Crafting with new tools!

Hi, hope you all had a nice weekend.

I lost my voice and so had a very relaxing and quiet weekend - bar the trip to the local dump and the charity shop!

I have recently acquired a few new bits and bobs and decided I'd spend this weekend trying them all out. Today's main picture is of the masses of tags, that I die cut using my new xcut set of tags and nameplates die set. It's great, I think it makes standard printed wording zing to life. I also cut some plain coloured versions for use with peel offs.

They are actually quite straightforward to use, but I had to develop a little technique, so I can see how the wording looks through the aperture! An hour later, several errors and some sticky tape, I now have a technique that works.

This is a cheap and easy way of creating sentiment tags for cards and gifts.

Previously I had purchased a set of Spellbinders Nestibilities Labels Four and had spent a rainy afternoon die cutting a stack of these. Below is a picture of these combined with one of the tags from the main picture.

So, I had this beautifully layered sentiment, that looks wonderfully professional - what to do with it?! Make a card of course (duh!). I am so over the moon with the card that I made (below) - which was all based around the sentiment, it took me quite awhile, as I was being very fussy about the flowers and the buttons, but I think it was worth it - now who do I give it to?

This weekend was great, I made so many things - started the Lavender sachet project - and I managed to take all the photos, that I should have ample material for blogging this week - yay! Nearly everything I did this weekend involved a new tool or something that I'd forgotten about - you know what the new tools for this post were, but the forgotten element is buttons. Mine had been so hidden away in the previous craft room configuration, I generally couldn't be bothered to get them down. Now that I have relocated them to a handy position, they are being used a lot!

My final card for today uses the blank tags I mentioned earlier - die cut before I started making the card and it fits the colour scheme perfectly. I also used the fave Stampin' Up Bird Builder punch and the new Martha Stewart punch around the page flower.
This card is based on an idea that I saw in Cardmaking and Papercraft this month. I modified it, as I wanted it to be easier to make! All the papers used were free with magazines and are from my scrap bin, the flower is a foam one with a pearl in the middle, sentiment is a coloured peel-off and I whipped out the crop-a-dile to add eyelets. I'd gone off eyelets for a while, but as you will see over the course of this week, they came back with a vengeance over the weekend!

Hope you have had good start to your week too.

Fingers crossed I can get another post out tomorrow - whoo hoo!

Cx