Made With Love by Kat

I seem to have acquired lots of 5" embroidery hoops in the house... I don't even do cross stitch! (Yet...) Up until now I've been putting interesting fabrics in them and adding felt flowers, but I wanted to see if I could combine some of my paper bits and pieces with the hoops - like a scrapbook page. For the basic "page" I used pale blue felt which I stretched into place and then snipped off around the back. I then chose my paper embellishments and layered them on before fixing into place. I used a mixture of 2D and 3D pieces (like the cute bow), and different textures including plain paper, metallic and vellum. I used Gorilla glue to fix the non-see through embellishments in place, and added some tiny brads to help pin everything else to where it should be. Then I added a few neon geometric stickers, which stuck well to the felt. I'm so pleased with how it came out!   Supplies: Maggie Holmes Confetti Ephemera Pack ; Docrafts Pa

I don't often make cards, although I've got more interested thanks to my recent stamping obsession , and I often think I should try to translate my love of making gift tags into creating cards to go with them. But on Tuesday night I was struck by the idea that I wanted to create a card using one of the mini plastic animals I have in my stash (I was working on a separate project which I'll share soon). The result was this geometric elephant card, and I love it! The elephant is stuck on with a blu tac glue spot, so if it was given to a child old enough for it not to be a choking hazard he could be removed and added to a menagerie once the card was finished with. I also added one of my paperclip flags that I made for this how-to . 

I'm really enjoying playing around with some mixed media projects. A bit of paint here, a bit of paper there... add some acetate or some vellum... When I look at Google images for inspiration, a lot of the pictures I see seem a bit (whisper it) old fashioned - hence why I love designers like Heidi Swapp whose collections have a really fresh feel.  This tag was made using one of the painted kraft tags I blogged about on Tuesday as a base. I added ephemera from my Heidi Swapp, Maggie Holmes and Docrafts stash and a Docrafts puffy sticker (I LOVE the Docrafts geometric pieces - about as far from stuffy old fashioned scrapbooking styles as you can get). The little peg was just a plain wooden one from Hobbycraft which I painted with my neon pink paint. I plaited some embroidery thread just as a change from using twine. What do you think? Share your links to your latest projects below - I'd love to see them. 

I've always really loved the look of those cute flag tags you can buy, but I've also always thought "that's definitely something I could make myself". And I was right! Here's how: 1. I've got lots of neon pink and green paperclips  that I bought in pots from Tesco. Foursome of these tags you end up not being able to see the clip at all, so you could just use bog standard silver, but that's not as much fun, right?  2. Cut a piece of patterned paper twice as long as you want your finished flag to be. I used the pre-cut strips from Docrafts geometric neon kit as they happened to be the right width, but if you're cutting your own, make the width just slightly smaller than the size of your paperclip. Slide the strip of paper through the paperclip. 3. Fold the paper in half and glue in place. Hold the two sides together with another paperclip until they're fixed. You'll see that the inside of the paperclip will be pus

I have an excess of gift tags! I got a tad (tag?) overexcited this weekend after I got some great stamps free with Docrafts Creativity magazine (a recent but much-loved already discovery) and some super cheap neon pink paint from Tesco. I particularly love the contrast of the neon paint with the brown kraft paper. However it does mean I'll have to give away an awful lot of presents to use them all up.  I love these simple two-colour tags - I think I'll use some of them for scrapbooking. I've only just started to get into stamping, after my lovely boyfriend bought me a cute owl stamp from Hobbycraft a few weeks ago (he needed change for the parking meter!) I love it though - typically I've acquired lots of stamps very quickly and we even have our own bespoke wedding stamp which we'll use on our envelopes and favours! It's from The English Stamping company who are one of my favourite new finds. 

Hey all, just a very quick post to share with you this gorgeous photos I took of the sunset yesterday - it's lovely to be able to get down to the yard to feed my horse in the evening and it still be light. And look how similar the colours are to Pantone's Colours of the Year! I think Pantone have made a great choice this year - so much so that I've created a Pinterest board in honour of them .

How have I made it so far through my life without doing any stamping? I've been playing around today getting the hang of ink coverage, pressure etc and I love it! These are some very early experiments but I'm super excited about this addition to my crafty skills!

I had so much fun making my January Project Life album! I decided to make a mini album - inspired by Stephanie Bryant's awesome videos I'm going to try to make on a month... we'll see if that's a bit ambitious! But for this album I used Seven Paper's Baxter cat 4x4 album with Heidi Swapp and Maggie Holmes ephemera along with lots of other bits from my stash - I'd much rather play about and put things together myself than follow a prescribed "collection". But of course it's totally up to you how you do your scrapbooks and if you prefer to keep things simple by using collections then that's cool too! This is my intro page with a tassel made from embroidery thread, a handstamped tag and some cardstock and vellum pieces all mixed up together. The vellum "hello" and "today" are We R Memory Keepers, the cardstock is Heidi Swapp from my stash.  I started my album with some pretty simple photos in page protectors or ju