A fabric challenge

The pages for the Cocoa Daisy online crop continue with this page for the challenge from Martha Bonneau to use fabric on a layout. I may have one or two pieces of fabric (!!!) in my craft room and so I took a charm pack with me to the crop at the weekend.

If I had been at home then I would have cut the squares neatly with my rotary cutter and stitched them on the sewing machine. However, as I was away from home, I ripped the fabric into squares and hand stitched them onto the page. This took longer but I love how it's turned out. It definitely adds a cosier touch to page about snuggling in sleeping bags.

I was very pleased to find a pack of Cosmo Cricket S'more Love chipboard in a sale recently as I have been thinking about buying some just to have this little tent to go on a camping page.

Cosmo Cricket - Part 2

Here is another layout I've made with my prize pack from Cosmo Cricket. I started out with some more of the gorgeous 8x8 Creative Girl papers and I thought I wanted to put them on this pale yellow background but it didn't look quite right. I brushed on some watered down gesso across the middle of the page and around the edge and it all started to come together.

I love adding texture to my pages and this time I used light modelling paste which I pushed through some star shaped sequin waste. I used a little piece of the sequin waste itself too, just to the left of the photo.

I also added a tiny piece of net to add a little more texture.

I coloured the Cosmo Cricket wood charms from the prize pack with my watercolours and stuck them down, along with some uncoloured wood stars and sequins, on top of the lines of machine stitching.

I love the little group of embellishments in the bottom right hand corner. I got to use a tiny piece of the oh-so-sparkly self-adhesive glitter sheet. Glittery goodness!

I love Cosmo Cricket!

A few weeks ago I was really excited to win a prize on the Cosmo Cricket blog when they were celebrating their lovely new products. This was the parcel I received in the post - so many lovely things! It included an 8x8 pad of their Creative Girl patterned papers, 2 sets of wood charms, tiny text stickers, self adhesive glitter sheets, a project hanger and a "Show Topper" lid.

The page above is the first thing I have made with the lovely new products. I really like the papers as they are light and quite neutral in colour (apart from that gorgeous pink) and so they make beautiful backgrounds.

I stitched my title by drawing around some alphabet stickers on scrap paper and then placing the paper on the layout before piercing the stitching guide with a pin.

Here is some of the self adhesive glitter sheets peeking out through a punched strip I made using a craft punch...

I love how this camera stamp came out (from Cosmo Cricket's Sweet Disposition set) after I painted some watercolour onto it...

Come back again soon to see what else I've made.

A circus double

I've been missing scrapbooking for the past week and finally found time to sit at my desk and get a double page done. It's been ages since I made a double. These photos have been sitting at the bottom of the box I take to crops and knew I had to get them on a page. My starting point was inspired by the quilt in my last post. The fabrics are from a collection from a while ago by Cosmo Cricket. I dug out all my old Cosmo Cricket papers and put this page together.

I have managed to use items from the following Cosmo Cricket collections...
Hello Sunshine and Storytime - Patterned papers
Pixie-Licious - Borders
Garden Variety - Patterned paper and borders
Jack's World - Stamps
Nutmeg - Ready Steady Chip alphabet
plus some Tiny Type stickers.

I used some more card Candi again as I thought it was perfect for this page - a bit like juggling balls.

A Snorkel quilt

A little while ago I found a pack of fat quarters from The Snorkel range by Cosmo Cricket. I love the Cosmo Cricket fabrics and I'm particularly pleased they are now working with Moda so the designs are much easier to get hold of. This was one of their older fabric ranges so I was really happy to find it. I knew they would be the perfect fabrics to make a quilt for my friends' new baby boy, who lives near the seaside.

I started with the background and picked out all the blue and fishy fabrics. I cut them into 3" strips and stitched them together.

I used bondaweb to stick down the fishy shapes, eyes and bubble circles. A zig zag stitch was used to go around each fish using navy thread to make the fish stand out.

Every time I make a quilt I try a new technique and this time it was my quilting. I'm trying to get a bit more inventive with my quilting as I usually just quilt in straight lines across the whole piece. I used my darning (free motion) foot and pinned card circles in various sizes onto the quilt as a stitching guide. I really like this quilting technique and I definitely think it adds to the finished look of the project. I used more navy thread and the darning foot to stitch around the bubbles and to add details to the fishes.

I've been trying to take better photos of my quilts, usually by taking them out into my garden. However I had to lay this one on the floor as I was going to see my friend and wanted to take the quilt but it has been raining  here for weeks - so outdoor photoshoots were out of the question.

My friends love the quilt and their little boy's bedroom already has a seaside theme - yay!

Crafting Sun-rays

We've had some lovely days of winter sunshine recently with clear blue skies and frosty ground. It seems like a great time of year for some sunny yellow crafting. Julie Kirk is running a month of yellow inspiration over on her fabulous "notes on paper" blog. Julie has lots of suggestions for yellow scrapbooking, cardmaking and wearing yellow too.

I've joined in with a bit of yellow card making this week. I have recently finished two Maisy Mouse cot quilts for friends who have had baby girls and I wanted to send some cards with the quilts. The top card uses the lovely bright colours from Cosmo Cricket's Delovely collection.

The card below uses more Cosmo Cricket papers from the Togetherness collection with some Material Girl stickers. This card is for a family who have a little boy and now have a baby girl, so I think the birds work really well.


Here's one of the Maisy Mouse quilts which was inspired by a pattern on the Moda Bake Shop blog. It's a great place for fantastic free quilt patterns. I'm particularly excited by this one here and I hope to be attempting it later in the year.

More yellow on the back of the quilt...

I've made another quilt similar to this one before, but I still love it.

Crafty cards

A couple of cards from me today. The top one is for my friend and her new baby girl using Cosmo Cricket's "Material Girl" papers. The one below is a simple thank you card made with Prima loveliness :) .

Delovely

I liked my paper flowers so much and I couldn't wait to add them to a layout. I made the "Butterfly Girl" layout above and tried to add the flower but it didn't look right. I made the layout below and the flower works well on this page. My friend Amy pointed me in the direction of Page Maps, which helped me put these pages together. They have some great sketches on there and I like all the little details they include. The papers are all from the Delovely collection by Cosmo Cricket.

Lovely paper flowers

I've been thinking about adding texture to my pages and I found a tutorial for water distressed cardstock flowers on the "Such a Pretty Mess" blog. I was particularly impressed with this tutorial as I have seen similar tutorials like the beginning of this one using punches, but I don't have those punches. If you scroll down she shows how to make these flowers just using scissors to cut out shapes. I LOVE these flowers! It probably helps that I used the beautiful zingy Delovely papers by Cosmo Cricket.

Creating cards

This Saturday I went to my local crop and got to play all day making cards. I took along my new toy - a Sizzix Texture Boutique embossing machine - to try out. I really like this tool (and I like it even more that I got for £6.50 on ebay!). I used Cosmo Cricket supplies to make some "Hi" cards as I have decided to put pen to paper and start writing letters to my friends.

Here are the Thank You cards I made (note the embossing in the backgrounds) which are the last few I need to write from Christmas.

I actually put time aside this year to make a Valentines card, instead of throwing one together last minute. I really like this one.

And finally a birthday card for my Father-in-law.

Sweet Pea

I'm slowly getting back into scrapbooking after the busyness of Christmas and I've had this photo in my scrapping stack since last summer. I knew I wanted to make a page using Cosmo Cricket's Garden Variety papers when my son got a T-shirt with "Sweet Pea" written on it for his first birthday (as it's his nickname). I'm really like the paper frills and I will be doing that again on more pages! I also got to use my favourite Martha Stewart punch - the embossed button.

Christmas mini books

I can finally show you some projects that I made as Christmas projects. Every Christmas I make minibooks for parents and in-laws with the best photos from the year. With increasing numbers of children and increasing photography skills, these little books seem to get bigger and bigger!

Here's a look at some of the pages. I used a Maya Road calendar set to add the dates to the pages (the scalloped kraft ciclres on the pages) and a set of Cosmo Cricket papers.



I also made a couple of travel scrapbooks for some adventuring freinds, who helpfully upload their photos to Facebook! It's a challenge scrapping someone else's holiday photos (which weren't labelled). I managed to add some titles, with the help of Google, and I made lots of journalling spots with a scalloped circle punch and a journalling stamp so that they could add their own notes to the photos.

Here's the book I made of my friend's photos from Goa...