Rubber Stamping - North Wales

Today is 25 June  & a Mold club member has a birthday Have a lovely day

Good evening - I do hope you are all surviving this nasty wet weather.  Fingers crossed the sun will come back again soon. Tonight I have been at the June meeting for the Mold club, & again, despite being short of quite a few people we had a very pleasant evening.  It is always difficult at this time of year with holidays & other things going on, to get a full house. I will have photos for you of tonight's meeting after I have uploaded them to my computer, but it may not be for a while, as Bob & I are taking some "our time" (which is "me time" for 2 people).  So in order to have this time I will not be blogging for a little while  - just pop in from time t time to see when I am writing again.  The club pages are up to date for a while so you can still go & check those. That's me for tonight.  Sleep tight.

Good morning everyone. Going through my box of finished cards, to find one for a birthday, I realised I hadn't shown the Bendy card that I made as a sample for the ladies of CSNW club. It hadn't even got as far as the club photo page. But coming across it reminded me also that in that meeting we had discussed the back of the card, because of the flap that sticks out through the slit & the tabs from the two side pieces.  It did look a bit untidy. So I had a think about it & tried out the idea we had come up with.  You will need to make sure you have a matching or complimentary piece of card left over from making your card. Then cut it to slightly smaller than the size of the back piece & apply double-sided foam tape on all 4 sides (make sure you are as close to the edge as possible).  Mount this onto the back & hey presto - no mess showing. The next test came in ensuring that the tab that was going to slide into that back slit - would still go in. On the

Good afternoon ladies. I thought today I would show you the MDF mirror that I decorated in the workshop I attended on Saturday. The middle section is the mirror & it looks a little funny at the moment as I have not removed the protective covering. Here are someclose-ups of the squares / Jigsaw pieces; The 3 pieces like the one on the left in this photo - have been painted in a beige colour that has a hint of green in it.  The decoration is texture paste through a stencil (or mask). At the moment I am thinking of adding colour too those pieces  using pan pastels to get a delicate colouring.  It will be fiddly as the stencil was Carolines - so I haven't got it to place over the texture paste whilst colouring it. So if I am going to do it it will have to be when I am feeling very relaxed & steady handed. I would rather like to do another one using a similar technique as in our mixed media card. But as I am not sure where I am g

Today is 12 June  & a Mold II club member has a birthday Happy Birthday Sue Have a lovely day

Hi everyone Once again I have no idea where yesterday went - I did things, I went places, but apparently nothing to write about.  Except I did fill one of my new die storage cabinets with dies.  Ooh it is so nice to just pull out the shelf & find want you want.  Have to fill the other one tomorrow. Today! Well that was a different day.  I attended a workshop  with my HSNW fellow members & we had a great day.  I was not sure what we would be making & eventually was pleasantly surprised with my results of what we did make. I have a little more work to do on it - purely because I wanted to use things I have here at home.  I am hoping to do that tomorrow & when it is compete will show you the results. I hope you are having a great weekend - despite the downpours. 'Bye for now.

Hi everyone - I hope you are well & holding up under this hot sticky weather.  Mind you they say it is going to change - unfortunately for the wet kind of weather. Yesterday I did not do any crafting as Bob & I took the day off to enjoy a late lunch with an old friend, who we meet up with about every 6 weeks, which was extremely enjoyable, although not good for the figure.  Still never mind. Today I had the second of my crochet workshops this week.  Once again I have a really lovely group of ladies in this workshop & especially one quite elderly lady (& I hope I use the term kindly) who really is struggling - but she will not give in. I note that I am falling a little behind with my update of club pages - so I will put that to rights tomorrow & get as much on there as I can - even if I haven't actually already told you about them. Another thing I realised today as I was thinking about craft - is the number of ideas I have, some of which get started &

Today is 9 June  & a CSNW club member has a birthday Happy Birthday Joyce Have a lovely day

Good morning everyone. I have just had a quick look back through the blog & it doesn't look like I have already shown these cards to you. Back in May I was the demonstrator at a club night for the Happy Stampers Festival club & chose to show them some one-layer cards. Here are some of the cards.  Some I took along with me & a couple I created on the evening; For this one I just masked off a small square area & used Distress Inks, Black Archival inks & a freebie stamp, then added the little bow. This one I used the torn paper technique, creating a layered background with the round blending tool to create circles, a script stamp in one of the background colours.  Underneath the butterflies it is white. This I achieved by die-cutting the matching butterfly shape & using them as masks.    Then I stamped the butterfly into the blank space. After finishing the card for me it felt unbalanced - it needs a butterfly in the top right hand corner.

Hi everyone For a while now I have toyed with finding a different system for storing my dies - which have been increasing at quite a rate. I have 2 of Tonic's system - the large folders. But I find them cumbersome & quite heavy to pick up. Also they are too tall for my bookcases so I have had to store them laying flat, which isn't good for the dies when 2 are placed on top of each other.  I also have 2 other folder systems. I finally decided to try Stamps Away (Clever Cuts) MDF storage unit which is basically an open sided box with shelves that fit inside on runners.  Each shelf holds a magnetic mat (after you have put it all together) & they can be pulled out individually for easy access.  I purchased 2 & they arrived last week.  On Friday I unpacked all the pieces & checked it was all there & that the pieces went together OK.  Then on Saturday I asked for Bob's help as I realised I wouldn't be able to support a piece whilst trying to glue ano

Good morning ladies & what another gorgeous morning it is too. I hope you all had a great weekend.  On Saturday Bob & I were out for a meal with all the people from his Company to celebrate 20 years of being in business.  A very pleasant evening.  Then yesterday we did very little all day just enjoyed the sunshine. During the day yesterday it dawned on me that I hadn't shown you any photos from the CSNW meeting last Wednesday.  So I am here now to put that to rights. You may remember I explained that I was late getting to the meeting due to the surge in traffic due to the Eisteddfod.  We were also a reduced group & there weren't any Show & Tell cards to photograph. The project for the evening was the Bendy card for which I fortunately, as the evening turned out, had found a slightly simpler format to make.  We managed to make the base card but really ran out of time to do any decoration on them.  So the ladies agreed to finish the cards at home & bring

Today is 6 June & a CSNW club member has a birthday Happy Birthday Gwen Have a lovely day

Good afternoon ladies - I cannot believe it is another weekend here already.  Just where are these days going! I thought it was time I showcased the tags I made for the 2015 project.  Because I made them for all 3 clubs I decided to keep them fairly simple (that is - simple for me to make, not simple to look at!!!!). Just to make this post a little more interesting I thought I would show you the creativity in its various stages - because I can - te he :) I decided to make the actual tags a little smaller than the stated size & the layer theme onto black card.  This photo shows the first stage where I have coloured the white tags with Distress Ink in the 6 colours I chose. The next stage was to put a subtle background on them & I used a text stamp I have along with the same Distress Ink colour as was used on the background Next I used black archival ink to stamp some silhouette grasses on the tags.I do love these stamps, they are from Stamps Away  - who

.............. quite work out as you want them to. I promise not to continue the theme of the last post - when I basically moaned about my day.  But the day before that I had decided to finish the mixed media topper - or rather start it - from the evening with the Mold II ladies last week.  On last Sundays post when I showed the Mold II photos of their mixed media cards I mentioned I hadn't had time to do mine during the evening & that also I would do mine in pale colours rather than the black finish for a change. So! I laid out my pieces; The colours you can see on it are the actual colours of the pieces I used. My next step was to cover it all with white Gesso; Things going quite well at the moment. I then spent a little time thinking about the next stage.  What pale colours was I going to use & what medium would they be in. For some strange reason I decided on an overall cover of a shade of pink.  Which I arrived at by mixing red acrylic pai

Good morning everyone. Sorry I have not been on since Tuesday, but things have been a little hectic. Tuesday was a very pleasant day & was rounded off with Bob & I going to Venue Cymru in the evening to see Bill Bailey. We left home fairly early as we had decided to have a meal before the show & to try the little Chinese Restaurant in Penrhyn Bay called - Yeung Sing.  That was the best Chinese meal we have had in a while & we will definitely be returning. Bill Bailey's show was absolutely great & I haven't laughed so much for a while.  He is very clever - well I think so & Bob & I are both great fans. The show & the drive back home meant we had a bit of a late night - so I was a little tired the next morning - Wednesday. During the morning I popped to Asda for some shopping & when I got back felt absolutely worn out. The outcome of which was that at 3:00pm I decided I needed to go to bed for a couple of hours, & very unusually f

Today is 2 June  & a Mold II club member has a birthday Happy Birthday Lin have a lovely day

Today is 1 June & a CSNW club member has a brthday Happy Birthday Hayley Have a lovely day