December Wedding Card Order

This month I had an order for a wedding card from a regular customer. She always gives me a detailed brief of what the card needs to feature.

This time the card had to have:

• The couple's names
• The wedding date
• Holly
• Blue Topaz for a december birthstone
• QPR blue
• Light christmas theme

 Here's what I came up with...

 

The cardstock is sparkly and similar to the blue topaz birthstone. The background features embossed snowflakes and some blue glitter stickles. The holly made a lovely, simple embellishment for the wedding dress and added to the christmas feel of the card. The QPR shade of blue featured as the groom's waistcoat, the ink for the sentiment and also for the text inside the card.

I always prefer to put the names and dates inside of the card, so it doesn't clutter the front of the card but also so it can be a main feature of the card insert itself. I even added a few miniature snowflakes around the text to keep the christmas/winter wedding theme going.

Hopefully both my customer and the couple themselves like the card.

Baby Gift Set Orders

 It seems like everyone is having children this year, I seem to be making an awful lot of baby cards, bibs and burp cloths. Surprisingly a lot of people appear to be choosing to not find out the baby's gender either so I've been left the challenge of trying to find gender neutral baby fabrics to make bibs and burp cloths from.

 The most recent order was for 2 bib and burp cloth sets, 1 for a little girl and the other for a surprise. 

I started with the little girl set as I had some awesome pale pink cupcake fabric in my fabric stash that I've been dying to find a good use for. So for the gift set I made a burp cloth, normal style bib and a bandana bib.

 For the surprise gender baby set I used a polka dot fabric that isn't too boyish for a little girl... in fact this was the colourscheme of my bedroom when i was a little kid. Once again it's a burp cloth, normal style bib and a bandana bib.

 The burp cloths have all got one of my newly printed fabric labels sewn onto one of the front corners. I thought sewing them onto the bibs as well would have been a bit overkill as it's obvious they are a set so only one label is really required.

 These burp cloths are for another gender surprise baby order but I thought I'd use the photo of them to show the labels sewn onto them...and show off my favourite gender neutral fabric I've found, the animal train fabric is so cute, but it's also a tad pricey so I'm not using it too often.

So that's one happy customer and hopefully in the next couple of months when the babies arrive it will be happy recipients of the gift sets too.

 

Wedding Card For Teachers

 This wedding card was an order from a regular customer, a lady who regularly gives me challenge cards to make..this card was cetainly no exception...

The couple are getting married today (19th July 2014) and they are both teachers, one teaches P.E and the other teaches science.

So the challenge was to include the following in the design:

• Their names- Ben & Alex
• Science theme
• P.E theme
• The wedding date
• Something wedding based

 This is what I came up with after many weeks of sketching and resketching ideas....

Late one night a brain wave came to me to try and make their names using elements from the periodic table to add the science to the card..this worked perfectly till the ex of Alex...so I made a new element that follows on from the last in the real periodic table to cover it. 

 

The sport theme came into the card in the form of a cricket bat, which I added the wedding date to.. I then figured I could make the name elements look like an equation where the date on the bat was the solution.

I then added the wedding element to the card using my favourite heart embossing plate, To Have and To Hold ribbon and hearts to represent the bride and groom.

Hopefully the couple like it as much as the lady who ordered it from me did...roll on the next design challenge!

Marvel Birthday Card

 I get some unusual requests for card orders and this one was certainly a challenging one, from a regular customer. This one was for her grandson's birthday.

The brief was:

• Number 3
• Kai (his name)
• Marvel characters (had to include Captain America, Hulk, Spiderman and Iron Man)
• Bright colours

 So here's how I put all the requested details together.
 

I tried to keep the colourschem simple as just blue, white, red and yellow...with a little green for Hulk, any more green would have been too much for the card, I did play around with green more and it just didn't work.

I even hand drew all the characters, which was not the easiest thing to do, many attempts at each character till I found a comic book cover that had the perfect pose of \captain America, Hulk and Spiderman that I could draw for myself. I coloured them using watercolour pencils.

 Now I didn't forget Iron Man...I just couldn't get him to fit on the front of the card with the other charcters.. couldn't leave hiom out either as he's Kai's favourite character so I decided to put him inside the card to make the insert more interesting.

Champagne Birthdays!

Another card order for Mum all made, finished and well actually now received as it's taken me so long to remember to blog them. Two of her friends were having 'big birthdays' and she wanted to give them some unusual cards and as always i took up the challenge and ignored the original design idea she gave me.. sorry mum but they never wuite work out how you see them in your head.. but I kept the theme similar using champagne bottles rather than the glasses idea she had.

One friend was 50 so I used lots of gold and glitter...

The other was 40 so I stuck to silvers instead..

My favourite thing about this order was using my Sizzix Bigshot that Dan (darling OH) got me for christmas.. he had no idea what he was buying me just went into Hobbycraft with the name on a bit of paper lol.. but now he understands a little more as everything is being made embossed now!

Pearls order

Here's a set of pearls that I've made tonight for an xmas order... crikey haven't made a set of these in ages.. but it was nice to drag out the hematite again.. perhaps one day I'll get round to designing some earrings to go with these sets lol
I've used:

• 6mm pearls
• 4mm hematite
• Silver clasps
• Jump rings
• Tiger tail

Mum's order

So my mum saw the sets I'd made myself and Linda and she decided she had to have a cocktail ring for herself... well 2 actually as she couldn't decide on a colour and didn't fancy a mix of the 2 colours she couldn't pick between... so I had to make her a black ring and a purple ring.

To say these rings infuriate me is an understatement.. it took 4m of filament to make the purple ring as I had to keep restarting it as the filament kept breaking or getting tied in knots... have you ever tried undoing knots made in clear thread, it's near impossible!

I've used:

• 38 purple crackle glass beads
• 38 black crackle glass beads
• 19 lilac seed beads
• 19 black seed beads
• 2 sieve rings
• Monofilament

Chip bead bracelet order

One of the girls from work fell in love with my chip bead charm bracelet that I wore for most of my shifts (mainly to annoy my boss that I could wear nice jewellery without it being something he could take away lol)... and she decided to commission me to make 3 for her to give as xmas presents to her friends..
I've used:

• ruby red chips
• violet chips
• chips of real jade
• 2 heart lock charms
• 3 just for you stars
• 2 hand made with a smile sun charms
• 1 star outline charm
• 1 small butterfly charm
• 3 patterned tube bails
• 9 lobster clasps

Linda's Order

The lovely Linda contacted me a little while back to make her a couple of jewellery sets for xmas.. one for her from one of her kids and the other as a present for a friend. So I thought I would share the finished pieces with you all, if anyone else is interested then drop me an email my addy is on the right hand column.
Items I've used:

• Turquoise glass crackle beads
• Aqua glass beads
• Hot pink bicone beads
• Black faceted beads
• Headpins
• Eyepins
• Sieve rings
• Ribbon necklace blanks
• Silver chain
• beading thread