Vellum Flowers

 

Going a bit outside my comfort zone, I decided to try and make some flowers for my cards using some lilac coloured vellum from my stash.

The silver ink on vellum worked well, but the gold is not so noticeable.

Independent Shops ..... Craftability

 

I am lucky that nearby in Ipswich, Suffolk, there is a wonderful independent craft shop called Craftability

When I popped in there on Saturday, I picked up 2 sets of spellbinder nested dies for the bargain price of only £3.00 each! That was because they had been used at one of their workshops and were not on the original packaging 

I also went to the Ipswich branch of WH Smiths that was closing down and found these pots of Dovecraft flowers reduced from £1.50 to 25p each. They had the date of 2011 on the back, so had been sitting around in a stockroom somewhere for 15 years!

So that seemed a good excuse to sit in the craft room and marry the die cuts and flowers together in some birthday cards.

And use up a few old peel-offs too!

A Small Bit of Stash Busting

Sorry for the absence from my blog -I was away in London visiting ComicCon and the Doctor Who Symphonic Spectacular. However, I have had a chance for a little crafting since then.

These cards were both made with bits of paper that have been sitting in my stash for at least 5 years - I really must stop buying new papers, as I  probably have enough to keep me going for many years yet!!

A small dent in the stash

I've had this paper sitting at the bottom of the pile for a very long time - at least 5 years, so I'm glad I finally got an idea of how to use it!  I find the larger patterned papers difficult to accommodate and prefer smaller regular patterns.

How old is your stash?

I know we can't help hording  crafting stuff, hoping it will become useful one day!

I came across these die cut flowers lurking at the bottom of a box. They were cut out of scrap paper, when I first bought my Cuttlebug. I remember that this die came free with it. Can't remember exactly when that was, but it was probably 2008 or 2009 - so these bits have been waiting around for a least 6 years - will I every use them up???

What is your oldest piece of crafting stash?

Recycling Drinks Cans into Flowers!

My daughter had several projects to complete in the school holidays - one of which was to make something out of recycled objects.

Her first thought was to use drinks cans( we have plenty of those to recycle!) and make a windmill. But after checking it out on Google, they seemed quite difficult to make, so we tried flowers instead!

We cut out different sizes of blooms with the spellbinder blossom set and decorated some of the layers with glitter glue and smooch paints.

Then we fasten them together with a brad and sellotaped the flower to some old knitting needles.

Leaves were cut out of green cardboard.

The vase was made out of an empty bottle of Aspalls cyder ( my favourite) with the label covered with a piece of recycled envelope and finished off with an old cerise ribbon 

Scraps Away!

I have several folders full of those poly pockets containing the left over pieces from various collections of papers - many of which were freebies from different magazines. 

The stickers and scraps of papers for these 3 cards, I think, were from a Making Cards Magazine collection - probably at least 2 or 3 years old!

I challenged myself to use them all up and after a bit of playing around, found they toned nicely with some large Papermania Capsule die cut flower shapes (which had been kicking around for a while too!) - so that just leaves about 30 more pockets of scraps to use up!!

HunkyDory Flowers!

I got a bit carried away with the free papers that came with this months Cardmaking & Papercraft Magazine!. I have made another 6 or 7 cards since this photo and still have some papers left, that's got to be good value for money. 

They are on nice quality paper and card with foiling and the decoupage really makes them stand out

With a little help from my friends!

Bottledolphin

Dumbo

These cards were all made incorporating ATC's made by other people that I have swapped with. 

They have kindly agreed that they can be used (or upcycled!) to make new cards, which will go to my local Cancer care charity to help raise funds. 

Juliaamy

Black Vinyl Stickers

I've had these black vinyl floral silhouette stickers kicking around in my stash for ages, so it was about time to find a use for them!

These are a couple of cards that I am sending to ex-craftrakkers over on craftbubble.

They also helped to use up some pink and black scraps of paper too!