More quilling for Christmas

 

Quilling

I've finally got back to my quilling after a year long hiatus for moving house and I've made some inroads into making my Christmas cards. I'm finally getting the scrolls right. I just need to figure out where to glue on the pine sprigs!

Pastel Art - Holly

More of my Colin Bradley art. This time still life. This was easier because I'm a bit more used to drawing plants.

St Peters Snow Scene

This is the St Peters snow scene I mentioned last week. Colin Bradley refers to them as Christmas cards but the finished artwork is far too big to fit on a card as each picture is almost A4 in size. Maybe he is thinking that you could scan your finished artwork and then resize the images for Christmas cards. Not that it's very useful for us Aussies as we don't see snow on the winter, let alone at Christmas! If you don't want to try your hand at doing your own artwork, you're welcome to download the images of mine. (Actually, I'd be chuffed if you used them!)

By the way, Colin is happy for people to post or even sell the artworks they create using his lessons, as long as they credit him, which is why I seem to be name dropping a lot. His lessons are very reasonably priced considering the cost of art lessons, either on line or "real", so I think it only fair that credit is given where it is due.

More Hanging Christmas Cards

The bells on these cards are quilled. simply roll up a length of gold metallic paper tightly and glue the end down. when dry, gently push up the centre with the end of a pen and glue a pearl inside for a clapper. the small bells are made with one strip of 1/4 inch paper cut lengthwise down the page. The larger bells are one and a half strips glued together. The dividers between the papers on the left hand card are stickers, on the right I have used a scrap of metallic braid. Rolled fringed flowers finish the right hand card, together with some punched branches and some cold porcelain buds sprayed with gold paint.

 This card has small paper roses that I made, punched branches and some small wooden star buttons.

 This card has silver cold porcelain buds and a fringed flower with a half pearl centre.

 This card is decorated with a cluster of  tiny  jingle bells that I bought tied to some narrow silver cord. Dab some glue on the knot at the back of the jingle bell to prevent the knot from undoing.

 This is one of several blue cards. Again I have used silver jingle bells which I hung from a fringed flower.

Download the images used in these cards here 

 

Hanging Christmas Cards

I’ve been playing around with some hanging Christmas card ideas. Not sure if I like the hanging bit so I might remove it and mount the cards onto bases. The images used are available for download below.

The images used in the4 cards are here

Poinsettia cards

I used a pearlised off white card for the base and third layers. The second layer was a pale green swiss dot on the left and a plain burgundy on the right. I used spellbinder borders to cut the scalloped borders and nested classic ovals to cut the frames. Two spellbinders fleur de lys corners were added to the frames and they were layered onto the sentiments which I printed on my bubble jet printer and cut out afterwards. I finished them with a touch of bling.

The floral pieces were cut from a piece of paper that was shaded at the edges. The bottom set of petals were cut from the darker part of the paper, the second from a medium shade and the third from the lightest shade. Once layered I added a diamonte centre.  It was a bit of fiddling around to cut from the patches I wanted so I’ve made a set of papers that can be printed out and put them in my shop. The branches behind were cut with a Sullivan’s punch which I bought from Lincraft. the ribbons were done floral artestry style, by looping the ribbon around fingers and wrapping some florist wire around the middle of the loops. Bend the loops up and wrap the wire around the bottom. Cut off the wire about a cm from the ribbon and glue it under the flowers.

Talking about glue, I saw some embellishments being made on YouTube with a hot glue gun with a precision nozzle and I just had to have one. I’m notoriously messy with glue, and one with a thick tip is a bad option in my hands! The precision guns are not easy to find but I did manage to get a Rapid Point gun in Eckersleys for around $23, which  is a rechargeable cordless model. Lincraft now has them for around $20. However, I am sad to say it is very light and flimsy and the recharging cord very short. It only has a short life as a cordless, so really needs to be plugged in if you are going to use it for more than 5 minutes at a time because it doesn’t have an on-off switch that I could find! So, unless you are working very close to the power source, it is a bit difficult to use. Because it is so light and the cord so short, it doesn’t like staying put on the table while plugged in and after having it a mere 3 days, mine slithered off the table and on to the tiled floor, landed on the nozzle and that was that! It still works but is no longer a precision model.

 As usual the magpie in me has got the better of me and I’ve used shiny card which hasn’t photographed well with flash photography. I have now made a light box out of a large clear 4 litre plastic container ($4)  and two desk lamps ($9 each plus $6 for two globes) placed shining inwards at the sides of the box. With a sheet of white paper taped to the back and bottom of the box, I now  have a mini light box/studio for less than $30. The great thing is the lamps store in the plastic container! So much cheaper than buying one purpose built, and a whole lot easier than the tutorials I saw where people cut the sides out of cardboard boxes and taped fabric over the holes. There is a tutorial on this here

Snowman card

Today I have some postable Christmas cards – ones that will fit in a standard 5×7 envelope. I’ve made about 18 of these to send this Christmas.

I got the inspiration from one I saw somewhere on the net last year. The one I saw was blue and I’ve changed a few things, but it’s basically the same principle. The matting boards are plain burgundy card that I’ve had for about 15 years. The two biggest white boards were embossed using s Stampin Up poinsettia folder. The snowman graphic I bought from someone on the internet and changed the colours in photoshop as it was green tones and I wanted red tones. I placed 6 of them on  an A4 page and had them printed at officeworks. I worked out the board sizing  and the photo corners in MTC and cut them out on my KNK Zing which made short work of the job,  then it was just a matter of layering the boards, punching out a simple flower and adding the bling.

Christmas 2013 - 1

This is one of the card designs I made for Christmas 2013. I’ve done a few, but this is one of the ones that will need to be hand presented as I don’t think it will post well without getting squashed and it certainly won’t meet the rules for Christmas card rates!

The base is a rectangular card. Beck from Amazing Paper Grace has a tutorial on how top make hinged cards but I find that they don’t sit up well as they are too soft along the bottom.A spellbinders die set was used  to create the second layer, tone on tone and the third gold card layer. I cut a fourth layer in cream the same as the gold layer and carefully trimmed back the edge of the card, You could simply cut it out in cream and use gold to distress the edges, which I did do for the last oval with the sentiment. Under the sentiment is a filigree layer in gold from the same spellbinders set.

The greenery was cut using a branch punch by Sullivans that I got in Lincraft, the roses are mulberry paper roses  and the ribbon some gold edged cream satin I picked up in a dollar store.

Cutting intricate designs using spellbinders, or any other make I guess, is not easy as the card tends to stick in the die. I’ve seen people say to use waxed paper between the die and the card, but I’ve tried half a dozen supermarkets and no one seems to carry it these days. Glad Bake does work to a certain extent. I did see today a post where someone suggested using thin viscous fabric. I haven’t tried it yet, but if it cuts the fabric then it’s quite an expensive option. If not then it sounds like a good option…something I’ll have to try out.