Happy Anniversary Hubby!

Yes it's Halloween, but it's also my 3rd Wedding Anniversary today.

We are off to Amsterdam for a few days to kick-back and celebrate 3 years of marriage.

Today's photo is of the Anniversary card I made Hubby.

Once I'd seen JT's Halloween cards, I knew I had to borrow the punch I brought her back from NYC.

Despite the fact that we celebrate our Anniversary on Halloween, I'm not mad into making Hubby's cards have Halloween features, but I thought I'd try it this year and I am pretty pleased with the results.

I used Papermania textured cardstock for the pumpkin's, I used plain black card and embossed it using a creative concepts brick wall embossing folder, to macho it up a bit! Last of all I printed a sentiment and added a grey striped Savile Row Candi.

I hope Hubby likes it.

No more posts until next Monday now.

Have a good week.

Cx

Stick with what you know...

Literally I will be 'sticking' with my regular white craft glue and never want to see UHU again! I followed a little tip and bought a tube, thought it might help me getting buttons to stick to cards better. Well it certainly did that, but it also ended up all over me and the craft room.

Basically it comes out too quick and is too runny and it scared me a bit!

Anyway, I wanted to use this weekend to make some non Christmas items, but was feeling a bit short on inspiration. So I popped over to Pinterest and had a rummage through my craft ideas and also at Edie A's cardmaking board, which is amazing.

Today's main photo is of one of the cards I made using the following card as a guide -

I always feel that any cards I am 'copying' should be modified in some way to make it feel like I actually did something...
They were fun to make sp I made them in 3 colours - the UHU was the only sticking point (ha ha). I tried a new technique of running an ink pad around the edges of the paper square, it's really easy, but choose your ink type carefully - the pigment ink does not dry in a timely fashion and I ended up with it all over me and ruined a couple of cards. Chalk inks are much better.

I think the twine threaded buttons look cute, but I felt they were a tad too much effort - here is a detail photo so you can see the inked edges and the buttons

I advise using a 6 x 6 piece of paper and cutting it into 4 equal sizes squares, I found using detailed papers worked really well at this size

The papers are all from a set that I bought earlier in the year, but didn't really know what to do with them.

Here are the red and blue ones

Choosing a contrasting ink colour for the edges, really makes the paper squares stand out on the white cards.

Below is a detail shot of each card.

I opted for no twine on the red cards - don't like it as much.

Once I am back from Amsterdam, I'll post some more photos from my inspiration session.

Cx

Engagement hearts

I made this lovely card for my friend Stuart and his shiny new fiance Amy. I'm seeing them this week for the first time since they got engaged, so I wanted to make them a card.

Stuart is a designer, so I had to make sure my card was funky and followed some design principles!

The big green heart came from Paper Presentation in NYC, which is possibly the most beautiful stationery / craft store in the world...I spent a lot of money in there, but the good news is that these hearts were in the sale and were dirt cheap, so I have them in black, grey and brown. The pink heart was punched using the Woodware heart punch. The white heart was punched using a new Woodware 2in scalloped heart punch - this is the first time I've used it.

I really like the 70's retro flower print paper that I used for the background. It came free with a craft magazine.

I am thinking about making a few more of these and adding them to the new website. What do you think?

Cx

Personal Christmas.

The main photo today is of one of the Christmas cards I am making for Hubby and I to use this year. Hubby thinks christmas cards are totally un-necessary, but obviously I don't agree...I love sending cards :)

I am really pleased at how well it turned out. Fortunately, choosing this design meant that I had to purchase new toys :) I bought a Sizzix snowflake folder and stamp and a Woodware snowflake punch.

The idea came from this one that I saw on Pink Petticoat.

I decided that embossing the background and applying ink using a brayer would be more fun. The snowflakes looked a bit flat, so I painted them with a thin layer of glitter paint, to give them a slight shimmer. Instead of using red string, I went for a red button, which adds colour to the card.

Overall I think it's worked well, so I decided it would make a great challenge blog entry - no.95 on the DYSU blog, that wanted wet or dry embossing is the perfect one to enter. And that's exactly what I did :)

This is my first challenge entry in quite a while...I miss it, but I don't have enough time right now..

Cx

It's taken some time..

but here it is...the long awaited Christmas card post!

Apologies for the delay, but it's been a bit hectic in my world for the last few weeks. I finally found a time to take photos of the Christmas cards I made for Ham'n'Mule this year.

Today's main photo is one of my favourites, using a Martha Stewart Present punch (which was not cheap - eek!) and contrasting background and greeting, I think it's a nice way to make Christmas monochrome. Below is the white on black version. They were really easy to make.

Next is a variety of cards, using Pink Petticoat digital stamps. I used 4 different sets - Fairy Lights, Tiny Christmas Treasures, Have an Ice Christmas and Mini Rudi's. They are really easy to work with and I invested in a super dupa Woodware circle punch, to make them all super easy to put together. The Mini Rudi's, Ice Christmas and the Tiny Christmas Treasures get a bit of glitter added to the image, to make them sparkle a bit.

The next card is based on an idea I saw on Pinterest that I really loved. I have modified it slightly, to make it easier as they do have to be reproduced several times. It was great to get to use several different embossing folders, normally I only get to work with one at a time. I really like the little green bow, it adds a touch of colour.

Here are teeny tiny snowflake's and rudi's...these are so small and cute. I love them!

I hope this means that JT won't be harming me now :)

Cx

Change is coming..

 Happy Friday everyone!

This is a pretty short post, just to show off the new Ham'n'Mule logo, because I love it so much! It's still lo-res, so might not show up as wonderfully as I want it too. I think Maggie, the designer has totally captured the essence of what we do, I love the button and the birdie.

The new and greatly improved website should be up and ready to use by 5th November. Most exciting! I will be taking more pics and adding to it this weekend.

To tie in with that, I have updated the look and feel of the blog....bye bye birdies. It made me sad to lose the birdies, but sometimes to achieve something wonderful you have to embrace change. It's not complete yet, but I'm taking baby steps to get it right!

Have a wonderful weekend everyone.

Cx

p.s With this post, I will have passed the total number of posts for 2011 - which was a big goal for me, so I am most pleased and we still have 2 months of the year to go!

Win some, you lose some..

So Saturday was the day of the Craft Fair. After getting up at 5.30am...yes 5.30am we were hoping that we would have a successful day and today's main photo is of JT and our lovely stall.

Unfortunately it wasn't quite what it should have been.

Our pitch was a bit poor, we were in the foyer, which in it's self would have been ok, but not with 5 stalls. It was very crowded, we couldn't stand behind our table and so we kept blocking off each other's stalls in the area.

Our takings were slim and quite frankly at the end of the day the lady that was organising it wasn't very interested in taking our feedback (which all things considered was rather measured).

We did make a few sales and I was really pleased that we sold one of JT's beautiful wreaths - photo below.

On the plus side, we learnt how to run a stall together and I'd say that was a big plus. We got lots of compliments about our items, which was really nice after all our hard work. We also had fun, made some new friends and had a couple of white wine spritzers!

We are now looking for alternative fairs, but we anticipate the website being live next week and that should help us shift our lovely Christmas items. The photo below is of our Christmas card display.

All in all many lessons learnt and after all it is a hobby right?

Cx

Finally Saying Thank You

As you know, I love making 'Thank You' sets.

This year I decided that for my Birthday Thank You's, I'd go with the Owl punch, as I guess I should be wise at my age....?

I used really nice silver sparkly cards from Michaels and black paper scrap strips. I am pleased with them, simple and fun.

I've already sent most of them out. I got a bit delayed with holidays and craft fair stuff.

I also want to say a massive 'Thank You' to Pam at VikingTapes- I purchase the tape for my 3M ATG from them they are reasonable and deliver quickly. Last week after I placed my order Pam told me that they were out of stock and I might have to wait a week...disaster, as I needed the tape to finish the Christmas cards. I appealed to Pam and following a hilarious email exchange my tape arrived the next day. Pam, I salute you for restoring my faith in mankind and customer service in general...

All Christmas cards for the fair are complete now, I've making some other things to vary the stall a bit, brooches, scarves, non-Christmas cards....most of this I am doing this week, but plan to be done by Thurs evening so I can pack my bag on Friday night and go to bed early, as we are getting up at 5.45am!!

So, JT has assured me that my last post doesn't guarantee me escape from bodily harm....as it's not a Christmas Card post...it's genuinely not my fault, I have to wait until the weekend to take the pics. I guess I'll have to try another method tonight so I can actually attend the fair on Saturday.....

Cx

Good Weather = Naughty Me!

Hey!

I had a fab birthday...far too much drink was consumed in a 4 day period, Joe's wedding was wonderful and my holiday in Tenerife was a hoot. None of which relates to the title of this post...so let's start at the beginning shall we?

I decided to use my birthday vouchers to my a new (long awaited) fisheye lens for my camera. I bought one by Lensbaby, which means I can interchange other lenses and accessories from their range - it makes buying new camera equipment fun and relatively inexpensive. It arrived on Thursday.
I have a million and one craft fair related things to do and JT said she'd do me bodily harm if I didn't get a post out about the Christmas cards...

Enter me being naughty the weather was too good this weekend to pass up and opportunity to play with the new lens. So I decided to do the bare minimum craft fair stuffs and rushed outside to play.

The main pic was taken today whilst I was being naughty! I am LOVING the new Lens, so easy to use and with a bit of work in PSE the photos are great. I had this random thought that I should take a photo of someone on the crossroad and then realised it might work if I used myself! Here are a few more.

Litter Bin at the local sports ground. Added Lomo effect using PSE

Gladiator Street is in my neighbourhood, such a cool name I want to live here. No work done to this pic

Cool effect - Pencil Sketch in PSE. Creates a pencil sketch (obv.) of your photo.  Cool.

This is a pic of our re-vamped bedroom, converted to b&w. I love this pic, feels very Living magazine!

Final photo is of my local park. Took some good advice and got a great result.

So in an attempt to avoid bodily harm, here is the one photo I managed to take of my Christmas card contribution to the fair...I have made approx 50 cards this weekend and started the non-Christmas items, so not totally naughty.

Christmas Trees

This card is a Pink Petticoat digi stamp, that you are supposed to paper piece, using the papers in the digi kit. But I thought that I would use my random paper scraps instead. I used a die to cut out the trees and sentiment and used Kars Xmas Collection 2011 papers for the blue shiny backing card. All in all I think they are cute, but a bit modern and work really well.

I really will try to get more Christmas photos up this week - honest.

Cx