Altered Book for Secret Santa and Giveaway news

We all agreed at AVJ that we would take part in a Secret Santa gift exchange and each of us had one person (drawn from a hat) that we would send a gift to. So if you have a cuppa in hand I will take you through the making of my pressie.

My Secret Santa project went to the lovely Anne at Redanne. She, like all of us at AVJ, loves to get into the vintage, grungy and distressed look that the amazing Tim Holtz creates.

I was delighted to make this and send it to her, however it didn’t end up as I imagined it would, in fact I named it Topsy in the end because the ideas grew and grew, as did the book. So here’s the story.

The concept began with the idea that I would alter one of Tim’s worn covers and add the plastic tag pages for Anne to keep next years Tim tags in …. but as I thought about it more I decided to use one of the old books I had in the cupboard instead.

I started with an old vintage book that didn’t have a publication date in it, but some research on the internet suggests it was probably published in the early 1900s.

I took out the inner section just leaving the cover and reinforced the spine with some builders drywall joint tape which is a very strong paper (forgot to take a photo here). My intention was to add some flaps on the inside covers for the bound pages to slip into. But I next wanted to add a page to go with each month of the year and tag pocket. So the pages were cut to size and punched with the ‘Bind It All’ ready to put together later.  Each page was sprayed both sides with tattered rose, antique linen distress stains plus several glimmer mists to get the distressed background but keeping the colours fairly light. 

I stamped and cut Tim’s calendar months and cut the pocket hinges edging them all with walnut stain, these were later attached to Tim’s tag pockets and put through the ‘Bind It All’ as well.

Next I gathered lots of die-cuts and collage pieces as I wanted to decorate each page and decided that each one would have a tag theme to correspond with the month and I chose one main colour for each one and wrote them down to refer to.

January

February

March

April

May

June

July

August

September

October

November

December

So as you can imagine, by the time I put all my collage pages and the tag holder pages together they wouldn’t fit between the covers of the book the way I imagined. So I cut the covers off and put them through the ‘Bind It All’ but soon realised that even the largest O wire wasn’t big enough to bind it and believe me I tried lol. I knew that Anne was going to need space to add her Tim tag every month so even more room was needed. At this point I was very disappointed that it wasn’t working out and wondered what I could do to remedy the situation.  I remembered back to when I had bought scrapbook kits many, many moons ago and they had spacers which allowed the pages to go in the albums and not get crushed. So I sat and cut 12 spacers that had bee run through the ‘Bind It All’ and adhered them to each page. As you can imagine by now this book had grown enormously in depth and with the covers on was now over 2 inches deep. But I still had to get it bound. Eventually I solved the problem by googling how to bind single pages in a book and found this video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q35JN8cSHs8

Eh voila, new learning for me and problem solved.

It took a while to get each page bound to the next page ….

… it’s a slip knot method that I had seen before but never tried ….

… and actually in the end I was rather pleased with the result.

Each page opened fully and there is now room for the additions Anne will hopefully make.

To finish off I also added a tag to suggest to Anne what she could use the book for.

This is soooo typical of me, start with one idea and then change things as I go along.

As for my Secret Santa gift I was very lucky to receive a sketch book / journal from the lovely Jools with the most amazing cover on it. I love these hard backed books with plain paper that you can keep to add journalling, ideas, snippets of work, photographs etc, so this one will come in very handy over the coming year. The textures are gorgeous and it’s kept to a monotone palette which looks stunning.

More photos and information can be found on Jools’ blog.

Before I finish today, I know I said we all agreed to take part in the Secret Santa but dear Terry was unable to commit to it. As a dear friend who I love to see when I go to California we always swap little gifts with each other at this time of year, so I decided to send her something as well. In my haste to get it in the post to the US I forgot to photograph it and this is all I took.

But Terry has received her gift and very kindly sent me some photos.

I won’t show them all now, I will point you over to Terry’s blog for today, but I will probably be using this technique and ideas in a workshop next year.

ONE MORE THING BEFORE YOU GO

We are having a Christmas Giveaway and Creative Guide hop over on ‘A Vintage Journey’ We would love you to come and join in the fun and there are some fabulous goodies to be given away.

I think all it needs is for me to say thanks for stopping by today, especially if you got here to the end of such a long post. Please pop over to see all the amazing projects my wonderful teamies have sent around the world and maybe get some ideas for your own hand made gifts, if not for this year then bookmark the pages or add them to Pinterest to come back to next year.

Have a wonderful Sunday.

hugs Brenda xxx

Let’s Celebrate at AVJ

Nikki is hosting our ‘Let’s Celebrate’ challenge which will take us up to Christmas, but of course with a wide open title like this you could be choosing one of a number of different things to celebrate.

You can make something to celebrate Christmas if you wish but lets not forget about those December birthdays, anniversaries, Hanukkah and New Years. It may be fun to focus on celebrations other than Christmas, it's up to you.

At this time of the year Christmas is very special to us as a family and we celebrate the season in a number of ways, one of which is giving gifts. If your children are grown up like mine then these days they don’t seem to want for much and they enjoy receiving gifts of money or tokens. This year I decided to make my own gift card holders.

Cut two pieces of card one 10 cm wide  x 18cm tall and one 14 cm wide x 6 1/2 cm tall.  Create a distressed background with stains and the wrinkle free technique. Repeat on the other side of the larger piece.

Take the larger piece and score at 5 cm on one side of the longest edge and 6 1/2 cm on the other end. Punch a semicircle or semi oval on the 5 cm end.

Take the small piece and score at 2cm on both ends of the longest side. (Here beware the thickness of the card, you might need to score at 21mm so that this wraps around the larger piece properly). Cut out a 2cm square on two of the corners and a fraction off the bottom diagonally so that the flap will fit inside neatly.

Work out which bits of the card holder are going to be upright and stamp randomly, I used Tim’s music score and text from Letter to Santa and Festive Sounds stamp sets with coffee archival ink.. Use a sticky note to mask off any section that you don’t want to stamp over. Round the corners of the large piece as shown and ink the edges before we adhere anything together.

Cut two pieces of ribbon/seam binding, I cut mine 30 cm and 25 cms long and sandwich it between the top and bottom layer when you adhere them together.

On the inside I stamped a greeting….

… and on the outside I added some glossy holly stamping using Tim’s technique that he used on on Tag 10 in 2011. I used Mini Holidays 2 and 4 for the holly stamps. I also cut and added the Noel die-cut from the Holiday Words – Script thinlits dies.

The ribbon ties around the wallet and it’s all ready to hold that gift card for that someone special.

I know it’s a big rush now to get everything sorted, decorating, cooking, buying and wrapping presents, but if you find yourself with some crafty time then we hope you will join us on our ‘Lets Celebrate’ journey.

Take care.

hugs Brenda xxx

Prove you are not a robot

Recently when vising blogs I have found more and more people with a 'captcha' box headed 'Please prove you are not a robot'. I get frustrated at these verification boxes because they slow you down when commenting and I was asking myself why so many people seem to be turning them on?????

I found CVC challenge blog also has it on and I couldn't believe Chris would have turned it on, but she didn't know anything about it. So I experimented leaving a comment on my own blog and low and behold the Robot box came up. I couldn't find a way to turn it off in the settings and that really annoyed me. 

So after searching around a bit on the internet and experimenting myself I have found that if you have a blogger blog it is likely you

  do not have to fill this in on another blogger blog. 

TRY IT. I did, it worked for me here on CVC challenge blog.

Secondly you probably can get rid of it if you want to. I have my comment box set to come up as a pop-up as I like to see the blog post and comment box at the same time, but if you embed it so that it comes up at the bottom of the post, the captcha box disappears - again this worked for me, but I have changed it back to a pop up box.

So first of all try publishing your comment without filling in the captcha box if you are on blogger and commenting on another blogger post. Good luck.

hugs Brenda xxx

Santa’s Stable – Crafty Individuals

My Christmas cards are now well under way and I've made this stand up cabinet card, mind you I still have most of them to write and get in the post.  The stamp set is CI 396 and I love the Santa and angel painted in the sepia tones. I did this with distress inks and a water brush. My youngest grandaughter looked like this for her Christmas nativity play this morning, with a long dress, wings and tinsel in her hair. I so love this time of year but I really miss being in school and sharing the build up to the big day with the children.

Now for making the cabinet card. I looked on the internet for cabinet card designs but most of them were just rectangular and I have the Tim Holtz vintage cabinet card die but I knew it would be too small, but I am into extending dies where I can, so I took a piece of mountboard, and die-cut just the top part. Using a ruler and pencil I drew lines to extend both the sides and length, they’re straight lines so it was very easy to do. I used my rotary trimmer and scissors to cut the shape out and hey presto I had the size I wanted to fit my image.

Of course there were cut lines still showing but covering the front and back with papers hid those and gave the shape it’s strength back. I glued the frame onto the papers and cut round the shape. I didn’t worry too much about neat edges as I knew I was going to sand them down.

Whilst in preparation mode I also cut a piece of normal 300 gm card and covered it on both sides with the same snowflake backing paper as the cabinet card and die-cut Tim’s small easel.

Then I was ready to do the background for the image and as Tim says it’s just a background, I used CI  017 text stamp with walnut stain distress ink and that was it simple. I knew it needed to be quite plain as the stars and images needed to take centre stage.

I had just bought a bag of stars made from wood, so I chose one, dabbed it with picket fence distress paint and sprinkled both gold and silver glamour dust over it. The small stars are die-cut and given the same treatment.

To give some dimension I popped this little angel up on foam pads and tucked a small glittered tree behind her.

The base has been cut with die-cut festive greenery and red berries with some silver bauble berries. It finished it off quite nicely.

I hope your preparations are going well.

Enjoy the rest of the week.

hugs Brenda xxx

A Nostalgic Christmas 2 – Country View Crafts

This is my second DT piece this week for the new Country View Challenge of Nostalgic Christmas. In my post on Monday I talked about my childhood memories of Christmas but today is more about how we depict that nostalgic feel to our card making. How much better than choosing the wonderful retro ornaments and retro packages dies by Tim Holtz.

I remember well the old fashioned Christmas baubles and how glittery and shiny they were and when I was a child and even in the early days of marriage I used to adorn my tree with lametta – those long strands of silvery foil. I don’t even know if you can buy it anymore. (Oh yes you can just googled it and found some on Amazon)’'.

I started with a piece of music score paper from an old Christmas song book and stamped one of the Holiday Knits in picket fence distress paint.

After drying it I blended tumbled glass, evergreen bough, festive berries and aged mahogany distress inks over it….

….l and made up the packages and baubles.

You can see I even stamped one line of the design on the parcels.

The sentiment was taken from the Christmas ephemera pack and again I blended the inks over it.

The title of the Christmas song on the music background is ‘The Mistletoe Bough’ so I die-cut some mistletoe greenery using the festive greenery strip die.

I’ve really enjoyed taking a trip down memory lane with this challenge so I do hope you will be able to join us at Country View Crafts for the last challenge of the year.

Thanks for stopping by.

hugs Brenda xxx

Peace on Earth - Christmas card

Hello everyone.

It’s my turn to post a project over on the Country View Crafts Project Blog today and I have added another of my favoured red, white and kraft collage designs.

I just loved this prancing deer the first time I saw him and at last I had found a chance to use him.

It would be lovely if you could join me at CVC Project Blog to se how this card came together.

Chris is visiting today, so it will be lovely to see her with exchanges of gifts etc ready for the big day.

I hope all is well with you.

Take care.

hugs Brenda xxx

Update - copied from CVC

Hi everyone, Brenda here and welcome one and all to what is my penultimate post here at the CVC Project Blog before Christmas. I hope your preparations are going well, I still have quite a bit to do, but will be ready for the hectic three days we have planned. I just love this time of year.

I have another Christmas card for you today made in the red, white and kraft colours and collage design that I am favouring this year. It uses the wonderful prancing deer die that I also love.

I started by spraying my card with some glimmer mists and home made distress ink sprays mixed with perfect pearls

I was planning the design in my head and on the card and gathered the paper elements I wanted to used, tearing them to size, stamping and inking edges as I wanted.

I gathered die-cut pieces together and made my sentiment …..

.. and coloured up the deer using distress inks and the sprays. I used the stamping block technique for this and will do a quick step by step for it on another project as it’s such an easy way to get this distressed look.

As this is an 8 x 8 card I decided to add a tag to the design and textured it using one of Tim’s embossing folders and distress inks and stamped the gorgeous little gingerbread house blueprint.

I went over the house with a water brush, some distress inks and picket fence distress paint to create that snowy scene.

This is then how it all came together…..

the two deer were glued together so that there was a double aspect to him which gave him both height and dimension ….

… the shabby bow was died to blend in with the colour scheme

… and the collage came together with some additional pieces to balance the composition.

Thanks for sharing in my Christmas card making, I still have a few more to make so you could possibly see one more before Christmas.