Brick by Brick is the Appeal to raise funds to build a new Hospice in Glasgow
As you may know we take voluntary crafting to the Day Centre at The Glasgow Hospice. Asking the patients beforehand if there are any specific cards they would like, we gather together all that is needed to make a complete card, in a cellophane pocket. Then on the day each patient chooses which one they would like to make up. Last time, since it is so close to Easter, we chose Tatty Teddy as the theme, but we use a variety of different styles month by month.
Collection boxes for the Brick by Brick Appeal come flat-packed ready to assemble, complete with double-sided tape, so any crafter will have no problem putting one together - it's just like origami!
Any card packs that are unused are made up and added to others to sell at Deaf Focus in East Kilbride, to raise funds for a ramp at the Atholl Centre Pitlochry. Deaf Focus is a great place to practice BSL signing.
Atholl Centre Pitlochry
We made a short video to show this.
With Video Captions for the Deaf Community when turned on in Settings.
One of my purchases at the recent craft fair was a We R Memory KeepersCandy Box Punch Board - and what a well-designed piece of equipment that turned out to be! The demonstrator had only learned to use it the previous day and I really did only need one demo to know how to use it, as the video we made shows. Even with Ruth's hand problems, the punching was not difficult.
Just in time for Easter we made little crackers filled with chocolate eggs: cardboard, decorated with Easter strips, peel-off borders, name labels and a cheepy chick. You saw a photo in a previous post, and here's another, the rest are in the video.
Candy Box
The crackers are ideal for Birthdays, Easter, Christmas and even Wedding favours, depending on the pattern of card used. At the Ross show, too late, we got egg-decorated cardboard, doing away with the need for all the extra decorating. Imagine for wedding favours, lovely pearlised card, perhaps embossed, for little crackers like the pink birthday one shown in our video!
In the pink
I was so pleased with the punch board, that I added Pillow Box and Gift Bag as well, from Joanna Sheen; then Ruth also bought the Candy Box and the Gift Boxes boards. Well, she is known as the box queen!
Happy box-making, whichever way you make them, with or without boards. Here's how we did it.
As promised, here is an off-the-cuff video I took of us joining in a demo of box-making at the craft fair, now uploaded to YouTube. Charmain of Payper Box led us through the process, using flexible embossing powder and removable double-sided tape. Jeanette from our craft group was on hand to do a lot of the work, also videoing sections as I did a little bit of the crafting, while Ruth did nothing! It was a laugh for us anyway and I hope you enjoy watching.
It doesn't seem any time at all since Ruth and I were at the Craft Fair in November and here we are in March doing the rounds again! It's a great opportunity to stock up on basics and see what's new.
Alice's
I look forward to practising some Tangles with the help of a book of examples, since I am prone to doodling while on the phone. It's usually treble clefs and cubes - I guess that makes me a musical mathematician LOL - seems appropriate! I also got a cracker boxmaker which looks like it might be fun and useful!
Ruth's
With permission, I filmed rubber stamped cards at Card IO, decopatch at Damselfly, card at Ross Papers and boxmaking at Payper Box. The results of our visit can be seen in a short YouTube video.
We hope to use the Card IO (formerly Tapestry) stamps on acrylic tubes, with the Day Centre patients at the Hospice. A quick tip we were given by the demonstrator is using alcohol-free baby wipes, dried-out, to rub in backgrounds to give an ink-dusted effect. The Inkylicious demonstrator uses a wet paintbrush to drag the colour; also a spray bottle of water pointed upwards drops a fine mist onto the background colours. We both bought the plastic sun and moon stencils to make ink dusting even easier!
Card IO Samples
More Card IO Samples
Demonstrator Hard at Work
Ann of Damselfly was on hand to give us advice on our decopatch technique, which leaves a lot to be desired. Jeanette of our craft group made a neater job, as she took her time. We were glad of the rest.
If only we could Decopatch like this!
Still to come, a demo of boxmaking, with Charmain of Payper Box. That will be a YouTube video on our Craft & Chat Playlist. Jeanette was with us too and helped with extra hands, since it's hard to film and craft without a tripod! This gave us another opportunity to have a seat while we crafted.
When we made our Easter Cards Tatty Teddy video, afterwards Tatty Teddy looked in on us to see how our crafting was going. As you know if you have watched the video, it wasn't one of my better days, having forgotten to check the remote control battery and then discovering a spare...in my video camera case of course! I had also made a purchase on eBay which hadn't yet arrived - so it will be seen in another video, coming up soon, we hope.
Anyway, TT joined in our Craft & Chat outtake video, as we dissolved in giggles as usual. Hope it gives you a wee laugh.
We got on with our filming yesterday, having prepared all week with waterfall, stepper cards, and digital cards from Spring Chic CD-rom. Now to film the introduction and ending...
Guess what? I forgot to check the battery for the remote control! However, that only required one of us to get off our seat and manually start/stop the video camera. Giggling together as usual, afterwards my brain suddenly kicked into gear and remembered I had a spare battery, where? In the camera case, of course. So we just filmed a little extra bit for the end of the video. We hope you enjoy Tatty Teddy Easter and look forward to your comments. What will we film next?
Here are some of the cards we made:
Tatty Teddy Easter sample card for Hospice
Tatty Teddy Easter card packs for assembling at Hospice
We are finally getting organised and back into
crafting demos and blog posts plus a quick tip on YouTube for removing
dies from card. There may be other tips that we can add as we go along
as I am always eager to find an "easier way", especially
regarding measuring!
In the very near future we plan to have some
cards on display giving different ideas and we will talk through how
they were made. The theme is Tatty Teddy. Alice and I have both been
busy with ideas so that we can have different cards to show you plus quick and easy for new crafters.
We made our visit to the Craft Fair again to stock up on our supplies, and as well as our usual breaks to rest our legs, we spent a long time sitting whilst trying out Decopatch for the first time. Demonstrator Ann, whom we have met before at the Craft fairs, guided our sticky hands, without damaging Ruth's craftyglittery nails. Using mdf hearts and gluing torn pieces of fabulous French-designed greaseproof-like decorated papers, that don't fall apart when glued, gave us a chance to snatch a quick video for YouTube which you can now watch.
Decopatch Ann
Our decopatch hearts completed
Other side
I bought the beginners decopatch kit as it looks like something that will work well in the future with Grandsons; they definitely have to be introduced to crafting! Evan's Mummy is very creative herself so I gave her a wee rubber-stamped and Copic-coloured picture to mark her 1st Mother's Day this weekend.
1st Mother's Day
Here's a couple of photos of our loot, and Ruth has even gone so far as to film hers to give you a good look!
Alice's supplies
Ruth's purchases
We're still very keen on ink dusting and bought some more Inkylicious rubber-stamp verses and images, to make our pictures when we get a chance to have a play.
Ruth at the stall
Next in our video pipeline is Tatty Teddy; we're going to make some simple Easter cards to use with the patients in the Day Centre at the Glasgow Hospice at the end of the month. We have various Carte BlancheFrom Me to You cardmaking paper and rubber stamp products which we are looking forward to using.
...well that's crafting isn't it? That's my excuse for mentioning this lovely DVD that craftywhippet and I have both bought, which has also shown on UK TV on Sky. There are lots of trailers on YouTube. André Rieu has also recently performed at the SECC in Glasgow.
I have had had more help from Dave of Memory Box and he sent this useful link to his video. This gave me more ideas about how to get the tree to cut out all over, not just in the centre, by using a metal plate - but this didn't work either.
Adding the centre patch just took away the pressure from the outer leaves, so that's been removed. At the craft group Jane tried it on Ann's Cuttlebug with no success. She's taken the die home to try in the Big Shot. So... back to the craft night. I had bought a set of three rubber stamps for male cards. Ann suggested I size down this shirt and tie to fit the 2" square punch used for the Waterfall card and do it for my project. I sized and centred it in MS Publisher and printed out lots of little squares for the girls.
These were coloured with alcohol pens and distress-inked at the edges, then attached to the mechanism. A background was made by using a Versamark ink pad then chalking over that, or brushing with mica powders, or heat embossing.
I coloured four more shirts for future use but the finished product of my sample is blue of course!
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