Calling all Crafters....Coated Card Bargain!!

To Do: find some decent coated card that wont bleed my promarkers!!
ACHIEVED!!!

I went searching the craft forums looking for some recommendations on what type of card to use - the name that kept cropping up was Ryman - so I googled and found the website. This card has been recommeded for Promarkers and Copics, so it cant be bad!! It is coated so enables the pens to blend easier than matt card, which sucks up the ink like a sponge.

Their card is on a 3 for 2 offer this week AND for this week only they are offering free next day delivery on ALL orders!!! This was an offer too good not to take!!! I bought 3 packs of 50 A5 white coated card for £7.98. bargain!! Personally thought I would be less wasteful with the A5, I should be able to get 2 images on each piece so SHOULD end up with less 'scrap' card.

The next day delivery is on all orders completed before 5PM. Wooooo!! thats me!! Cant wait to use it - gonna be weird seeing my digis with white eyes.... so used to seeing the skin tone bleed up into them!! LOL!!

Also - on a non promarker note - I think I may be doing another craft fair!! Its a Christmas Fair, its at the village hall opposite my house! (*shudders* its only August....shouldn't be thinking about christmas yet) My OH brought the poster home yesterday to show me and it says there are still stalls available. will look into the price/day etc... if I do go ahead with it I think I might make some of the matchbox advent calenders! :)

hope you take advantage of the free postage and 3 for 2!!!
Speak soon!xxx

Vintage and Handmade Fair, 10th December 2011

So, I got up stupidly early on Saturday 10th December to make sure I had everything packed. 7.45am I was ready and packed the car and headed to my friend Meryls house. Mel had provided everything for my table to make it look beautiful and had offered to come to the hall and help me set up. When we got there the Hall was set up with about 45 tables downstairs and the rest upstairs. We hunted around in the main room looking for a table with my name on it. Disappointment set in as I realised I was upstairs. We lugged everything up and there was my table, in a room with 6 others. We set my table up and it looked beautiful!! My sister arrived in time to get changed into our 'Pinkys Cards' t-shirts and then the customers started coming in. There was a good trickle of customers for most of the day, but there were also big periods when there was no one apart from us sellers up there!!

(the beautiful Mel - Home Grown Bride, looking very proud of the table!!) 

Apparently our fair was on the same weekend that Woburn and Bletchley had got their handmade fairs on too. On top of that, Milton Keynes had got the Red Bull racing cars down, racing around the city centre, this meant there were a load of roads closed for the racing cars to use.  knowing this now, I understand why the fair was a quiet one!!!

HOWEVER I think that for my 1st fair I did bloody well!! I made nearly £60 and gave out LOADS of business cards!! I even had some interest for wedding stationary!!! so I am very positive from this experience!! I met some lovely people and have the beginnings of hopefully some good friendships.

my favourite part of the fair:

a couple of girls were browsing at my stall and I asked them if they were looking for anything in particular. 1 girl said she was looking for a card for her grandfather. So I chatted with her about what sort of things he likes and after a minute or so she stood up looking disheartened. she said he had some sort of problem where he could only really see the colour yellow clearly. I routed around in the boxes behind my stall and pulled out 2 cards I had made in yellow. her face lit up. It was the same design as the cards she had been looking through, I had done them in all non Christmassy colours but hadn't put them out on display. she gave me a huge grin and told me that it would make her grandfathers Christmas receiving a card he can see clearly. that made me feel so warm and fuzzy inside!!!

I'm looking forward to the next fair, one where i wont have to focus SO much on Christmas cards! My tattoo range went down a storm so will have to look into investing in a few more Bombshell stamps methinks!!!

OK, well that's it for now. will try and blog again before Christmas - have slipped a disc though so I'll have to see how I'm feeling!

Big Love - Speak soon!xxxxx

Prep for the Fair and a Vintage beauty...

Hello!!!

I have been a bit quiet on the blogging front recently - mostly because I have been working my socks off to prepare stock for the Vintage and Handmade Fair I am selling at tomorrow!!!! I have done 100 Christmas cards and am now working towards finishing the non Christmassy cards, I have done 51 so far. This is the 1st craft fair I have ever done and it is safe to say that I am royally poopin myself about it!!! Who knew selling cards would be so scary!!! This is an idea of what the stall is going to look like - 

The fair is at Millmead Hall, Wolverton, Milton Keynes - 10th December, 10am - 4pm. It is going to be an awesome day out, just in time for any Christmas shopping you need to do. There is over 50 stalls including MINE!!!!! Here's a little sneak peek at some of the stuff I'll be selling....

On a non-Christmas fair note....

I took some of my cards into work and a colleague asked if I could do a special card for her daughters 16th birthday. Of course, I said! After listening to what the birthday girl was into I did a quick sketch of the card I had in mind.

I sat down and started on the circle that was going to make the easel part of the card. Quite quickly my design evolved from an easel card into a standard single fold to give the design more space.  I have used a Kraft card base, Tim Holtz Vintage Shabby cardstock and elegant flourish die, some Prima flowers, sticky pearls and some buttons. The numbers are from Tim's Carnivale alphabet that I have triple embossed using silver embossing powder. The pink cardstock was torn into a square, screwed up, flattened out and sanded. I think it creates a lovely vintagey look.

This  is my 1st vintage style card, believe it or not!!! I'm shocked that I have managed to go this long without making one - Vintage is EVERYWHERE atm!!! I think it turned out really well!! I'm super pleased with it and hope the birthday girl will be too.

Would love to know what you think of it!!! please leave a comment!

So that's me done for another post, will write again after the craft fair - hopefully will be taking lots of piccys!!!

Speak soon. Big Love.xxx

Matchbox Advent Calender

I fell in love with a christmas tree shaped advent calender in paperchase last year (and being told that i wasn't allowed to spend £20 buying it) i was on the hunt for something similarlly amazing this year. i came across the advent calender from Kaiser crafts whilst flicking through the latest Cards and Papercraft magazine...i have fallen in love again!! however... i don't want to spend alot of money to then have to spend more cash on stuff to decorate it with. i had a quick look around on google and saw a few versions of a 'matchbox advent calender' and thought it was really cute (and a LOT cheaper than the kaiser one) so decided to give it a go. I'm not going to do a step by step tutorial... but i have put on lots of photos. if you have any questions, lemme know, I'll answer them as best i can.

I found using double sided tape worked really well for this project. I'm quite impatient and glue takes too long to dry. lol.

1 layer gives you 12 boxes, so for the 24 you need to make 2 of these layers. you could make this advent calender with boxes you have made yourself to give each box a bit more depth but not only am I impatient, I'm lazy too :) in case you're wondering - I gave all the matches to my friend who is a science teacher... those Bunsen burners don't light themselves!!

I found that covering each tray in paper made them very tight in their box, so I used promarkers to colour the tray so they blended in with the rest of the calender when they were pulled out.

I did originally think of using brads as tiny little handles to open each drawer with...however, I found that if you didn't have longish fingernails to get behind the brad it was quite hard to open!!! so I decided to use bakers twine looped though some holes and knotted in the front. The matchbox itself isn't made of very think card so I reinforced the front of the tray with a strip of thick board and then used my crop-o-dile to punch the holes. 

I used the same technique here for the numbers as I did for colour coding my promarkers. check out the post 'promarker and stamp storage' for details.

I used clear cellotape to attach each stack to the one next to it, I did this on the top and bottom of each set of 3. I think when I make the next one I will cover all around each stack of 3 matchboxes with patterned paper rather than just the exposed side. Although it doesn't look bad, I think by covering all sides in paper will give a neater finish.  

the top and bottom are made out of the same thick board i used to reinforce the trays, cut slightly larger than the matchboxes.

I trimmed the bakers twine down to just behind the knot, giving a neater finish - also I was finding that the longer ones were getting caught in the tray underneath when it was opened and closed :)

so that's my finished advent calender!! I have to say I am VERY happy with how it turned out.... super cute!! 

please leave a comment and let me know what you think!xxxx