Makes for a "Get Well Soon"!

   ...So, my mum was in hospital having some hip surgery done just recently and that gave me a good enough excuse to spend a bit of time making a card and a little minibook to help cheer her up. I had seen a feature in issue 67 of the DoCrafts Creativity magazine which was about making a long extended card using their Floral Folk range and I thought I could definitely use this as my inspiration for the card shape and use whatever papers I already had so, I opted for using my bargain A4 pack of Simply Floral papers which I picked up in HobbyCraft half price for about £6 - I do so love a bargain! I really like this DoCrafts range as it is so colourful and there's a lot of contrast in the papers. What I mean by this is some of the papers use lighter colours and smaller repeat patterns and others have really strong backgrounds with big almost cabbage style roses. I find this makes a kit easier for working with as the papers work together in a complimentary way instead of fighting for harmony and being a bit hard work on the eye...
   So without further ado, here is what I rustled up!

Front cover. 

You can see how it folds out giving 8 different surfaces to decorate!

The front cover has been decorated with the Simply floral range mainly,  but there are few other elements in there to help it out. I have a dovecraft paper doily in the background and an Anna Griffin blue bird stamped at the top left corner, the wooden word "love" is from a pack I bought from The Works which was only a quid! Bargain again!!!

As you can see, the colours are so pretty and work cohesively over the whole little minibook. For the rest of the pages I worked out which colours I wanted to use in sequence first by stamping a floral background and then inking the edges in a distressed way just to give the background a helping hand so it wasn't overpowered by the embellishing! One additional decoration I did use was a moroccan trellis I designed and cut with my Silhouette. It just pulls it all together although it's not featured on every page. The big roses are cut out from the SF patterned papers (- oooh, they're lush - yum!) and any butterflies are Anna Griffin again - inks, mainly by American Crafts - they are those little square pigment ink ones that smell like paint and yes, they were another bargain again, this time from TK MAXX. 

The kit I used for the basis of my projects!    Image © DoCrafts

Background Stamp    Image © DoCrafts

    It struck me when I first came across this range by DoCrafts that it would probably work with some of the Anna Griffin stuff I already have and I was right. Phew! I love it when things work together because when you first start scrapbooking, the tendency, well certainly in my case, is to splurge randomly on all sorts of things that catch your eye - it does take a while to be able to look at stuff and restrain yourself from impulse buys. And then sometimes you just can't stop yourself anyway, lol!

With that completed, it needed a card to keep it company so in the same vein I made this...

The paper kit also features a bit of decoupage and diecuts which I used as a card topper here with more trellis from my Silhouette and stamping with an Anna Griffin sentiment! Done!!!

As you can't take flowers in to hospital anymore this cheered up her little corner! She loved both projects and had them displayed proudly on her little bedside locker.   

Hope you are all having a lovely crafty weekend!!!

Have fun,

Jak!!!