Quick Cards Made Easy Magazine Fun Folds Challenge

In the current issue (issue 143), there is a selection Kitty Frampton's gorgeous summery kite fold cards that is fun fun, so easy to master and looks really impressive, too. So, for this month's challenge, they would like to see your fun folds. Use any card fold technique you like, but the more unique, the better! Post a photo of a card you've made on our website to be in with a chance of winning.

Competition closes 29 September 2015.

*Terms and conditions

Promoter: Immediate Media Co Bristol Ltd. Promotion excludes Immediate Media employees. Open to UK and Channel Islands entrants only. By entering, you agree to be bound by all the rules of the promotion. All entries must be your own work. Direct queries towritetous@cardmakingandpapercraft.com or call 0117 927 9009. Winning entries will be chosen from all eligible entries. Winners will be notified within 28 days of closing date. The draw is final and no correspondence will be entered into. For details of winners send an SAE within two months of the closing date. If any winner is unable to be contacted within one month of the closing date, the Promoter will offer the prize to a runner-up. Promoter reserves right to substitute the prize with one of same or greater value. There is no cash alternative.

You can submit your creation here.

Fine-Tip Glue Pen by Stampin Up! coming soon

As part of my favourite demonstrator benefit I have seen the new Stampin' Up! 2015-2016 Holiday Catalog and I am very excited about the new stamps with coordinating dies and punches, the  designer series paper, embellishments.  I just love the Halloween goodies and feel very inspired about Christmas.  Through out August I will  be sharing sneaky peeks and tell you about my favourites. You can start ordering from September 1!

No more sticky messes! The Fine-Tip Glue Pen (item 138309) is perfect when you need to secure intricate items. The precision tip lays down a fine line of glue which is great for adhering delicately detailed paper die cuts, small embellishments, and glitter. It also has a unique pin tip closure to help prevent the tip from cloggin

Watch the video and learn how to use the Stampin Up! Fine-Tip Glue Pen.

Outlawz Current Challenges

So as promised here is the current challenges:

Sunday - CAS: Friendship
Monday - Greeting: Make us smile/laugh
Tuesday - Color:

Wednesday - Sketch:

Twisted Thursday: Add Flowers
Friday - Coloring Challenge: At The Beach
Saturday - Paper a la Mode: Add Flowers

Remeber to read the rules and have fun.

Stampin Up! Demonstrator

I have joined Stampin Up! as an independant demonstrator this month and will be featuring their products on my blog and website.

Outlawz Challenges

Outlawz will be so happy if you decided to join in!  So what are you waiting for come join in at:  http://outlawzchallenges.ning.com.  They have some exciting challenges for you with montly prize draws!  So come by each week to check out the challenge as they change  weekly. The Outlawz team want everyone to have fun with the challenges, so if you have any questions, please ask :)  Here is a few guidelines though to help you if you do decide to come play....

Challenge Rules

1. Your projects must be new. No back linking (cannot be posted anywhere prior to the posting of this challenge)
   
2. You can enter the challenges as many times per week as you like...BUT...you can only link ONE entry per week into the monthly Inlinkz.
3.  Please post your own creations only to the challenges
4. In order to be eligible for the site's monthly prizes, you must link us up with the Inlinkz so...LINK US UP!! :)

Directions for entering a challenge:

1. Go to the box under "Reply to this":
2. At top of the box, you will see "link" with a light blue square next to it. The square is for entering your image. When you hover your cursor over the top of it, it will say "Image."
   
3. Click the light blue square and add your photo.
   
4. Set width to 400 pixels.
   
5. If you are using a link, enter it into the link box.
   
6. Click ADD REPLY.
7. After you place your card in the challenge, add it to the gallery and tag it with the appropriate code, given at the beginning o each challenge
   
8. Last, enter it into that months Inlinkz located in the menu bar, at the top of every page, right under The Outlawz header. Click on the Inlinkz tab, then click on the "Month Inlinkz" tab, then the "Add your link" blue bar now enter your link. 

 

Dialy Challenges:

I hope this will interest you.  I will be posting a little more on each challenge shortly.

 

Heartfelt Thanks

 As some of you might have heard I was recently diagnosed with Bipolar disorder and have been suffering from a really bad low. I lost asll interest in the things I enjoyed and just wanted to withdraw. But with support at home and work , medication and the will to get better I think I am on the road to recovery. 

I made this card on Tuesday and really took pleasure in making it and hope the recipient enjoyes looking at it as much as I enjoyed making it.  I used the Cascading Fuschia collection by Heartfelt Creations.

Misti Stamp Positioner

Some of you might have seen the Misti Stamp Positioner that is so expensive.


A quick video to show how Jodie from Hallmarkscrapbook made an inexpensive stamping tool using a DVD/Stamp Storage case.  This little tool is cheap in quality and in cost and is limited in some functionality, but might work for you until you can get the other one.

CREAlies Create-A-Card No5 an and Nina Crafts

I wanted to show that once you have a CREAlies create-a-card die you do not need too much else to create a great card, so I made these three cards.  It is amazing how many people think that you need to use a lot of dies to create a card I prefer a clean and simple style and hope you enjoy looking at these as much as I enjoyed making them.
 

For this card, I simply used some Nina Craft stamps, Memento’s black ink, and Alcohol markers. I had a small piece of holographic acetate in my stash and decided to stamp the glass with StazOn and glue this over the top of my glass for a bit of glam. (July 2012 project club stamp set 'Classy Cocktails' and a new and free to class members stamp 'Pineapple Cocktail'.)

For this card I used some free papers and a topper from a magazine with the Robin Wishes Stamp from Nina Crafts.  I stamped the Robin on white Shrink Plastic and coloured it with Distress Markers before shrinking it and attaching it with a Glue dot. I added a green bow just to finish of the card.

 

A very simple card again using the Crealies Create-a-card No 5 die and some paper and decoupage toppers from the Me To You range by Docrafts

French Couture

Mini French Couture

Die-namics Mini Hybrid Heirloom Rose

Die-namics Mini Royal Roses

Crealies

A "series " of guest designer posts will be posted on the CREAlies blog every Tuesday but this beautiful creation by Norma Lee was so good it got posted the Friday before so go have a look at the rest of her creations at From My Craft Room.

 

Anneke kicked of the first official post and you and see her creation here and remember to go look at her blog as well. 

You can also view the design gallery with products used to create each project here or go check out these blogs:
 

Designteam:
Blog Crealies Designteam
Blog Anja
Blog Hennie
Blog Marianne
Blog Miriam
Blog Lean
Blog Shirley
Blog Wilma
Facebook Crealies
Facebook group Crealies
Pinterest 

Webshop: 
www.crealies.nl

Keep checking back for updates on these lovely creations.
Here's my answers to the Crealies-guest designer questions:

• Name: Mariaan Lawson
• Blog: http://bonscraft.blogspot.co.uk/
• What or Who inspires you? I get my inspiration from everything around me and have to admit that I sometime steal ideas from my son (10) and daughters who are only 3 and 4 years old and love to craft with me.  They have not had anything influence their creativity yet so they are tend to be more original and "out of the box" then I am.
• What do you like best: I love creating nice things, sharing and teaching other to be able to be the best they can be or as creative as they can be.
• How would you describe your own style?  I love femine styles and was always a very girly girl but do not let this limit my creations
• Favourite colours: Purple and Apricot but not together
• Favourite technique: stamping and colouring
• Favourite way of colouring: I love pencils but do also play with alcohol markers and marker pens.
• Favourite Crealies Product:  I love the card templates and the clever way these where designed not to be to bulky to store so go watch the Youtube video showing you what they look like and how to use them.  I also love the doily elements and hope to get some CREAlies stamps soon I can  create my own backing papers and add focus to my cards and mini books.

Creating a Crafters Resume for Design Team applications

A lot of companies are currently advertising for Design Team members and I have applied for a few.  I have not been to successful so I did some home work to see what the people who get to be on design team do differently from me and in this post I would like to share my discoveries with you.  Consider blogging or even getting your work published with letters to magazine editors with a photo of yourself and your work as this can be the start of something bigger. Personalized cards count as well and if you got a note from the person that requested it praizing you, scan it and post a photo of it with the card.  All these things count when you apply to join a design team.

Companies receive hundreds of application from all over the world and it can be a very intense process to select only the best so make sure you stand out.  Most companies want you to send them photo's of two to three of your favourite/best creations with a description of yourself and your work.
  

Important questions to ask yourself first:

Think about what you specialize in and start a list.
How many years have you been a crafter?  
What is your experience?  
What have you created? 
Who or what have you designed for?

  

Here is a basic template of what is required:

Resume

About Me:  
I've been crafting (card making, scrapbooking, etc) for ...... years. I love a wide range of projects such as pages, altered items, articles, sketches, and challenge inspiration pages.I am currently looking for design opportunities.  Please feel free to contact me with any enquiries via e-mail!

Certificates or Qualifications:

Current Design Teams:

Past Design Teams:

Guest Designer:

Pending Publications:

Publications:

Contests or Challenges Won:

Featured Here: 
Forums you belong to and share your photo's and tutorials on.

Additional Information:   
Here I would include a list of link where photo's or samples of your work e.g Photobucket, Flickr, etc can be seen followed by my Social media buttons to Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, etc

So now that you know what to put on your resume we can look into each section seperately.  Next week a little more on who post design team call or publication calls and why as well as what they are looking for.

I hope that you found this helpful, if you did please leave a comment and if you feel I left anytjing out please feel free to tell me all about it in the comments section.
 

Crealies Design Team

As you all know I have been going on about Crealies dies and how much I love them. I was invited to be a Guest designer, they have had many applicants so I am really happy that I am getting this chance.  I will post more info in August and let you know when my post goes live.

I am so excited and looking forward to working with the CREALIES DESIGNTEAM:

• Anja van Kempen
• Hennie Barendregt-van Zelst
• Marianne Jacobsen-Dokter
• Miriam van der Putten
• Wilma van Workum
• Annelies Karduks

Take a look at the Crealies products, cards and Facebook at the links are below:

http://www.crealies.nl/
http://www.pinterest.com/crealiesnl/

https://www.facebook.com/Crealies

Short Holiday

Instead of crafting last week we had a short break with our girls.  The hubby surprised us with a few days of during the week so we made the best of it.  Unfortunately my son (10) still had to go to school so we just made the best of local attractions.

We spend quite a few days in the Hastings Nature Reserve as it is so close.

We went to the rock pools where we found all these wonderous things:

Beadlet Anenomes:  The beadlet anemone, Actinia equina, is a common sea anemone found on rocky shores around all coasts of the United Kingdom. 
Underwater, it displays up to 192 tentacles, arranged in six circles. Out of water, the tentacles retract and the anemone resembles a blob of red, brown, green or orange jelly, up to about 5 centimetres (2.0 in) across. It has bright blue spots (known as acrorhagi) located just beneath the tentacles, organised as an external ring containing stinging cells located at the top of the column that it uses to fight over territory. The acrorhagi contains the cnidocysts which themselves contain the nematocysts. There is some evidence that the various colour forms may in fact be different species.  In the second photo you can see the tentacles partly out.

 

A small to medium-sized blenny, elongate small fish of a large family of fishes that live in rocky areas in shallow water. All true blennies have a continuous dorsal fin with the first dorsal fins are spiny and the remainder are soft. The pectoral finds are relatively large. The pelvic fin is in a jugular position. Distinguished by the absence of tentacles/lappets over the eye. Usually green with black mottling, adults may be grey with black. Males in breeding livery go all black with a white mouth and an attractive pale blue fringe to the long dorsal fin. If the small green blenny has blue spots and a lappet over the eye it is the similiar but rarer Coryphoblennius galerita.

 And then my favourite find was the hermit crabs in the photo's above, they are really secretive little creatures, hding in their shells, but if you put then just on the edge of the water they scurry bak into the water quickly popping out of their shells.

Then we walked down a Glen and took these lovely photo's:

My CREAlies Collection

As promised here is my collection of  CREAlies dies Set of 3 Butterflies no. 3 dies,  Creative Tags die no. 2,  Doily Elements die no. 2, Doily Elements die no. 5  and the newest ones that I ordered from their webshop two days ago Crealies Create A Card die no. 5  and Crealies Create A Card die no. 4.   The Create A Card dies sells for €12.50 each and  €3.53 P&P is cheap when you consider how quickly they got here, Thank you  Annelies.

I already went to the  Downloads section as  there are links to several PDFs with placement options of the Crealies Create A Card dies on cardstock so now I can go play.  If you do not here from me for a few days you know why, I will be too busy crafting, but by next week I am sure I will have some to share with you. 

Happy crafting to you all and do not forget to go look at their blog for some inspiration:)

Crafty Challenges

 Sometimes it's just nice to have to 'think outside the box' for the sake of it and to make something you may not otherwise make so I use challenges for this and sometimes even combining more then one for a specific project.  I do not nessarily enter the challenge as some of the challenges have rules I can not really bother to follow and it feels like the "papercrafting" polivce will come for you if you dare stray from there rules.  It can however be a great way to expand your stash if yous tick to all their stringent rules.

You have to remember a few things if you are going to enter challenges though like:
Linking to your actual creation, by this they mean the actual blog post with it in and not your entire blog. You can understand this rule as you may make a post a day and the challenge blog may not get round to viewing your creation for a week or two and have to scroll through looking for your entry which consumes a lot of time. It is also advisable to link back to them or at the very least a mention to the challenge name and challenge host.


Some challenge blogs will not even consider your entry if the links are not done correctly so have a quick read of all the rules and if you want to be considered for the prizes, do this correctly.  Most of the time there will be a tutorial or explanation on the challenge blog of how exactly they would like it done.

I will be updating the challenge regularly as I find new challenges because I think it is a great way to get you out of a crafting rut and challenge you imagination to make the most of all your craft stash.

Weekly Challenges:

Splitcoast Stampers

• MONDAY  Try a New Technique Clean and Simple Cards  Scrapbook Inspiration
• TUESDAY Color Challenges Teapot Challenges Digital Scrapbooking
• WEDNESDAY Card Sketches Scrapbook Variety
• THURSDAY Ways to Use It
• FRIDAY Free for All Mix-Ability Scrapbook Sketch
• SATURDAY Inspiration Challenge
• SUNDAY Featured Stamper
• MONTHLY Christmas Cards Scrapbook Goals Cards for a Cause
• ONGOING Virtual Stamp Night Virtual Scrapbooking Night
• ANNUAL Hope You Can Cling To Dare to Get Dirty

 Outlawz Challenges

• MONDAY Greeting Card Challenge
• TUESDAY Color Challenge
• WEDNESDAY Sketch Challenge
• THURSDAY Optional Twist
• FRIDAY Alcohol Markers
• SATURDAY Paper Ala Mode
• SUNDAY Clean and Simple

DailyDare4U

 The Daily Dare lists team challenges only as there are too many independent demonstrator challenges to include them all.  It is a ver comprehensive list though.  They also have a list of places you can find Card Sketches from.

Card and Craft Challenge list

Another stunning list with tons of challenges.

Monday

The Pink Elephant
Mojo Monday A card sketch challenge created by Julee Tilman in 2007 on Poetic Artistry before moving here in 2009.
Stamp with Fun!

Monthly Challenges:

Kaarten-maken-met-Tiets 

Here you can find a lovey card scketch as well as a Digistamp Challenge

Next time I will be telling you more about Design Teams and the criteria most Organizers would like you to meet, so till the next time practise your craft, enter challenges and send your creations into magazines to get published.

CREAlies

I really love the CREAlies dies and had a hard time finding these dies in the UK.  I already have 2 of their dies:  Set of 3 Butterflies no. 3 dies and  Creative Tags die no. 2 and have rececntly ordered Doily Elements die no. 2 and Doily Elements die no. 5 from Ebay but wanted to expand my collection.  

I gave up on finding in the UK and did a online search to find their webshop but was sceptical to order from the Netherlands due to the high International Shipping costs all other shops charge. Yesterday I however decided that their Crealies Create A Card will be worth what ever shipping I would have to pay so I ordered Crealies Create A Card die no. 5  and Crealies Create A Card die no. 4 and to my surprise  I only paid €3.53 P&P for the two dies.  I am so excited to get these and can not wait for the postman to knock.  One thing I have to say about CREAlies is that I am impressed with the Downloads section as  there are links to several PDFs with placement options of the Crealies Create A Card dies on cardstock so no guessing.  

I loved the Harmonica Template years ago and even have a Craft Special Book called Harmonica Folding by Annelies Karduks from CREAlies and must say I do hope that one day they will turn these into Cutting dies.  Here is just one of the first cards I made. 

 

Looking back now I can improve this in so many ways and hope that my creations will show you the real potentail of these new dies.  I think it is funny how after all these years of cardmaking it is still the same things that impress me and that I really love doing.

If you are into paperflower making you have to invest in CREAlies flower dies but do not trust me when I say this go look for youself at their Blog, Facebook page and website.  Or search Pinterest to see just a few CREAlies creations.

To be honest with you I think if you are new to cardmaking the CREAlies webshop is the only shop you will need for Dies, Stamps and Masks as you can make your own background papers using the stamps and masks, not to mention the embellishment and toppers you can make using combinations of dies and stamps together.  So whether you are looking for that special Flourish, Alphabet, Leaves, Flower, Tag, Label or Border die and lots more you can find it all at CREAlies.

You can expect a full review with photo's and a video as soon as I receive these as I am sure a lot of you are wondering just like me what the actual Create a Card die looks like.

I will also be making some Card Candy to share with you using these dies, more on this later.

Nina Crafts Project Club stamps set for February 2014

 This months Project Club set from Nina Crafts is all
about tennis and was so much fun to work with!  I thought this month I would take a picture of the stamp set as it comes, so you can see what to expect in you envelope each month.  The sets are all A5 in size and very versatile.  If you subscribe to the club you  would not only get  these stamps,  but for £10 the every month would receive;  Card stock,  embellishments,  instructions sheet, and newsletter and not forgetting  the 25% discount online!!  And the best of all Project Club members get 1 month exclusivity of these sets!! So go get them here before anyone else!!

 

 

I decided to make a Stepper Card this month with a tennis net and ball like in a real game.

Yet another very simple card using this set.  You can see some more samples on the Nina Crafts Blog.

Thank you Dragonflies

 Wow at last I have three afternoons a week free to craft and blog again.  I do not mean to sound like a bad mum but did miss some me time and now that the girls are at nursery in the afternoon I get to do a few things that has been neglected.

I was clearing out my craft shed the other day and realised how many clear stampsets I have that I have not used in some time and found this lovely set by Woodware that I absolutely loved  and as I had to make a thank you card thought I would have a play.

 

I created a panel by stamping three dragonflies and then added some details inbetween.  I stamped the flowers and cut them out by hand, shaped them slightly and then mounted then with 3d foam pads.  I used another stampset that I can not remember the manufaturer of for the insert.  It was received very well.

 

 

While I was having so much fun with the stamp set I decided to try my had at making my own gift wrap and stamp all over a sheet of plain brown paper and colouring it with gel pens and Spectrum Noir makers.  Yet again the person receiving the gift loved this personal touch.

I have also taken on some other projects in my local community like doing a volunteers course at my local Children's Center and do a few hours per week there from time and have become a voting partner on a community development programme funded by the Big Local and are hoping to improve things for everyone in particular my kids. Might sound selfish but in improving things for them I am indirectly improving things for others in the community.  So I am keeping busy and loving being more then "just Mum" for a change.

Here is an insert I made for another card using the same stamp set and paneling like the first card.  I really loved how it came out.