September's Jewellery Class Designs

In the class at Craft Den on Saturday 4th September, we will be making two bracelets:

A simple daisy chain, where the first daisy becomes the fastener for the bracelet.

 
A double-linked chain with Thai-silver melons and rainbow seed-beads.

If you want to join us and learn a new skill - call the Craft Den on 0114 2340732 to book a place.  The class costs just £8 for 2 hours hands-on tuition and this includes all the materials you need to make both bracelets which are yours to keep after the class.

Birthday Diva Two Ways

I needed to make an 18th and 40th Birthday card this week for my cousin's daughter and one of the book club girls respectively and I thought that "Diva" by my favourite digi-stamp artist Mo Manning would be just about perfick for both of them.

I coloured her up in two completely different ways - one pink, one green and blue and to be honest I'm not sure which I like best - the image itself just makes it so easy to colour it right.  Copics, blended pencils and quite a bit of glitter and crystal embelishment and you're good to go Diva-tastic.  I even used a little "smooch" pearl ink to highlight the pearls around her neck, highlighted with glossy accents.

The bracelet was for the 18th Birthday - it's a clubbers bracelet - the round beads glow in the dark :-)

A few card commissions

These are the cards I've made for people to send to friends and relatives recently

A new baby girl - ultra-cute Elzybells special delivery stamp - great to go either pink or blue with.

A tripple Bella card for a special 40th birthday showing how the birthday girl would spend the weekend with cake, cocktails and pressies from her mates.

Another Bella image - this time Eloise Greengrass from the chichiboulie fairy range - I love the way these colour up - lots of opportunities to get the sakura pen and glamour dust out too!

This is a sugar nellie stamp "Guitar Hero" - I used Smooch pearlised accent ink in moonlight colour to paint the guitar which added a touch of realism.

Finally another Bella (I'm becoming a bit of a Bella addict - there are just so many lovely stamps to choose from that there is always one to match the occassion you need an image for!)  This is Golfafella from the Fellabella range.  Rather than going straight to copics - I paper-pieced his jumper to give it a pringle feel and shaded over the top with pencils.  I did the same with the golf back to add a leather look.

A Cheesey Quiche Experiment........

My husband, who usually isn't around on our book group nights, is now at home, and therefore has to be fed along with the girls.  Not a problem normally, but this month I'd decided to make a 5 onion and gruyere quiche and my husband does not eat cheese - food of the devil according to him (he's pretty normal apart from the cheese-issue honest!)  So I was going to make him something or a separate "cheese-less quiche" but I thought I would experiment and see if I couldn't make a cheese-less section in the big quiche.

I lined the tin as normal, but then rolled out a quiche-height strip and stuck it in a V shape to create a separate section within the quiche.  Adding the greaseproof to fill with baking beans around all the sections was a bit trickier than filling the whole circle and I had to make sure there were enough beans to support the V until it firmed up during the blind baking process.  It was trickier still to get them out ;-)

But it seemed to work and after 20 minutes in the oven I had my very own pastry pie-chart!

This is the photo of the different flavours - after this stage I just added the egg and cream mixture carefully so that the cheese didn't leak into the special slice.....

....and hey presto - one husband-friendly slice of quiche without cheese!   The only issue was that the extra pastry in the V didn't crisp up like the edges and base as it was surrounded by the egg mixture, but if you need to keep your flavours separate it does work and you can always throw the slightly soft pastry once it's served its purpose.

New Rubber Stash

I spent all last night EZ-mounting my new rubbers stash - mostly a bitter-sweet haul from Elzybels following her decision to close her shop I just had to buy EVERYTHING I might ever want!  I have very sore fingers today!!!!   However the stash looks good now it's all organised by category in lovely clear binders - how sad am I :-)

All About the Boys

 It's was all male birthdays for me in July and I usually find men's cards hard but I was really pleased with the ones I came up so I thought I'd share a few.  My favourite was this one for my husband's friend who is a video game addict so this Mo Manning digi-stamp is just perfect!  I was very pleased with how well the jeans came out.  I coloured him with copics and pencils blended with sansoder.

Then we had a couple of bikers - one of the pedal power variety which is just a great wire topper mounted with a lot of silicon onto a mount and then onto an embossed happy birthday using my sissix.  The other biker prefers a bit more petrol so I used a kanban pop-up motobike and coloured it copics and metalic markers for all the chrome and added some bubblewrap behind the headlight to provide some texture.