Craft Stamper Project

My grey board frame has been published in the new edition of Craft Stamper magazine. I have not seen it myself, but have had a couple of lovely congratulations emails from my friends Chrissie and Thelma letting me know. Also Paula has commented on my blog. Thanks! Here are a couple of 'tasters'. If you want to see the full project, go grab a look at the magazine.

Unfortunately I can't show anymore as the frame is with Craft Stamper, sorry.

For those of you who get the mag, 'hope you like it'. It should be available in the shops next week.

Sue x

Scrapping!!!!!!

I have had a great day today, 'scrapping'. Just for me, to keep for myself and look back on in years to come. And do you know what? I have thoroughly enjoyed myself. I haven't excelled in style, techniques or designs, but just made 3 simple layouts of my 'little man'. I became aware whilst tossing and turning in bed last night (due to my still painful ribs), that in just a week he will be one and I have only done about 5 pages of him, how bad is that? so I made it my aim to start some today. Here's the end results.

We had a picnic in the garden here, and he loved it, just sitting around on a picnic mat, chomping away on bits and pieces and swilling it all back with a beaker of tea.

Here he is with 'Grumps' in the garden. He loves to smell the flowers, stamp on the pebbles and waft his hand in the pond, trying to catch the fish! Oh and the page is meant to be wonky, lol, however looking at it now I wish I had kept it straight, but ne' mind.

The second page of the double spread, taken on the same day.

This is a close-up of the flower with an altered button for the centre. I also found an old faded album pale pink, not suitable for 'little man' so am attemting to alter it. I have gesso'd and given it one coat of paint, but it seems to be not drying off too well. I am going to leave it over night to see if it will be worth the time and effort, I'll let you know the outcome.

Back to the bungalow now. Looks as though we will be delayed due to shall we say 'lack of communication', but hopefully it won't be too long. This is a photo of the overgrown drive and the massive tree in the background which we have to take down. It is a eucalyptus, and it is preventing a gorgeous oak tree from growing to its true beauty, so unfortunately it has to go. I am really looking forward to having trees in the garden. I'm sure Josh will be up 'em before we know it!

I think we might have our hands full for a good few years don't you?

Sue x

Memory Lane wall plaque

I just love the quaint look of the new 'Memory Lane' house stamps from Crafty Individuals. In view of our imminent house move, I was inspired to make this shabby little wall plaque.

I used an off cut of grey board for the plaque and altered it with gesso and various subtle ink pads. I overstamped all over with Crafty Individuals large swirl CI-182 in pale green staz-on, then in two ofthe corners with brown.

I began by stamping , colouring and cutting out some houses, then made some assorted hearts. The large one is corrugated card, painted and tinted with ink pads.

The one above is a punch, embossed and coloured to suit.

Another two are made of clay, which can be quite fragile, and the others of paper clay which is nice and flexible, and unbreakable!

Finally added the flowers, gems and sentiment 'there's no place like home' (cos let's face it, there isn't) from plate CI-280. Thanks again Jean and Malcolm for the opportunities you give me to play with all your new products. I have certainly had some fun!

Sue x

CI-277 cards and our future new home.

Well my ribs are still hurting, but I have made the most of it by using some of my new Crafty Individuals stamps. I only managed 3 1/2 cards, so here are the three I managed to complete.



All of the 'Victorian Children' images here are on CI-277 plate, along with the words/sentiments. It really is excellent value for money you can get so much out of it. I started by making various ATC sized backgrounds using paint, torn paper, gesso, then overstamped the swirl from CI-236 to add further detail, using pale chalk inks. On the first card I added a backdrop of a distressed tag, a tiny tag to which I added the sentiment, then added the image, flower, leaves abd button to embellish it. The second card had a chalked background behind the ATC, created by chalking, then overstamping with CI-213, crackle background.The oval is a punch, again stamped with the swirl stamp around the edges and the image added before finishing off with the embellishments. Card 3 uses painted corrugated card as a background which was ripped to reveal the original colour. I rounded the corners of the ATC, overstamped again with the swirl, and finished off with a sentiment, bit of ribbon, leaves and a flower. This is one of my all time favourite plates so far, I feel I will never tire of it............

OUR FUTURE NEW (well old) HOME

Well here it is, the bungalow of our dreams....... Well we are still dreaming, and will be for a long time as it really does need a massive amount doing to it. I mean massive amount too, both inside and out, but we are really looking forward to seeing the transformation, although it may be slow..... I will be posting its progress on my blog and as soon as we get the keys will post the 'before' pictures of the inside. It will be a permanent reminder of how it looked and to record the hurdles we come across.

It is in the village of Healing, just a few miles down the road from where we are now. I never ever thought I would venture out of town as I have spent all of my life living just 10 minutes from the hustle and bustle of the town centre. We feel that the time is right for the challenge now, as the girls are both settled, the weddings are out of the way and Paul is still young enough to do the work himself,


This is the back of the bungalow. It is very plain, but hopefully we will be able to get it looking a bit more interesting. The garden is quite big, and a lot of it is overgrown as you will see from the following photo's.

The grass near the back of the house has been kept, but the further into the garden you go, the more unkept it becomes. You can just see the bungalow through the trees on the photo above.

There are so many trees and shrubs, it is like a secret garden. Josh is gonna just love it playing hide and seek in here, mind you, I will be keeping an eye out for hazards!

I am hoping to use the green house when we get sorted.

You can see how the garden is more overgrown here.

Even so there are some lovely established shrubs which we will hopefully trim back and keep.

But some unfortunately will have to go.

Believe it or not the photo below shows 'the garage', obviously we will be ripping it down but it is so 'cute' in its own little way.

Hope you have enjoyed the first instalment. I'll be back with photo's of the BIG trees soon.

Sue x

Finally a bit of crafting....

What with the Weddings, work and organising to move house, I have been a real busy bee of late. I spent most of today crafting with a few of the new CI items Jean and Malcolm sent recently. I challenged myself to make something using just white card stock, the CI 'Seaside' background paper book and the new 'Seaside' stamp plate, CI-278. Here's the result....

I cut the card into a strip and folded it to create a tiny accordion fold book. It measures just 8cm x 5cm. If you look at it next to the 6" paper pad, you will get more of an idea of its size.

This is the top view......

And the front page.

I kept the reverse side 'plain' and just added different background papers as shown above.

Then cut, stamped, coloured, chalked and ripped to create little mini pages as above.

A bit of a closer view. It is amazing what you can achieve by just using 3 items. I found it very relaxing folding, cutting, colouring and collaging the elements together.

As I have mentioned before, I love working with CI stuff because of the amount of words, sayings and sentiments you can find. I am hoping to do a couple more bits with the 'Victorian Children' plate CI-277 tomorrow, fingers crossed.

On Sunday, Faye and Ash went off to Meadow Hall shopping for pressies for JJ's first birthday. Can you believe that in just a fortnight he will be ONE?????? We had the pleasure of having him for the day, and during the afternoon took a drive to 'Waltham Windmill' for a bit of play time and an ice cream.

Josh seems so grown up, walking around, investigating all sorts of things including the swinging sign outside the sweet shop.

Here he is with Grumps on his way to find me, I though a game of hide and seek was in order. He was in fits of laughter when I kept jumping out at him from behind the trees, until I had a little mishap. I failed to see a 6" stump of an old tree and fell flat out, and ended up in agony for the rest of the day. Eventually I had to go to A and E as I thought I had broken a rib it was so painful. Examinations and X rays showed no breaks, thank goodness but I am still in agony with it, hence my crafting time. I just hope it gets a bit easier soon, we have a house to do up!!!

Sue x

Crafty Individuals new releases.

These little beauties popped happily through my letter box today, courtesy of Jean and Malcolm of Crafty Individuals. I absolutely love them ........

The thing I just love so much about CI stamps is that they nearly all have words of some description on them. My favourites from these are

Happiness is time spent with a friend......

Friendship can not be measured, only treasured........

There's no place like home........

and I do like to be beside the seaside, I do like to be beside the sea.........

Finally another book of gorgeous background papers, 'The Seaside', which co-ordinate so well with the rubber stampsCI 272 and CI 278.

All I need to do now is find some spare time to craft, what with helping out at school, two weddings and now moving house I have not seemed to have any 'me time'.

For the sake of showing something creative, here's a couple of pages I did a while ago in my altered book, and never managed to blog.

Oh and I think my project will be in the next issue of Craft Stamper, I think it is out on the first Friday of August, I'll keep you posted. It's a lovely little frame full of Crafty Individual images.

Till then, bye for now.........

Sue xxx