and even more

 To finish? off with Sam's circles I decided to try the lanterns we did with Sam's star last year. I also tried hinging 2 together  with a T light in between. Pictures show effect with and without lighting nd with last years

 

More with Sam's Circles

 This is the most versatile die I have bought this Christmas. I set myself the challenge of how many

different ways could I use it and I am still working on it but here are a selection.

Christmas Flowers and poinsettia frame

 Here I have used the new poinsettia frame (JND) plus some of the words which are die cut into the card (JND) alongside various flowers that go with the Christmas theme. I also put flowers on the slider card, the bauble and used a Sue Wilson frame I had for sale.

Christmas Stamping - cottage , church and gnomes

 Here are some of the cards stamped with the 2 jays cottage in the trees and village church. 

and then I did a few cards with the Gnome stamps from Woodware

Christmas Time

 Here are a few cards done with the Christmas time die from JND.

3D cards & more with previous stamps

 Here are some examples of the Polar bear and cottage pop up cards using the papercuts die from creative expressions.

and a couple of other stamped cards using the stained glass window and the peaceful night broken down for use with the slider card die

Christmas Stamping

 Here I have picked the Dove stained glass window which initially I was unsure of using but then found there was so many variations you could do I was pleased with the choice. The second stamp chosen was "peaceful night" which I love. I did this as a single layer, multilayer with flat layers and multi-layered with raised layers.

Jane's tree

 Another new die from JND. A quick card to do that looks very stylish - well I think so anyway!

Penguins and Polar bears

 Just a couple of cards with each of these Sue Wilson dies  shown here. Obviously there is a lot more we could do with these and I'll have a go soon.

More Papercuts

 I know I showed a few of these earlier but I now have 2 boards full of new papercuts so I'm showing them both together since they are samples for October workshops. Great for quick cards and for using lots of background and colouring techniques when you want to spend more time on them.

Papercuts 1 board - fox,snowman,snowmen, birds, tree

Papercuts 2 board - " A child is born", " we three kings", penguins, Santa plus a few from last year at the bottom where I still have the dies for sale.

WORDS

 JND have come up with a set of dies which have words cut into your card as you can see from the examples below. These fit with all of the other dies we have worked with, a number of which are shown below.

Sam's Circles

 This new die from JND is so versatile. You can use it with the matching centre, deer scene and  village scene as well as lots of dies from last year, your flowers, snowflakes, stamped images and all sorts. I will be adding more later but had to stop to move onto other things. However I will return to it!

September workshop cards- Christmas or not?

 I have spilt up the new products so that we cover different ones each  month. I am continuing with workshops for 1 or 2 only to enable social distancing and  so instead of producing  a program participants ring me to book and tell me what they want to do from that months choice.

September choices ( cards which can be Christmas or not) include cards from the last 2 posts - "Moonlit Gathering" (25th August) which is stamping,  and the sue wilson dies ( Aug 7th). Then there are the two below "Four Seasons" using  a die by John Lockwood and a couple of paper panda dies - the deer and the bunny.  In this selection we look at using different embossing powders, backgrounds with reinker pigment inks as well as the usual inkpads, gilding polishes etc.

Moonlit Gathering

 Creative expressions have released a new range of stamps from Designer boutique. I took 1 of them "Moonlit Gathering " and proceeded to see how many different ways I could use it. This is the start..

Sue Wilson Christmas dies

Again having an early play with some of the dies. Whilst working with the gilding polishes I have had a sheets I keep using as a backing workable sheet and over time this has built up to a great backing sheet as you can see used behind the snowflake lady and the large mosaic star

burst.

Christmas Papercuts

I don't usually start Christmas cards till September but since we had these dies in early I decided I would have an initial play. These are fairly basic cards the fancier ones will follow, but I wanted to get a feel for the dies before deciding which I needed to order more of.

more papercuts

Another board I forgot to post was the new papercraft images. I have only tried 2 if these the Owl and the Hare but I did try them with a new 3D daisy embossing folder. Other new products I tried with this set were the chalk polishes and the opal blaze polish.

Papercraft Edgers

Just looking through  my posts I noticed that there were a couple of boards I'd done during lockdown that I don't seem to have published. One of these is the papercraft edgers featuring the Seahorse, The Dolphins and The Bee. The Rose is similar but from a different firm.

I have used pixie powders and special effect paints on many of the cards.

Multi layered dies

Over the last 2 weeks I have been playing with the square and harlequin multilayered dies from Presscut (as shown on Tv by John Lockwood). These are great as you can use 1,2 or 3 dies together - cut &/or embossed in such a variety of ways. The cut out bits are useful for paper piecing or making you own patterns. They can also be used with a variety of different embellishments or left as they are.

Flowers & Bees

This week I started to look at using the Chloe box set which had arrived just before lockdown. There were many great examples in the magazine so trying to come up with something different after weeks of not doing many cards was more difficult but here are my first attempts at using what was in the box.

I have now moved to some sewing projects so will have to have another attempt at these later

More layered papercuts

This week  I played with the new layered papercuts which I'd had in - the owl, badger, hedgehog and cockerel. For each die I cut it in 2 contrasting colours ( there are 4 dies in each set) and I cut some from card to leave a border which could be built up, and some altogether so that they would fit inside one another for a flat card. I left some plain with the 2 colour cards and others I coloured in with metallic gilding polishes.

New Papercuts plus....

With the lockdown I had weeks of not making any cards while I did my stocktaking, cleaned and sorted everything in the shop and then spent over 4 weeks on the workroom. I have gone through every cupboard and box and been ruthless (for me!) in throwing things out.
I restarted card making with the new papercuts dies and here are the results of the last few days.

the last couple here need finishing, but they show the use of cosmic shimmer special effect paints.

Happy Easter

First of all apologies to those who follow my facebook page since the pictures are the same but unfortunately that's all I have that's new.
My plan last week was to start a springclean of the shop but I ended up making loads of Easter cards for the family. I worked with the JND slider die as you can see and did some variations of the workshop samples shown earlier.

Happy Easter to you all in these difficult times.

Enchanted woodland

The latest creative stamping magazine arrived this week and put paid to my ideas on using this closure time for sorting workroom and shop out. I had pre prepared a lot of backgrounds due tp the fact the all day workshop on this  was due to be this Tuesday - not giving me much preparation time. After using these backgrounds on a number of cards I then looked at using the stamps with different shaped cards and the slider die from John Next Door. Here are the cards I have done so far.... tempted to do more but I really should do some sorting out next week!!

With no more workshops to prepare at the moment I may not be posting very regularly for the next couple of months but will put up any I do do in preparation for the end of lockdown.

Cards for Easter & Spring

Yet  more slider cards here as well as using some of the special effect dies. To make bags for easter eggs I used the heart bag/box die from JND. I also used the stained glass flower dies fromm creative expressions

Slider and other die cut specials

I was playing last week with John Next Door's Slider die and seeing what different types of card I could produce. I then looked at what other die cuts I had to produce different cards and found an accordian die and Stampendous pop ups and pop up accessories. I didn't use John's neverending card die but just did one for myself by scoring.