… and I made a few simple, fast Christmas cards to buildup my pile.

Card base: Recollections ‘Pearlised Gold’
Paper: SEI ‘Christmas Mint’
Stamps: Hero Arts ‘Snowflake Circle’, Inkadinkado sentiment
Prima flower hiding an ink smudge on one card.

I also made this (non-Christmas) card with another Hero Arts stamp:

Adorable! The stamp set came with 4 little dolls, I want to make a whole village of them. I stamped her in black on the notecard, and again in purple on some patterned paper. Cut out the kimono and glued it to the card! I like that the kimono has no black lines – just sparkly purple ones!

The quote stamped on the card says ‘creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. art is knowing which ones to keep’, and I really like it. It is part of a Tim Holtz set I bought at my LSS recently, as is the lion rampant.

This card does have mistakes. I embossed the lion with Tim Holtz Distress Embossing powder (colour: Brushed Corduroy). This embossing powder is a little different than the standard, so I did a test on some scrap card to see what it was like – that was all fine. I wanted the lion image over the 3 different papers – the background (Core’dinations cardstock), the stripe (DCWV Sweet Stack), and the paisley circle (Heidi Grace designs for Fiskars). So I glued everything down with a glue stick, let it dry, then stamped my lion with blue ink and applied the embossing powder. Then I held it over the burner of my stove.

The lion came out fine. The rest of the card did not fare so well: the heat from the stove released the glue! Only near the lion though, so it was awkward to get the glue stick in there without bending things, so I resorted to white glue. And because I was frustrated with the card for doing that to me, I used a lot. Now the front of the card is stiff and slightly bowed from all that glue. Oh well, I love how it looks!

The layout is from Pollycraft Monday’s most recent Challenge – #27.

Cardstock: Core’dinations
Papers: DCWV, Fiskars, Recollections, grey scrap for lace border
Stamps: Tim Holtz (Ranger)
Ink: Versamark Brilliance (Blue), Autumn Leaves black
Misc: Martha Stewart doily border punch, Making Memories button brad,  Prima Fancies flowers (dabbed with same Brilliance ink)
I also used the Scor-Bug that I bought at the same time as my Scor-Pal for the double row of dots at the bottom.

I made another card today too, with the same base. Both these cards are 6″x6″ – I cut them from the same 12″x12″ piece of Core’dinations cardstock. I need to get some more plain cardstock!

The lace border on the bottom edge is even the same paper as the blue stripe on the card above!

I wanted to try some more paper piecing, and I need to get on my Christmas cards, so I pulled out this Hero Arts snowman. The blue/cream for the hat and jacket is Making Memories paper – it’s a fleur de lis design. The red is the same throughout this card, a paper from SEI’s Christmas Mint collection. I like how it’s a holiday card, but not your usual red and green.

This is a sketch from Sketch Saturday’s Sketch #74.

Cardstock: Core’dinations
Papers: DCWV, SEI Christmas Mint
Stamps: Hero Arts
Ink: Autumn Leaves black (I went over it with black fine-point Sharpie)
Misc: Martha Stewart doily border punch, Hero Arts felt snowflakes, Making Memories button brad,  American Crafts clear jewel brad, ‘Frosted Lace’ Stickles, very old stickers from my stash.

This is my Ulmus shawl so far (pattern here). As you can see, I’m about halfway through the border section. A few rows after this picture was taken, and I’m on row 22 of 34. Problem is, it takes a good 20 minutes or more for me to finish a row now, as the shawl has grown 4 stitches for every row I’ve knit. I’ve knit a lot of rows, as I have enough yarn for the large size.

This also means that binding off will take about an hour!

I am loving this tweed yarn, and I think goes quite well (in an autumnal way) with the deep maroon (Dionysus) from Gaia’s Colours. The tweed was labeled Colorfest Fiber Arts, but I haven’t been able to find any more info on it.

After this I need to cast on a baby jacket for a friend of mine who just had a baby. First of the high school crowd to have a baby. Scary! Luckily, I knew the baby was coming, and managed to snag a Tulips baby sweater kit at Sock Summit.

Where does everyone else take photos of their handmade cards? I live in a ground floor, north-facing condo. We’re actually a little below ground, and our windows are at about my nose level. I take all my photos, whether for Etsy, my knitting, or my paper crafts, at our patio doors. There are two steps up to the doors, I usually put whatever it is on the top step, and sit on the lower one to take the photo. This seems to work with knitting, but not so the cards. I’ve started using a little side table for the cards, to get them at a better height. Really, I think my problem is that we face north, and there’s not so much I can do about that. The patio doors are the only place we get more than a trickle of light. You can see our houseplants in the background – it’s the only place they survive in here!

My card for the Papertake Weekly Challenge Sketch #26. A lot of the time I find myself mixing cardstock/patterned paper collections and even manufacturers, but these two are meant to be together. I accented some circles on the right with brads, and outlined the yellow flowers with Mustardseed Distress Stickles. This was my first time using Stickles, and today I’ve been searching eBay to see if I can find a lot of every single colour! Love at first squeeze.

I coloured the dots on the hat with yellow Sharpie, the put Stickles on top.

Cardstock: Core’dinations
Patterned Paper: American Crafts
Brads/Jewel: Making Memories, Kaisercraft
Ribbon: from stash
Stamps: Hampton Arts

There’s a great giveaway over at the Magnolia Down Under blog, the prize pack is huge! I love the Magnolia stamps, but as I’m just starting out, I don’t have any yet. I haven’t seen any in the scrapbook stores I’ve been to yet.

I also made an easel card last night:

I love how it props itself up! I think I put the button that it rests against too far up the card though – it’s a bit temperamental, and likes to pop out randomly.

I stamped the snowflakes on the white cardstock, to match my embossed image. Make that image made me realise that the Versamark Brilliance Inks stay wet for a while. I stamped the snowman in gold, let it dry (I thought), then made a mask for the snowman and stamped the snowflake circle on top of him. Originally, I just wanted the snowflakes embossed in white, but when I poured the powder on, I found the gold was still sticky! I had taken the mask off, thinking that as the ink was dry, it wouldn’t be an issue. Wrong! I managed to save it though, and keep the scarf a separate colour.

Cardstock: old stash
Patterned papers: SEI Christmas pack
Stamps: Snowflake circle – Hero Arts, Snowman – Inkadinkadoo
Inks: Versamark Brilliance, Chalk
Brads: Bazzil
Buttons: Little Yellow Bicycle

Owls seem to be the animal of the moment: everywhere I turn, there are more craft projects involving owls.

I am also guilty, I bought a very cute set of Sandylion stamps featuring owls.

I can see myself using this set a lot! I love the whole kitschy woodland look that is floating around the crafting world right now.

I paper-pieced the big owl together out of some Making Memories fall-themed papers. The little owl is just one piece, on a very cool leaf skeleton paper (I used the same paper for the greeting).

I went on a shopping trip today (very good coupons for today only at Michaels, and a local scrapbook store) and bought some fine scissors for doing more paper piecing. I cut out those bits with my giant craft scissors – all the pairs in the house are similar in size. It was possible, but little snippy scissors will make it much easier in the future. I won’t have to full out my X-acto knife for the feet!

That got me thinking about tools. I thought back to making cards as a kid – I had paper, glue, coloured paper, and any bits and bobs I could scavenge from around the house. Now there’s a tool for everything. Do we really need them all? On my shopping spree trip today I bought a Scor-Pal. Before that, I just used a pen with a conveniently-shaped cap. Yes, I feel the Scor-Pal has improved my work, but I was managing ok without it.

One thing I’ve been refusing to buy is a heat gun. I love using embossing powder, and most things I’ve made so far have used it (apart from the card in this post, funnily enough). Reading scrapbooking/card-making websites and magazines, you’d think you couldn’t do it without a heat tool! I remember very clearly being about 10 and taking the lampshade off my desk lamp and using the heat from the light bulb to melt embossing powder. Currently, there are no lamps in the house with shades that come off, weird, huh? I couldn’t get my cardstock close enough to the bulb on anything, so I thought about other warm things in the house.

The hair dryer, even with the diffuser still on, it was too powerful. It just flapped the card around. The next warm thing on my list was the stove. The stove works very well. I just turn a small burner on to high heat, and move the card around over it. Once it warms up, melting is almost instant. Another (possibly safer, probably not) option is the toaster. I didn’t place stuff in there, I made sure to be holding it, and trying not to let it touch the metal inside. That worked well, and it’s way harder to burn yourself, but that limits you to toast-sized pieces of cardstock.

I’ve been knitting (if not blogging) quite a bit recently. My last show was great, because two of the actors were also knitters, so we’d sit in the green room and knit while waiting for the show to start. I got more knitting done than them, because they had to get into wigs and corsets and petticoats and other things. I just had to remember to make toast and coffee every night.

I had been working on my Ikebana sock; I even turned the heel and started my way down the foot. I decided to try it on, and found that it was quite tight, well, all over, but especially in the ‘can barely pull it on over my heel’ way. Its in time out right now while I decide what steps to take. I’ll have to wrestle it on over my heel again, to figure how far up the leg I want to rip back.

My other option is to just keep going – I wanted to enter these socks into a knitting competition, and the competition won’t care if they fit me. But I think they’ll be just too much work to waste on socks that I won’t even be able to wear in the end.

Because of the show I mentioned, I needed a new project, so I decided to put some of my Sock Summit purchases to good use, and start an Ulmus.

I’m on the leafy border now, so I’ve progressed much farther than this photo. Not sure if I’ll be ready to tackle the socks when this is done. I do have a baby sweater to knit for a friend’s new baby, so I think that’ll be the next thing on my needles.

As for stuff that’s been taking away from knitting time, I’ve been making an effort to go to yoga more often, and I may have a new obsession. Rubber stamps.

Well, stamping may actually be a recurrence of a long-dormant condition – I did a lot of playing with rubber stamps as a kid. I wanted to make my Christmas cards this year, and I bought stamps for that…. and then I bought lots more. And more. I have been using them though, playing with them, playing with techniques. Papercrafting was my very first crafty love.

I figure I’m enjoying myself, and I’m not hurting anyone, so how bad can a stamp (I love the clear stamps! so cool!) and inkpad and embossing powder collection be?