well so I just need to get another post up this week. Stay tuned!

Project 43: Black and white dove cards

 

 This week I thought I’d make a set of cards for my friend. Her name in Spanish means “dove” and so I thought I’d play on that as the theme for the cards.

 

I chose a monochromatic color scheme as I thought this would lift the cards from simple birds to more fashionable cards.

The headline card is my favorite – I ran a vintage-style scallop border punch along the edge and then duplicated this in white to create a sort of lace effect. I got a new set of candies in black, grey and white with silver stripes and I think they add to the 30s feel of the punch. I liked the text print on the bird, this will definitely suit my friend’s taste. 

I have a corner punch that matches the border punch above so I used this on a white square to frame a different bird. I thought this one was simple enough with black candies.

Next I used the same grey striped paper as the bird punch with a scallop in white to highlight it. Different colored candies on the bottom. 

To complete the set: a little love-bird style design with some spotty ribbon.

I wanted to have a bit more of a challenge so I made her birthday card in a similar style, using paper cutting techniques I picked up on a course last year. It took me a long time as I’m out of practice but I thought the simple little design with a similar bird works well.