This year’s lavender harvest has arrived and I have been challenged to do more than the usual lavender bags, so a wreath starts us off…
The base was cut from cardboard packaging and wrapped with donated wool before five handfuls of lavender were placed around the wreath, their stems cropped, lightly hot glued in place and then ‘bound’ with curling ribbon – which also makes a hanger for this lovely room scenter.
this time from Joanna Sheen cardmaking collection…
The shadows are achieved by masking and effects by pulling up the ink with water – useful practice.
I thought I would be using the die and stamp set from this mag but got sidetracked by an article on blending distress oxides with the stencils that came in the kit. Here are my two ‘casing’ efforts.
I cut a stencil from acetate to make a wreath builder, saving myself money and extending the use of my new Craftwork cards flower stamps.
The stencil is merely two 4 1/4” squares, one rotated 45 degrees to form a star shape. The scan n cut did it’s stuff and I popped out the star leaving a place holder to rotate stamping paper around so that repeated stamping in a stamp positioner is neatly aligned. (See Gina K wreath builder if you want the original at £10.99)
For this card I used my distress oxide inks and filled the centre with fussy cut flowers from the papercraft magazine kit.
It may look like I have only made 5 cards, but I have worked my way through the magazine, tried out the stamps, dies and stencils and ‘cased’ these cards so far.
The challenge now is to use up the remaining tags, fussy cut flowers and papers that I have prepared. Meanwhile they sit with my other Craftwork cards kit remnants waiting for a second burst of enthusiasm.
This magazine was a bargain from Craftstash bought with birthday money (justifying paper addiction here). Will keep my eyes peeled for issue 2…
I chopped up two of the menus handwritten for a special birthday and turned them into a page that goes with our historic family meals display.
‘Snap’ was a local word for packed lunch in Nottingham/ Derbyshire when I was living there many, many years ago. So these lunch bags fastened with Kam snaps had an obvious snappy name.
I used remnants of vinyl from an Amazon job lot which meant cutting front and back panels to use the fabric best. If you have a plasticised tablecloth or even a heavy duty shower curtain to upcycle that would work well.
Because the remnants weren’t squared, one of the sunflower bags has an angled flap which needs three snaps to keep it closed well. But because the colour of the snaps is a positive (there were about 20 sachets of different colour snaps in the beginner set I bought) it makes the end result better in a quirky way.
While the snaps were out I made a small lined bag (angled flap and 3 snaps again) and turned the cuff end of a shirt sleeve (left over from last week’s laundry bag make) into a phone holder to avoid scratches when it is in my bag.
to make: cut vinyl into required shape (back bigger so the flap folds over)
with right sides facing sew round the sides and bottom – use a long stitch length to make as few puncture holes in the vinyl as possible and don’t do too many back stitches at beginning and end or the vinyl will be too holey and might tear when in use.
trim seam allowance and clip the seam really close to the stitches at the corners before turning right sides out – the clipping helps neaten the corners as vinyl is quite bulky.
fold the edges of the flap over and seam these in place, on one of the bags I used zig zag for this to hide a blooper I had made.
position the snaps or you could use Velcro to finish the bag…
janecrafts 