The Commonwealth Games are sneaking up on Glasgow on the 23 July - the weather here has been amazingly summery too - quite a novelty, we'll see if it lasts.
George Square in the city centre has acquired a gigantic, three-dimensional structure, which has been designed to reflect the Games logo and is taller than a double decker bus, measures a whopping 5.5m (18-feet) in height by 10.2m (33.5-feet) in circumference. At four tonnes, it also weighs the equivalent of an African elephant.
The Big G
Craftywhippet lives near one of the venues - Hampden Park - so it should be fun trying to collect her and find a straightforward route for our next visit to the daycare patients in the Hospice. Last month we made a variety of cards - and this time we are continuing the theme of cats and dogs with toppers on spellbinders die backgrounds, mounted onto extremely colourfully-patterned "designer cards". They've started to call us the HoneyBees because of our sunny yellow tops, so we thought it was time to renew them with Craft & Chat on the logo - to be revealed if we can take a selfie!
Athletics Arena
All the road closures, traffic diversions and Games Lanes are not going to make it easy for folk getting to their work, but I'm sure the city will be heaving with visitors and excitement. Mount Florida has acquired some nifty new orange bus stops for all the diverted buses.
Yet another local bus stop
The Games' mascot is called Clyde, after the River - probably too late to start making cards with him! The craft group has been making more cards, which I'll show you in another post, but we're having a break for the summer after visiting our Master Crafter Jean in Stirling.
Jane's project was not so much a card, more a way of dressing up. Different glam dresses on stands were printed three times, cut out, folded and glued together. Accuracy proved to be tricky because of the thickness of the card, but trimming and a little bit of distress ink at the edges will work wonders. A little tag with a greeting stamped on was punched out and attached with jump rings to the hem of the dress.The dresses still have to be blinged-up with gems or pearls and glitter, but they were all assembled, complete with matching envelope, ready for taking home.
Our second decopatch craft group night had to be postponed, but we finally managed either the second mask or a decopatch item of choice. I chose a crafting tools tray done in turquoise crackle design paper, finishing it at home before I lost enthusiasm! Glossy glue is used which gives a nice finish.
Completed with brush
Now the tray has my most often-used crafting tools to hand.
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.
I discovered that I had a baby boy card to make, so thought it
would be a good chance to try out the bow gem template on cream pearlised paper that I'd bought from Crafting Buddies at Ross Papercraft Show.
I didn't have any cards in that colour, so made a 5.5" square from lightweight cream
pearlised card, backing the template onto the packaging card from my new clouds
embossing folder (waste not, want not!).
Blue gingham ribbon went along the ribbon part, the bow was coloured with
Copic pen all over, and the template dots still showed through.
Doing the gem filling was fun, but oh you need good light, good eyes and a
lorra lorra gemstones!
Baby Boy
Now for the pink baby one...
Baby Girl
And of course, the Easter one. Using Ruth's embossing folder, ribbons, with pearls instead of gemstones -
Ross Papercraft Show Meadowbank Sports Centre Edinburgh
The craft group went adventuring over to Scotland's capital to explore the Ross Papercraft Show. We were well impressed. Free parking, cheap entry, reasonably-priced teas, coffees and snacks - interesting well-stocked stalls with friendly exhibitors, demos - we had fun!
There was more buzz than there had been at the ICHF craft fair in the SECC, so we hope this fair expands to Glasgow! We had conserved our spending so still found things to purchase...no surprise there!
Alice's stash
Ruth's stash
I was entranced to find a small Hougie board - just right for carrying in my craft bag. It has centimetre score measurements on one side and inches on the other. I took green as I just knew that craftywhippet would go for pink! Mc Oyster from Cupar, Fife sold them and we had a great chat with Adrian.
We stocked up on decopatch papers for our next craft night. There was a lot of excitement over new rubber stamp designs and Jeanette went straight home and made a card with them! Hopefully, more details will follow. Lovely wee stencil dies for stringing on ribbon were so cute, how could we resist!
Ribbon Buttons
There were templates from Crafting Buddies for placing gemstones or pearls on - see the blog post coming up soon showing a couple of baby cards I've made.
Pearls
We've also been busy with We R Memory Keepers Candy Box Punch Board and hope to have a new video on YouTube soon. It let us make wonderful cracker-type boxes for little Easter eggs! Loads of other possibilities abound...
It's birthday time again for Evan - two on 5 April. Disney Pixar Cars is his theme of the moment, so our card to him is a large 8x8" card decoupage (Craftsuprint cup457045_416) surrounded by a border of his favourite vehicles. The decoupage (papertole) is built up with silicone on the background, then matted and layered onto holographic card with the corners punched. A banner and a 2 placed on top finishes it all off.
Happy 2nd Birthday Evan
I printed an insert with still more images, from Mater's Tall Tales: a spin-off from the movies, which Evan loves, as the stories are much shorter. Mater and Lightning McQueen with (U.F.M.) Unidentified Flying Mater is so cute!
Card seen from above
Cars even made it onto the cake
Other themes running through the birthday are Fireman Sam, Lego Duplo, Brio and diggers. You can see the evidence around the room.
Plans can go awry. The craft group had in mind to decorate the second mask, but as one member was ill, we postponed that, and an on-the-wing card was churned out for us by Jeanette on her Grand Calibur using dies.
Beautiful glitzy paper was tried but proved very fibrous to cut. However, perseverance paid off and we got a result, though foil card was easier to work with.
Using Marianne Creatables dies, the birdcage and birdon branch were put through the machine and, with slender pieces of foam pad, laid on embossed backgrounds. The door on the cage actually opens, which is a nice touch. Looks like the bird flew free!
Bluebird
Yes, that did take all evening! We did an inordinate amount of talking compared with crafting, but hey, it was fun, and Ruth and I are known as Craft & Chat!
Jane brought along to the craft group all her moulds and we tried air-dried clay for the first time. The trick is not to handle the clay too much - some of us cottoned-on to the technique faster than others! The frames and large flowers are Martha Stewart moulds, the rose and sunflower are WOW moulds.
Martha Stewart Frame Mould
WOW Rose Mould
There are qualities in the clay, some more pliable than others. They were partly set by the time we finished and craftywhippet loaned me a box to carry them home. Unfortunately, putting the box on its side was not a great idea and a few got broken or bashed. They will gradually harden further over the next few days and then they should be decorated with the likes of Twinkling H2Os, Copic pens or Spray & Sparkle. We will see how they turn out! I've never been handy with clay so if they are usable it will be amazing.
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.
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