Easter Cards with my new Scan N Cut!!!

Hi crafty peeps! With a heavy heart I decided it was time to retire my good ole Silhouette Portrait as it kept on letting me down by not "speaking" to my Mac and the workarounds were getting really tiresome. I had been watching the Scan N Cut with interest for a long time and when a great offer came up on Create and Craft a couple of weeks ago for the CM300, it was too good a deal to pass up. Fast forward two weeks  - I have a brand spanking new toy to play with - yay! - and it's so much fun!!! I mastered the simple cutting projects 20 mins after opening the box and have been slowly making my way through converting my old DFX files of homemade designs, through the Brother Canvas software. These are all loaded onto a USB which sits plugged in to my Scan N Cut by my crafting desk. I think I'll always use Adobe Illustrator for drawing my designs as it's the tool I'm most comfortable with - it's so easy to convert SVG files with the Canvas software - I just find it more user friendly than the Silhouette software. Mind you, I was too much of a stinge to buy the Designers Edition software upgrade so that might not have helped much. Anyhoo, this week I've been having a nosey round looking for free files to cut out and spotted these two SVG's from Miss Kate Cuttables which were on sale for 35 cents each and couldn't resist them for making a couple of Easter cards for my mum and sister. The bunny card was really easy but the Hoppy Easter easel card was defo a bit more challenging as I had to work out which bits were cut from the same colour cardstock and where to position the cardstock on the cutting mat. So, it was a baptism of fire but I'm really happy with the finished project. I hope you like them too!

Simple but effective!

Many many layers to put together but such a nice result!

Hope you are all having a lovely chocolatey Easter Sunday and get time to fit in a bit of crafting over the Easter hols!
Have fun
Love Jak xxx

Willow mixed media project

Hello everyone, thanks for popping by! I've been playing about recently with stamps, spending a bit of time exploring different ways of colouring them and different papers that take watercolour well, so there's been a lot of creativity going on, but nothing much worth taking pics of to share here. The latest project I'm going to show you all is this bit of home decor. It's a concertina box card and folds flat so could easily be sent just like a card through the post but also has lots of dimension. I've used a stamp from DoCrafts Santoro Willow range called Souvenir D'Hiver and used some DoCrafts water-colour felt pens to colour the image - scribbling the ink onto an acrylic block, adding a spot of water to the ink and applying with a small brush. I love this technique because I find the inks are really transparent and the colours are bright and lively. There are three layers to this project. The base has an embossed texture which I've coloured with Gelatos and some mica powder. I also die cut some branches and leaves which combined with the colours in the background have set a kind of autumnal feel for the project. You could make this work for any season though depending on the colours you choose. The next two layers are elements/images adhered to acetate which give depth and keep the whole thing sturdy. The papers I used for the front of the frame are also from the DoCrafts Santoro Willow 12x12 paper range which also has images you can colour in yourself so the range is very versatile. I hope you like the finished project.

Close up of the main image coloured with those lovely inks

Thanks for looking in, I have more cards to follow shortly...
Keep on crafting,
Jak xxx