With Deepest Sympathy

Short post tonight – this video has taken so long to upload (what is WRONG with YouTube tonight?!?) and I desperately need to go to bed…

It’s a super simple card, muted tones, one floral focal point and a sentiment. I always feel sympathy cards should be clean in design, with no frills and leave the message inside to speak for itself, without being overwhelmed by the card design.

In the video, I show you how to create a seamless, repeating background image using a Stamp-a-ma-jig from Stampin’ Up! to get this tone-on-tone background on the grey card base.

I hope this card inspires you if you need to create a sympathy card. They’re definitely the hardest cards to make – and to write - without a doubt!

Watch video below | Watch at YouTube

Valentine Heart card & Silhouette Studio tutorial

A completely die cut card, designed (pretty much) from scratch using two downloads from the Silhouette Studio website. In the first video, I will walk you through how I did this, and in the second, I’ll show you how I complied the card from all of the die cuts.


This design requires the above software. Please feel free to click on the image to take you straight to the download page of their website. If you have a Silhouette or a CraftRobo machine, you should be able to download and use this software as they are both the same machines, that (for some strange reason) are sold under different names in different countries.

I hope you find the Silhouette Studio software walkthrough useful. I had considered using Illustrator for this, but it is far more complicated than it needs to be for the purposes of this design.

As you can see, the designing only took me 10 minutes from start to finish. It’s only easy when you know how though; hence I hope the tutorial inspires you to be more adventurous with your designing!

Please don’t forget to rate my videos and subscribe to me over at my YT Channel. Also, if you ‘follow’ my Facebook and Twitter pages, then you’ll always know when my next video/blog post is up.

Watch video below | Watch at YouTube



Watch video below | Watch at YouTube

Go Tigers! (something very different to usual!)

A request from a rugby-mad friend of mine for his birthday, who supports Leicester Tigers! I used my CraftRobo to cut out the card and the swooshes, which I designed for this purpose. Suffice to say, the designing took far longer than the actual making of the card…great fun though and he was suitably impressed for it to be worth the entire afternoon of designing =)

Happy Birthday Joe!!

This photo is of the birthday boy and his wife – appropriately masquerading as TIGERS at our recent Friends’ Christmas celebration. We were all ‘Tigered’, myself included. It was very surreal but most excellent fun ;-) He’ll kill me for going public with this photo, lol!

Thanks for everything!

TWO video tutorials for this card. An unexpected bonus for you all! =)

This card used a new technique (well, new to me!) called Hot Foils / Hot Foiling. My wonderful parents bought me some surprise craft stuff for Xmas and this was one of the goodies. I used a stamp set that was part of the same present (thanks M&D! xx). It’s hard to capture in the photos but these foils are GORGEOUS in real life – so shiny and brilliantly metallic. You could never hope to achieve this level of shine with metallic embossing powders, so it’s good that these hot foils are an option.

I also show you two methods of customising your own patterned paper brads. This means that whatever gorgeous patterned papers you have, you can create perfectly coordinated brads to use on your projects. You could use the I-top brad maker by Imaginisce, but this is not widely available (if at all?) in the UK, so I had to come up with a suitable alternative. I hope this idea inspires you to be more creative with your products!

Watch video below | Watch at YouTube



Watch video below | Watch at YouTube

Sneak Peak!

Hey there! Just a very small sneak peak of the project and TWO video tutorials I’ll be posting tomorrow! I’m not at home today and don’t have a great internet connection, so this tiny post update will have to do for now.

Back tomorrow with the full shebang! =)

2010 – A Year in Focus

Happy New Year to you all!

This post is to look back at some of my favourite creations from 2010 (while I re-group and get organised for this year)! If you click on the pictures, they will take you to the respective blog post and video.

Enjoy the trip down memory lane…

::January::	::February::	::March::	::April::
::May::	::June::	::July::	::August::
::September::	::October::	::November::	::December::