It’s been a while since my last blog post. I’ve been very busy with general life things, work christmas moving house etc. So a backlog of posts to come.
So to start here’s a little card I made in November for a birthday featuring some partying Owls.
A simple make from some card stock I found in TK Maxx, button eyes and some of my ever growing collection of letter stamps.
Nail art has been a hobby of mine for a very long time I started doing painting designs on my nails as a teenager. I’ve dug out some of the earliest pictures I have from an old hard drive just when digital cameras were more widely available to the masses so the picture quality is quite poor. I think the earliest I have is from 2004 but I was painting designs from the late 90s. I may attempt to recreate some of these now that Nail Art has become much more popular and now that digital photography has greatly advanced. These were also mostly done before nail art pens were available and so most were done with paint brushes or cocktail sticks!
Stripes, Checks, Flowers and Animal Prints.
Cracks, Checks, Greek Key Style, Japanese Flowers & Bamboo
Blue Star, Zebra Tips, Big Yellow Start, Flowers, White Tree.
Spectrum, Circles, Graffiti, Swirls, Japanese Doll
Also here are some which are definitely from the 1990s. When I started painting my nails I used to always paint a fake nail as a keep sake as I didn’t have a good camera. I had them in little plastic pouches. Here’s a photo I took of them at a later dat. It’s quite a mixed bag. Some patterns have airbrushed backgrounds a few with jewel, sticker and water decal embellishments. All were done with varnish thin paint brushes and cocktail sticks.
Airbrushed Backgrounds with Black Patterns, Silver Swirls, Purple Stripes, Palm Tree Island, Silver & Red Zigzag, Black ^ White Spots, Halloween Nails, GB Flag, Blue Stripes & Circles, Lightening with Jewel, Sunburst, Silver Roses, Black & White Checks.
Some more spotty nails but with 5 bright colours dotted onto a white background. I achieved these spots using a stylus pen. They make perfect dots and are easy to wipe clean with a bit of nail varnish remover.
Inspired by a visit to and old style sweet shop with pick ‘n’ mix sweets that came in a stripy paper bag. Painted with a thin paint brush using bright pink nail varnish on white.
I tried out a new terracotta nail colour this week and was inspired to draw on a brick wall patter with Shapies. Then added a little graffiti (my SAIR tag) onto my thumb with a metallic Sharpie.
Last weekend I went to The Range for the first time. I thought it was just for home furnishings and accessories but discovered it’s also an amazing place to buy craft supplies at really great prices.
I bought this set of little stamps and washi tape. This whole lot came to approximately £5. Fantastic. :)
It seems there are a lot of new babies on the way. Here’s a simple new baby card I made.
I used some new gel stamps that I picked up from Paperchase for the spotty borders.
I coloured the stamps with some stamping pens that I found in TKMaxx. You can get some good craft bargains from there. I also used the spotty border stamp to create the pattern on the box. For the balloons I just cut out the shapes and mounted them with adhesive squares for some relief. The strings are stamped on using the same set of gel stamps. The congratulations lettering this time is from a set of stickers from HobbyCraft.
Back to Nail Art with varnish. Here’s some summery spotty nails in pastel colours with coloured tips.
I had lots of birthday cards to make in July and I was inspired by my sister-in-law’s profession in fabric and weaving to create this set of woven paper cards.
The most tricky thing was keeping the paper together whilst weaving it. In the end the best thing seemed to be to stick one end to a strip of card and then once secured onto the backing trim the edges. It did get a bit messy with the glue in some places. As usual the lettering was done with one of my stamp sets.
For the blocks I found a weave pattern via pinterest but here’s the original site Weave Pattern from Not Only Quilts
This is my first customisation of a Kid Robot Munny Vinyl Toy. I created it some time ago and have been busy editing the pictures of my step in creating it. My inspiration for the design came from the Japanese Harajuku Style. I first collected some inspiration for clothing and accessories from a couple of books I have on Japanese street fashion called Fruits by Shoichi Aoki. I also created an inspiration board which you can find on my pinterest.
