PEGS...

Well you wanted to see what the pegs would turn into, as you will see they are still pegs lol While browsing THIS BLOG
I saw a packet of decorated pegs and I just knew they would be perfect for my friend's birthday. She is trying to get her craft room organised, so hopefully these will help. the owner of the blog had very kindly also provided a box template.

first I printed off some 'categories' on patterned paper, cut out the strips,glued and sticked...

Decorate with a touch of bling and you're done.

the pegs look very yellow there, they aren't, they are just regular wood coloured pegs.

Here is the box. I printed the template once onto card and once onto patterned paper, again cut, score,fold and stick.

I then added ribbon to the front, and finally added eyelets at each side with some organza ribbon threaded thru, so the box will hang up.

I cut a panel out of the box and replaced it with acetate.

As for the match boxes...well they are all done, but they are only a third of my WOYWW52 project, the other two thirds are underway, all looking cute so far, hope they all turn out ok and on time lol

do you want a sneak preview?...do ya?...

Well here you go...and yes that is the back of my Eurovision score sheet...

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Plum and Ginger Bakewell cupcakes.

4-5 plums
3 tbspns orange marmalade
1/2 tspn ginger

6oz butter...........this bit is double the BERO recipe for bakewell tart
6oz sugar
8oz ground almonds
4oz ground rice
2 eggs

few blanched almonds

Cream the butter and sugar, add the almonds,rice and eggs, beat well.

Chop the plums, remove the stones (chop them fairly small, you want to be able to get about 5 chunks inside each cake)

Pop them in a pan with the marmalade and ginger and gently soften, keep stirring, you don't want them mushy, just softened.

Drain off the marmaladey liquid into the already creamed ingredients, mix it in.

Line a muffin tin with paper cases

pop a dollop of mixture into the bottom of each muffin case, make sure the bottom is covered,add about 5 chunks of gingery plums, top with more mixture.

they don't rise too much so you can take the mix up to fairly near the top of the cases.

top with a few blanched almonds and bang in the oven.

Gas 5 for about 20 mins or until golden.







They are super yummy.

Hello blogland, it's Wednesday again, gosh doesn't it come around quick! I seem to have been busy every day, see the cover I made for my cricut in the previous post.

Firstly let me share a photo with you of my son,he is just finishing up his Masters degree in Archaeology. Here he is talking to the BBC at Nevern Castle in South West Wales back in April, apparently he was explaining to them that he was exposing the inner face of a tower wall!



On Friday I took my new bag(the red and black one from a previous post) out for afternoon tea. Schlepping up to the village with it just didn't seem good enough for such a pretty bag, so we went out to Bettys and had tea and crumpets.



I think my bag enjoyed the outing, I certainly did.




Next a pic of my desk, now this isn't today, this is from Sunday. I was making a mini book, just as well that it was mini as I had effectively reduced my workspace down to the size of a postage stamp lol




This is the book and tin to keep it in, filled with photos from my son's 21st birthday last year.

I used BG Boxer papers and chipboard, with a tin from the £1 shop.

Bound using the BIA, I have recently seen demo videos of the Cinch Binder, oooo I do like the look of it.

the photos are from when we went out for a Indian meal. He didn't want a party, instead he went off on holiday with his friends, so we paid for that instead.

I have also made a couple of cards in the past couple of days, this one is using an outline printed and coloured in with promarkers and prisma pencils. I got the flower outline from HERE.




This one is for my niece.

Finally this is a shot of my desk right now, the pegs are leftover from a project i just finished, I can't show you yet as its for a birthday and she might see it here. The matchboxes and reels just might possibly get made into something for WOYWW 52, if I have time. They are sitting there right now taunting me to get on with it lol

thanks for visiting, have a great day.

Today I shall show you my Cricut cover. I have had a Cricut Expression for I think 3 years now, and I do love it but it does not get used every day and so does tend to get dusty. I have noticed how much more dust we get in the house since we had wooden floors put down...

When round at my friend Effie's house I noticed she had a cover over her Cricut that she had made, good idea thinks I....and here we are about 2 years later LOL

So first of all, a few weeks ago, I took some sheets of paper, lay them over the cricut, drew the shape onto the paper and faffed about with it, trimming the paper and pinning in place till it fit, next i *ahem* left it hahaha It looked great with it's tatty paper cover!!! ok so it didn't but I get bored easy, and it could wait for another day...or week...

Eventually, I took off the paper, unpinned it and cut some fabric using the paper as a pattern. My fabric was just an old off cut in the cupboard, and wasn't quite long enough, so I had to piece it.



Then I hemmed the bottom and fastened on a piece of elastic underneath at each end, this just slips over each end and keeps the cover down.


So far so good, but it looked awfully plain, the greeness looked like a meadow, which of course needed flowers.

I don't have a large flower sizzix, so i cut these flowers and leaves freehand from calico, then painted each piece with gesso, 2 coats back and front. Before painting the leaves I folded them and did a little seam from the bottom to about halfway, just to give a little dimension to them. This is not a quick job, drying takes a while, and it's boring...well ya know what they say about watching paint dry...



So onto another day, lol, I swiped the flowers and leaves with various Distress ink pads..now these wont dry on here, so you can smudge them around till you get a pleasing background colour. They do eventually dry, but are not 'set' so if you wet them the ink will come off. I then used navy stazon to add my images, using background stamps and word stamps. I also found out some flowers for the centres.

The material is not hemmed, I wanted them to look a little rough around the edges.



Next I stitched thru the 2 layers of painted calico, and the paper flower centre with some gold seed beads. I also machined around the leaves with a zigzag stitch and some gold thread. Lastly i painted the paper flower petals with shimmerz.





In the photo above you can see cording at the bottom, this is about 6-7 lengths of different fibres, twisted slightly and fed thru the machine under a zigzag stitch, again with gold thread. This binds all your fibres together and gives you a machined cord.

here they are all stitched on,by hand, to the cricut cover. The wide ends of the leaves are tucked just under the cord to hide them,then stitched, and the narrow ends are stitched down aswell, but not flat. Give the leaves a bit of height by arching them slightly and then catching down.

This is a handy compromise between using paper(too flimsy) and using patterned fabric (too restrictive in what you can do to it, ie: inking and stamping. I mean i wouldn't want to ink over expensive quilting fabric lol) the calico doesnt need hemming, will not fray further after painting, though you can hem for a neat edge if you wish. I first used this method when making birdies with Effie, you can see them HERE.

I am sure there are a thousand uses for painted calico, if you come up with one let me know.

Today I have been making purses, I followed this tutorial. First I made one to match the bag I made for my niece, they have now been posted off to her to arrive hopefully in time for her birthday. I hope she likes them, they look quite sunny, and they are all off on holiday next week so maybe the bag can go on holiday too lol



The purse has a zippered section for cash, and an open section( just behind the zip) for cards and receipts.



I liked it so much I made one to match the bag that I m keeping for myself.



Just need an excuse to actually use the bag now, popping up to the village postoffice just isn't good enough for such a pretty bag lol



Going to keep my machine out and make a dust cover for my cricut machine.

This past week has been quite busy, baking, cleaning and bag making… I thought I would show you my nice tidy craft room, won’t stay like this for long lol

Wall 1. Here are 6 large drawers filled with stuff, on top you can see printer, big shot, TV, virgin TV box and dish drainer….rescued from the kitchen and now filled with jars of ribbons and buttons. The box on the left contains card blanks and the tin on the right is Banana Frog stamps. Up above are two shelves, one storage and the top one is display. Some of the bits on the top shelf were made by my friend Effie, and she was throwing them out!! lol so I rescued them and gave them a home.



On the left of the drawers are some Perspex shelves on the wall, they hold my sizzix dies, on the floor is my sewing machine and my recycle box.



On the right of the drawers is another wall mounted board with hooks in it for templates and cricut cutting mats.



Wall 2. Here is my table, and another display shelf. On either side of the table is a single wardrobe.

The left wardrobe contains paper and cardstock; it also has 2 green Ikea boxes on the top.

The right wardrobe is full of boxes of fabric, stuffing, Vilene, threads, bubble wrap, wrapping paper and punches. It also has 2 green Ikea boxes up top.

Under the table are 2 sets of drawers, they roll out on wheels they are all full of wood mounted stamps.

This week I have sorted most of my unmounted stamps out, they used to be in 3 huge boxes, now most of them are in cd cases, I just need a couple of Ikea cd racks to keep them in.

Wall 3. Here is the single bed for my son when he is home, it’s also where I sit while I type this and watch TV. Under the bed are 2 enormous Ikea under bed boxes, they are both full of wool, knitting accessories, yarns and seed beads.

Above the curtain rail is a nylon cord on which I have hung tags that I have received in swaps.

To the left of the window are some more Perspex shelves with sizzix alphas on them, guarded by a menagerie of small toy animals lol

Wall 4. Here is the bookcase, it has 12 cubed sections, the bottom 4 are hidden by the bed, but I can assure you they are just as full as the ones you can see. There are approx 280 art/craft related books in there. Next to this is my cd rack, with real music cds not stamps lol

Finally what used to be the airing cupboard and water tank cupboard, we now have a small boiler in the attic so the tanks were taken out and I quickly filled up the cupboard lol. The top section is full of bedding; the main section is full of Ikea boxes. One of the boxes is still full of unmounted stamps, the rest have magazine clippings for journaling, and stickers,rub ons,chipboard etc.

In front of the cupboard is a rolling set of drawers, on top sits my cricut and ipod dock. ..and so back to the beginning, you can see there is no door….We took the bedroom doors off when we started to renovate, about 4 years ago and it would see they are going to be the last things to go back on. The black flowers you can see are giant stickers from Ikea on my bedroom wall.

So, all nice and tidy, took me 2 whole days to get it looking like this hahahaha but I did have time to spend a day at my friend’s house making bags. We both made this super cute bow bag…for a change I am actually keeping this one.

Yesterday I made this bag, for my niece for her birthday. If I can find a zipper I will make a little coin purse to match it.

So what is actually on my desk??? Well it’s a dragon, not a really real dragon, that would be silly, and no doubt expensive to feed… this is a wooden dragon model, belonging to my son. It has kicked around for years, gradually having more and more appendages broken off. I had the foresight to save most of them, so now he is glued back together. I am painting him white then I will decorate him with patterned paper.

Have a great day, thanks for looking.

Hello again, some more journal pages for you. This is a 365 day journal, normally I wouldn't commit to anything like this, but as this year I turned 40, I wanted to do this diary type journal to commemorate this year. I found this sketch book in the cupboard left over from college years ago. I glued the pages together in pairs for stability, then gessoed each page and stuck down some text.



Then I painted each page with Brusho paints, these are vibrant paints but not heavy, so as you can see the text still shows through.



The next stage is to add dated areas for the journalling. This double spread is for January, I die cut and punched the white shapes, stuck them in and doodled on the date.





Finally the diary entries can go in. Thankfully I have kept a written diary each day so far this year, so I was able to refer back to that picking out one or two things from each day to add into this journal. There will be 12 double spreads like this one, plus a single page for each month too. I haven't decided yet what will go on the single pages, but I think they will be more pictorial and less text.



I am still working from the sofa, see yesterdays post... I have added to my little 'nest' with Basic Grey papers and chipboard which I am using to decorate the little square tin. this will eventually hold a mini book of photos from my son's 21st birthday.