Made Marian: Oozing Crafty Goodness

Browsing through The Guardian’s Life and Style section is one of my favourite things to do at the weekend, they always have great articles about fashion, food and crafts.  I logged on this morning and found exactly the inspiration I was looking for in these hand made Christmas cards.  I’m particularly fond of the one on the bottom row with the tree made completely out of buttons.  It’s a new spin on my usual trick of using the buttons as decorations.  I’ll definitely be trying this out today.

Update:

I tried out the button card…..

I started by drawing out a light guideline for the triangle and then sticking the buttons down within my guidelines.

Then I stamped on the greeting and drew on the star, easy peasy.  Here’s the finished product…

It was well worth the visit and if you’re interested in any crafts I would recommend it for next year.  They had plenty of card making and jewellery making supplies as well as fabric, yarn and other bits and bobs.  Here are some of the things I brought home.

Yarn from This is Knit - I plan to do some gloves and a scarf from this.

Ribbons for Christmas Present Wrapping.

Extra supplies for Christmas Card making.

Just a quick update on some cards I made recently.

These are wedding anniversary cards, very simply made by sticking some yellow paper onto the front of the blank cards, then attaching some pretty ribbon and “best wishes’.  The colourful flower brads came home with my SO’s parents from America last year.

Er, obviously this is a birthday card, the background paper is all one sheet which is pretty cool.  That was the last of that paper and I’m gutted, Ioved it.  The ribbon is cute and colourful as well and I used some bright pink ink on my Birthday stamper.

This card was made from a baby card set that I had in my stash, all the bits were in the set and I pretty much just attached them!

Just noticed that the ribbon is falling off this card - better check it before I actually give it to someone.  Again, just some fancy paper, two silver stickers and ribbon attached to a blank card.

The front of this card is some recycled wrapping paper, some star brads and a cake sticker!

I haven’t been feeling the card making recently, I don’t know why but it’s a craft that has been neglected in the Made Marian house of late.  However there are some important birthdays coming up so I said I’d better come up with something inspirational soon or I’d have to resort to buying a card, something I haven’t done in well over a year.

So inspired by the birthday cards with badges that we all got as kids, I decided to combine my crochet skills with my card making and came up with these.

The crochet circles on the front are actually brooches, so they can be removed from the card and worn by the lucky recipient. The circles were super easy to make. I cut out a small circle from a piece of felt, attached the crochet circle and the button to the front and then sewed on the brooch back.  Easy Peasy

I’m a tad too late with this but here’s one of the Mothers Day Cards I made this year, this is part of a set of three but unfortunately the other two had to go in the post before I could photograph them.   I felt like using the green to bring in some Spring and I’d never used the gatefold before in a greeting card but thought it would be a nice change.  Hope you like!

These are two very simple cards for Valentines day.  Simply cutting up and assembling required.  Check our your local craft supplies shop as they will have lots of kits for making seasonal cards.

If anyone would like to send me some pictures of their handmade Valentines I’d be happy to post them up

Photo by babybee

I’m sure it’s the same everywhere but it seems like every shop window in the city has been shouting about the fact that Valentines Day is around the corner.  I tend to sit on the fence about Valentines Day because I like to celebrate it in some way but I don’t like to buy too much into the clichéd commercial side.  I suppose what I mean is that I like to get a card but I love the fact that I’ve never received a shop-bought card from my significant other (he has always made them up on the computer with photos of us and little in-jokes).  I know that for some people Valentines would be a write-off without a big bunch of roses but given the emphasis on saving the pennies these days maybe we should be thinking outside the box. My significant other is no stranger to this, about three years ago he bought me a gift basket that had a little conifer plant in it, it was about 99% cheaper than a bouquet of flowers and it’s still living on our balcony.

Of course you could always take a crafty approach and buy a few bunches of cheaper flowers and wrap them up yourself.  Your local florist will probably be able to sell you some cellophane and your nearest fabric shop will have a selection of ribbon for you to chose from.

You can even make your own chocolates. I’m a big fan of chocolate truffles and they are ridiculously easy to make. You can present them nicely by reusing an old sweet box wrapped in some pretty paper and ribbon or use a tin storage box like this one.

Last but not least, the card.  Here’s a great card-making project from The Purl Bee. I tried this last year and found it really easy especially since it was my first attempt at card making. I got hooked after trying that project.  Maybe you will too. These were my end results.

I hope my crafty suggestions for Valentines day will inspire some of you to celebrate the day but not go overboard on the commercial stuff.  I’ll post up some more recent love-themed cards soon.

Disclaimer:  I reserve the right to accept cute commercial gifts if they are offered, like this. A gift, not from my significant other though but from his Mom.  He’s dressed as a ladybird which as some of you will know has particular significance to me

Posting has been sporadic here for the last while but that doesn’t mean that crafting has been sporadic.  There has been a good few birthdays over the last month so I’ve been kept busy making cards, I’ve also been working on a top-secret project (more to follow).  And as well as all that I need to get cracking on the raffle prizes that I’ve promised Damien for the Blog Awards.

My cards are taking on a distinctively Spring like quality at the moment, but I think we could all do with some Spring in our lives after the dark Winter months.  Here’s a typical example of my cards at the moment.

I’m planning on bringing two raffle prizes to the Blog Awards, one for the boys and one for the girls.

And here’s a sneak preview of my top-secret project due for completion in April

Well I hope everyone is settling into 2009 nicely.  I’m super busy in the “real world” at the moment so blogging is a little bit down the priority list.  Crafting however is still up there around the top and I have two projects in mind for this book which I bought recently.  I cannot wait to get started.

I’ve also been busy making the wedding invitations for Margaret and JD’s Big Day Out, only the evening invites to go now.  All supplies were bought from Daintree, and the ones I made were similar to the (a) in the picture but the colours are different.  They were nice and simple to make but they look very elegant.

You know it’s Christmas.   Here are some of the Christmas cards I’m sending this year.   There are loads of great little kits in the shops at the moment.  The stick and go ones are fantastic, most of those kits come with the blank cards as well.  You should definitely give it a go for some of your cards this year.  I had about 3 packs of Christmas embellishments but I managed to get 10 cards out of them by using a bit of imagination