The king of the jungle

This is a card for Crazy 4 challenges 34: 'choose one of the CRAZY girls cards posted here today and CASE it!'

I chose Mercy Kerin's card (the first one shown) - I've used some spotted paper and also a lion stamped (I love this Magenta lion stamp - it's a large stamp, so this time I cut the image down a bit for the square card.

It's also for:

KL stampin n scrappin 27: 'earth colours - browns, greens and white'
Paper garden projects: 'don't be blue colour challenge'
Frosted designs: 'colour challenge: aqua, brown, lime green'
Your next stamp 15: 'going dotty'
Crafty catz 30: 'spots'
Creative cottage 8: 'circles'
Alphabet: 'A for animals'
Aly's Sunday 16: 'animal hugs'
Stamp dreams 28: 'animals'
Tanda teaser 144: 'paws for thought' - I hope this 'cat' isn't too big for the challenge!
Incy wincy: 'one of my favourites' - this stamp definitely is
Everybody art 88: 'song title' - 'I'm the king of the jungle'

Simply blue, gold and white

This is a very simple card for sketch 61 on Card Patterns:

It's also for Basic Grey week 18 colour combo 5: blue, gold and white. I ussed lime rickey papers. The metallic embellishment in the middle of the flowers was originally silver, so I inked it with gold alcohol ink.

I'm also linking for:

One stitch at a time 10: 'flowers'
Creative card crew 49: 'April showers bring May flowers'
Creative craft: 'blooming marvellous'
No time to stamp? 137: 'April showers bring May flowers'
Our creative corner: 'blooming blossoms!'
One stop craft 77: 'metallic' - the embellishment in the middle of the flowers
Creative Belli 90: 'birthday card' - the old and forgotten item is the metallic embellishment
Simple doodles 16: 'not a spring chick anymore' - anything that is old - the metallic embellishment

Salt: Honour and respect

It was Stacy's turn to choose the theme for this fortnight's challenge on Salt - you can read what she wrote here.

Firstly, I apologise to my fellow Saltinies that my LO is late this week - I could say that it is because my crafting has been minimal for the past couple of weeks, what with John being poorly and hospital/doctor visits - but the truth is that I just couldn't get my head round what to do for this challenge. I think I found this to be the hardest challenge on Salt so far - but I now want to thank Stacy for helping me to reflect in the way I have in the end.

The scripture that Stacy chose is: “This is also why you pay taxes, for the authorities are God's servants, who give their full time to governing. Give everyone what you owe him: If you owe taxes, pay taxes; if revenue, then revenue; if respect, then respect; if honor, then honor.”- Romans 13:6-7

The more I thought about honour and respect the more I thought about our country at this present time, so close to a General Election and all that entails, particularly with the prospect, perhaps of a hung parliament. I felt I should do something on this theme, but what? ... I didn't want to wave any particular political banner, but as I considered this theme afresh last night (when a bit of panic had set in, thinking that I wouldn't be able to produce anything for this), I pondered on the scriptures from Hebrews and 1 Timothy that I've used in the LO.

We are urged to pray for those in authority and to obey our leaders and submit to their authority, but in turn they themselves have a responsibility ' ... as men who must give an account.' Our obedience isn't just automatic, but needs to be weighed up against the greater laws that God Himself has given.

I kept the LO simple - no flowers or flourishes - using three photos from the internet. The large lettering is American crafts remarks runway.

As usual, if you click on the picture, you will be able to read the writing.

WOYWW update

I spent a long time today labelling, putting inserts in cards, bagging etc - only to find that I had another lot that I'd forgotten about, so did those too - altogether today I did this with over 130 cards - I didn't realise I'd made so many recently (that's not counting the 60 odd Christmas cards that I've made).

I've now slotted these cards in with the ones I already had in boxes - I've just had a count up and I've got 410 in total.



Thanks to Elaine for the link for a supplier of the stackable trays that I showed this morning - for anyone interested, they are available here.

Now that I've got all the cards ready, I can concentrate on making some more to fill the gaps - need to make some more 'new home' cards, for instance - and 'sympathy cards', sadly, are often bought, so need to make a few more.

I'm also ashamed to say that I haven't done a LO for tomorrow morning's Salt challenge - I'm going to have to be late with this. I think the difficulties of life with John's ill health have been catching up with me a bit lately and I've been finding it hard to concentrate.

We're up to Guy's hospital again tomorrow, but I'm hoping that when we get back I'll be able to get something done and add to the Salt blog. Meanwhile, the new challenge should launch at 10:00 am, so please go along and see what others in the team have shown.

WOYWW getting organised ...

Wednesday has come round again with lightning speed, so it's time for WOYWW - do go along to Julia's lovely blog and have a nose at lots of people's workspaces - I love seeing them, but apologise to others that, unless I find some more hours in the day, I probably won't get round to looking because I need to concentrate on other things, as you will see.

Firstly, last Wednesday I showed a photo of a pile of 12 x 12 papers that needed sorting - quite often they get put back into the trays as they are, which, of course, makes it difficult to find what I need, hence a whole lot being out on the workspace. Tbh I like everything to be organised and labelled - and most things in my craft room are - so I decided to take the whole lot of paper out of the racks and sort and label. I've tried various ways of grouping papers, but find that mainly sorting by manufacturer works best because I then can tend to picture what papers I have more easily. I've also created catagories such as Christmas, ladies, men, scenes, wording ... those papers that tend to be used for a special purpose.

Someone last week asked where I got the trys - they came from Artymiss quite some time ago - probably two or three years - since then they have been taken over by the Craft Barn and I can't see the trays in their products. As you can see, I'm running out of paper space, so, if anyone knows a stockist for these trays, please let me know. Btw, the top tray is empty but usually houses a few miscellaneous things that haven't been put back yet!


I'll be selling cards on Friday week for charity at our Women's Evening Fellowship at church, so I need to get on and get ready for that. As you can see here, I've got a lot of cards that need labelling, inserts, envies, bagging ... You can't see many of the A6 ones because they've slid down inside the box, but there are quite a lot there to be done. Like other crafters, I love making the cards, but am not keen on doing all the other bits. So, I've cleared the decks and my first task today (perhaps I should say 'this afternoon' because somehow someone has stolen the morning!) is to get on with preparing these for sale, which is why, in the second photo under this you can see the boxes of inserts and envies.


Once I've done all this, I need to get on and make more cards to fill the gaps in my boxes which live on shelves in my bedroom wardrobe because I don't have room in here! So that will be the next task, to get the boxes out, slot these cards in and see what I need to make.

Update:

If you scroll up a post to here you'll find my update for WOYWW - all cards now have inserts, labels, bagged and sorted - that feels better!

Well, I tried ....

I needed to make my Easter inchies for the April BF swap and decided to use a bunny digi image to print on to shrink plastic - mmmmm - cut the shrink plastic as carefully as I could, but this is how they turned out:

I think these need to go in the bin.

So, I had another go with a different sheet of SP - decided this time to make them a bit smaller than an inch so that I could mount them on to card so that any wonkiness would be more disguised - not sure that I've achieved that because at least one of them looks exceedingly wonky!!

Sorry, girls, not my best ... but I tried!!