New Christmas Card (Etsy Update)

Hi all~!

Time flies, doesn't it? It will be Christmas in just less than a month's time!

This year, I decided to design something more cheery and in color, something to brighten up what has mostly been a grim year for humanity.

This card features Rudolph, our well-loved reindeer and a little girl whom Rudolph has met while roaming in the woods. This card also comes with multiple sentiments which you can choose to stick on your card. Feel free to create your own sentiments though!

Hop on to my shop to purchase this card!

Love Poster, A Gold-foiling project (And free printable!)

"Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.  It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres." - 1 Corinthians 13:4-8

I designed this mini poster as a gift for my cousin who just had a little baby son. However, I would also like to say a big 'Thank you, I love you guys~~' to everyone who made a trip down to the Pameran Poskad exhibition and especially to those who made a purchase of my artworks! Thank you so much for your support! You have no idea how much that means to me!

I am also providing this as a free printable! I designed this in such a way that it can be used for gold foiling with a Heidi Swapp Minc Mini machine (which is what I have). The shorter width is actually slightly wider than the maximum 6" stated on the Minc Mini box, but my Minc mini machine takes in that width without any problem.

To use the printable with gold foiling, print out 'love_watercolor_background.pdf' first with an inkjet printer with no scaling. Then, print love_text.pdf over this inkjet print with a laser printer, also with no scaling. This way, you can foil over the "Love" text with the watercolor background still intact. However, if you do not have a Minc or laminator to do gold foiling, you can still print the text as a plain black print.

After all the printing, trim the piece along the trim lines before foiling.

Download free printable.

O' Crafty Day #18 - Ang Pow Gems

Have been making ang pow gems to adorn my door and one of my FB subscribers has requested for this tutorial!

I just learnt that some superstitious folks will be very unhappy if you have these up as Chinese New Year decoration... Not very sure the reason why, but I guess those sharp points are the main culprits! However, if your family and friends are not superstitious, go ahead (like me!) and make tons of these for your CNY decoration this year! If not, you can always wait until after the CNY period and make these precious out of other sorts of fancy paper!

I had originally used the triangle score guide tool by We R Memory Keepers to make my life easier since I already have their Trim and Score board. However, that doesn't mean you can't make one without the tools.

Materials that you need:

Note: All measurements are in inches, which will be denoted by "

- Base Template + Pattern Sheet Download (Please print the pdf at 100%, no scaling.)
- Ang Pows (The longer ones) / Thick papers or cardstock at least 6" x 6"
- Scissors
- Scoring tool (Optional but good to have, a plastic ruler will do the trick too!)
- Pencil / Pen
- Ruler
- Adhesive (I'm using a tape runner since it's faster)
- Washi tape / Masking tape (Optional but good to have)

These gems are all made up of the same basic module - equilateral triangles. So our objective here is to score/draw the base equilateral triangles repeats before tracing out the pattern for the gem you want to make.

For this tutorial, we will be making gems from a repeat of 1" big triangles. Once you get the idea, feel free to make different-sized gems by varying the triangle size. (As this template is catered for Ang Pow packets, the largest size you can go for the triangle is 1.5")

Okay, let's starting digging some gems and head on over to my tutorial!


For peeps hailing from GuideCentral,

▼▼▼▼▼▼

Cut your Ang Pow packet  into a 6" x 6" square. Make sure to have the uncut long folded edge positioned at the center of the square.

The easiest way to do this with scissors is to draw a parallel line 3" away from one of the long edge and cut along that line. Then draw another parallel line 6" from the bottom of the Ang Pow, and cut along that line. It doesn't matter if your Ang Pow has a closure slit on it. Then, just cut along the bottom fold, and you'll have a 6" x 6" square with a center fold!

If you are using normal thick papers / cardstock, just trim them down to the right size.

▼▼▼▼▼▼

Just because we can! Cut out as many 6" x 6" squares as you need. :)

▼▼▼▼▼▼

Making sure the base template is the right side up (the numbers should not be upside down), place the ang pow square at the top left hand corner and align the center fold at the 3" mark. (refer to the photo above). If you are quite precise with your cutting, the corner of the ang pow square should fall nicely with the corner of the template.

At this point of time, if you have washi tape / masking tape on hand, I suggest taping the ang pow square down to the template with a couple small pieces of the tapes.

▼▼▼▼▼▼

Place your ruler along the vertical line at every inch, and score/draw a line. You should have 5 vertical lines.

▼▼▼▼▼▼

Align and orientate the ang pow square with the tilted square template as shown in the photo.

▼▼▼▼▼▼

Again, score at every 1" interval.

▼▼▼▼▼▼

You now have a nice repeat of diamonds. Orientate your piece of square such that you are looking at a series of fat diamonds (refer to photo). Place your ruler along the points of a column of diamonds (please refer to photo again), and score/draw.

Once you are done, you will be left with a piece of Ang Pow square filled with 1" big equilateral triangles!

▼▼▼▼▼▼

All you need to do now is to decide, from the pattern sheet, the gem you want to make and copy the pattern onto the Ang Pow square. Do make sure the orientation of the triangles on the Ang Pow square correspond to the orientation of the triangles in the pattern sheet first!

The example I have here will make an octahedron gem!

▼▼▼▼▼▼

Time to cut out your pattern~

▼▼▼▼▼▼

To make the next few steps easier, let's pre-fold all the scored/drawn lines.

▼▼▼▼▼▼

Apply adhesive on all the small tabs.

▼▼▼▼▼▼

The assembling part can get a bit confusing. But the rule of thumb here is to find out all the tabs that have an adjacent non-tab edge, and stick them together.

For example, in the case of my octahedron gem, there are 4 tabs that have an adjacent non-tab edge.

Once you have the first few tabs adhered, the gem should start taking shape and the rest should be pretty easy!

▼▼▼▼▼▼

And you're done! The bottom is a hexahedron made from a sheet of designer paper with a 1.5" triangle module. Have fun!

▼▼▼▼▼▼

In one of my earlier blog posts, a fellow crafter requested for a tutorial on folding techniques for shibori dyeing. That is currently in my pipeline, so do look out for that post!

Origami Sunday

Tried the swallow-tail butterfly, which is pretty easy. (Instructions can be found here)

Escaping~

And the more challenging, braided paper. (Instructions can be found here)

This was my 2nd attempt. I got the wooden bone folder from the Finnish Lapland =)

Random crafting: Origami roses

Suddenly had the urge to meddle with some origami.. Revisited the Kawasaki rose, and I found 2 variations on Youtube. =) And here are the 3 roses, blooming in their glory:

Kawasaki rose (I messed up a petal... :\); modified Kawasaki rose; Rose of roses (Jordi Adell)

I think I like the Rose of roses best. =)

A try at crepe paper flowerball~

My gal-pal will be celebrating her big day soon, and she has been doing a lot of research on wedding decorations via Pinterest. She was particularly fond of flower balls like this and this.

Due to the Chinese belief that people in mourning are not supposed to attend celebrations like weddings, I am not able to be her bridesmaid as planned. But having heard from her that she might not be able to get enough help from the new bridesmaids, I thought I should at least help her a little.

And so, what began as an offer to help her get the crepe paper streamers became a chance for me to aid in making the crepe paper flowerball. I am a little shocked that a such a small (3" to 3.5") foam ball requires more than 2 rolls of streamers (each 81 feet long). Perhaps I had made my roses tighter than normal and packed more into 1 small ball.. Haha..

Here's the final styling of the flowerball:

Using a plastic dessert cup as a stand, I filled the inside with fake marshmallows made from Kutsuwa paper clay and tied a gold ribbon round the cup. How romantic!

O' Crafty Day #16 - Gift card holder with Faux Chalkboard effect

I got an Ikea gift card as a Christmas gift for a friend, but oh boy, is the original yellow gift card holder kind of an eye sore... And so I decided to create a new gift card holder for it, finished with a faux chalkboard effect!

Materials used:

1) Teresa Collins Fabrication 8 x 8 cardstock papers (I used 1 main floral paper and 1 dark colored paper)
2) Versamark pen
3) Ranger embossing powder (Seafoam white)
4) Small floral cabochon
5) Mini glue dots
6) Tombow glue tape
7) Gift card

Tools used:

1) EK Success Paper Shapers Corner Adorner Card Creators Punch (Basketweave)

2) EK Success Paper Shapers Corner Adorner Rounder Punch Small
3) Bone folder
4) Heat gun


Instructions:
1) First you need to measure your gift card. Mine is 3³⁄₈" x 2¹⁄₈", with a credit card-like thickness. I ended up cutting out my main floral piece of cardstock at 4" x 5¹⁄₂".

I used both the front side of the dark colored paper as well as its reverse side. The dark colored side piece measured 1" x 3¹⁄₂" and the reverse side measured 3¹⁄₂" x 2¹⁄₄". The dark colored piece would eventually be the fake chalkboard background and the reverse side would be for the written greetings pasted inside the card.

2) Holding the main floral piece in a portrait manner, punch out the bottom 2 corners with the paper shaper basketweave corner card creator punch.

This is the reverse side of my floral paper. =) This would also be the inside of the holder!

These would be the slots for the gift card.


3) I also rounded the 4 corners of the floral piece with my paper shaper corner rounder punch to soften the look.

4) I, then, folded the card in half, making sure the 2 slots are at the bottom. I used a bone folder to make the fold crisp and neat.

5) Next, taking the dark colored piece of paper, I rounded the 2 corners of one of the short ends. Then, I used the smaller nib of the Versamark pen and wrote my sentiment. Versamark ink, as you know, only slightly darkens the paper beneath and if you look at it straight on, it is going to appear invisible. To make writing easier, be sure to adjust your lighting so that the light hits the paper at an angle and tilt your head a little so that you can see what you are writing.

After which, I heat embossed the sentiment with my white embossing powder. This creates a faux chalk writing effect.

6) Using a couple of mini glue dots, I attached the floral cabochon to the black sentiment piece. Then, I adhered this piece to my main floral card front with some Tombow glue tape.

7) For the final piece of cardstock, I first rounded the four corners...

8) ... And wrote my greetings first.

9) I then adhered this piece to the inside, top half of the holder.

And there you have it! A new and personalized gift card holder! Yay!

Preparation for Arts Open House: Packing the Kits!

My friend, Miss Xzz, came over in the late afternoon so that we could start packing the 50 paper craft kits, which will eventually be  given out to the senior citizens at our paper crafting booth @ the Arts Open House.

Well, we had some unfinished business before the actual packing.. There were paper templates still needed to be scored, materials to be divided, doilies to be stamped.... And we pretty much turned my spare bedroom into a "Christmas decoration" galore.... =P After getting all these things done, we sorta formed an assembly line for the kit packing.

But as you can see, the room was still as messy as before.  We eventually managed to pack 13 kits before the sky turned dark, and our natural dinner bells started ringing. 

Sorry for the glare...! ><

Erm, we did clean up the room a bit before heading out for dinner...

Craft updates

There has not been much knitting progress this past week as I'm currently held up with preparing materials for an Arts Open house event for senior citizens. My friend and I are in charge of the paper crafting booth and I had been busy cutting paper templates on my Silhouette, dividing laces, trims and twine, slicing shop-bought stickers into individual pieces...

 as well as making my own stickers...! =)

Crafting Quick Tips: Handling finicky tiny alphabet stamps

My silicon alphabet stamps set came of great use while making the finishing touches to my postcards for the Pameran Poskad exhibition. However, my stamps set came in this tiny plastic sheet and it's almost impossible to paste those tiny stamps back according to alphabetical order every time I finished one letter. And before long, my floor was "littered" with these stamps and I had to squint and search for the alphabet that I wanted to use.

Another big minus point I had is that once I pulled each alphabet out from the plastic sheet, it seemed to lose the stickiness and refused to stick onto my acrylic block or the plastic sheet. I ended up rolling some glue tape on a piece of scratch paper and pasting the stamp onto the glue before getting that onto my acrylic block. I believe wiping a wet tissue over the back of the stamp will help in sticking onto the acrylic block too but I didn't have wet tissue on hand then.

That doesn't solve the problem of my stamps laying messily on the floor but it gave me an idea. I took sheets of paper, put some rows of glue tape, and pasted each individual alphabet stamp onto the tape in alphabetical order. To make sure I paste the stamp in the right orientation, I stamped each alphabet onto the paper first (which also acts as a label) and get the correct orientation of the stamp..

This made my life much easier as I can paste back each stamp very easily to the correct position and it's a breeze to search for an alphabet.

What can we do with rubber stickers??

I just have to put the above image in there. Haha.. But anyways, I got this set of cute rubber stickers at SGD$6.75.

Not cheap for being stickers but staring at the embossed patterns on each sticker lit the bulb in my brain. They would make pretty cool stamps! Very worth it for that price!

And so I gathered my materials for the stamp test.

After some stamping, I trimmed my prints with my paper trimmer, punched holes, put on some ribbons and voila! Perfect gift tags!

I've used textured cardstock, which explains the slight distressed look, which is pretty cool.

Heat embossed kraft paper gift wrap

Materials:
- Kraft paper, cut to size
- Versa  Mark watermark ink
- White embossing powder
- Heat gun
- Stamps that you like

First, plan ahead on how you want the final design to look like. We are not going to stamp everything at one go, but doing it in smaller areas. This will facilitate the process of heat embossing and minimize the risk of messing up the embossing powder (I accidentally brushed my thumb against the embossing powder before heating on my first try, ruining the gift wrap ><). For me, I did the stamping and heat embossing row by row.
Once done, you can fold the kraft paper into a gift bag and decorate it with a cute bow like what I'd done. =)

Silhouette Art #2: Mini Box with Side Decor

Medium: Thick textured cardstock

Design: Box base and branch downloaded from the online store, stalk of leaves from the silhouette studio software and my company's logo.

Notes: Still trying to figure out why some of the details are not cut properly.. (too small? paper problem?? My box is quite small though, 3.75" x 2.75" x 3".. the actual design area is only 3" x 2.5")

Silhouette Art #1: Washed motivation

Medium: Textured Cardstocks (Postcard size, 4.5" by 6.5")
Design: My own
Others: Washi tape, hole puncher, yarn

Christmas Cards 2011

Nothing fancy but some simple mini cards:

I got myself 2 pieces of 12in x 12in scrapbooking paper (their thickness should be almost similar or slightly thinner than the thickness of a cardstock), one is in Kraft paper color and the other is in textured black. I then cut them down to 3in x 6in rectangles which when folded will be a 3in x 3in card.

The image in the center of each card was embossed with white embossing powder, using the stamp set, SM42 Lacey Patterns from Crafty Secrets. Really love the squarish lace designs!

Very simple, very quick.

Here's a birthday card using the same technique: