Well, lookie here - I've gone digital!!!

    So, I was just telling my friend Elaine that I was tempted to try a bit of digital scrapping for a change as I felt it would be quick to do seeing as I do this kind of thing all day, everyday at work... she kind of wrinkled her nose at me and said "Yeah but it's not the same as cutting up and gluing down bits of paper..." and yep, I agreed, it's not, but it is a wee change and sometimes a change is as good as a rest (and I think I've had plenty of those of late). So, without too much financial outlay -about 5 or 6 quid - I bought 2 American Crafts digital downloads of their Dear Lizzie Neapolitan embellishments and journalling cards. I picked these as I have a 12x12 paper pad which I really like and thought I could hybrid and mix and match the different mediums by supplementing the paper stack with the printed digital files so that way I get good "value for money" use from my downloads... Anyways, this is my first go at a digital LO and I've not gone too crazy as the temptation is to throw everything at it seeing as you can use the files time and time again unlike real life embellies which once they're gone, they're gone. I quite like the result and it did literally take half an hour to put together.  My verdict: Yes, I will do more digital LO's but it won't stop me from real crafting either as I just love truffling through lovely tactile papers and other bits of crafty treasure. I'm sure there's room for both types of scrapbooking in my life as digital is naturally a solitary thing to enjoy and real scrapping a bit more sociable especially when you're cropping with others or out shopping for stash together with friends... What do you think?

I would recommend trying it out if you like pottering about on you computer...
Thanks for stopping by!
Jak,
xxx

A 12x12 layout...

   Well this one came together quite quickly - it was done in about 2 hours which isn't too bad at all - and after the saga that was my Xmas Mini I find that quite encouraging!!! I think I might do a few 12x12s as I was looking through some photos and came across a few that really do need a page to themselves. Single photo layouts are so much easier to do than pages with multiple piccies as you really get a chance to play about with your scraps of patterned papers and you can have fun mixing and matching different styles of patterns! Cool! The main blue floral paper in this one is from a K & Company paper stack called Bloomscape, which I've hardly touched. Other papers are from Papermania Happy Days and American Crafts Neapolitan - but these are just little scraps from my stash. I must stop buying 12x12 pads as I never use them as whole page backgrounds. Instead I should go for the cheaper 6x6 alternative and that way I could get double the choice for the same price! Hmm! Sounds like a plan/excuse to hit the shops wouldn't you say?

Thanks for taking the time to pop by!
Jak
xxx

Christmas mini on hold!

Hi everyone, I hope you are having a great start to your year. I find January is always a chore but, thankfully we only have a few more days left to endure!  Talking of endurance my Xmas Mini is turning into a task of epic proportions! Lots of things are not working out but specifically the cover is a disaster and I'm struggling to get big enough o-wires for my bind-it-all to well, bind it together. The ones I've put on for the moment are way too small and now it won't shut! But that's only one of many annoying inconveniences that have conspired against me and the production of this meant-to-be charming keepsake! (Grrr!). So, I'm not gonna bore you with a grim blow by blow account of all the hellish detail but right from the get-go nothing has gone right!! In fact it's gone so badly that right now this stupid monstrosity is being put in a baggy and banished to the back of the craft cupboard where it can stay until I get my head round how to make a bad thing come good/work a miracle... It's not often I fall out with a project but we really need a bit of distance between us. Jeez, crafting's meant to be fun not a frustrating grind! Meh!
    Anyways, I'm sure you are all doing much better with your own lovely craft projects so don't let me rain on your parade! I'm gonna upload some terrible photos of this black hole and if anyone has any constructive advice as to how I can remedy this tragic attempt at a Mini Memory Keeper just leave a comment.  Don't tell me to bin it tho'! Ha, you gotta laugh - must put an extra page in it about how I struggled to bring it all together!!!

Yours, useless and frustrated, boohoo
Jak
xxx

Stupid draughty doors that won't shut!

This bit wasn't going too badly!

But it needs much bigger o-wires!

Introducing...

...A new(ish) member of the family! Drum roll please... put your paws up for my sister's amazingly beautiful, couthie and totally huggable Rosie The Greyhound! Yay!


 

     Rosie is a two year old rescued greyhound from the Scottish Greyhound Sanctuary and was adopted by Kags in October there. Being a rescued dog it's not been all plain sailing as she has settled in. For a start she struggled with the stairs up to the flat my sister lives in. Also she has a sneaky streak which sees her helping herself to all sorts of things that are not good for her - namely a massive box of Heroes (part of Millie's birthday present!) and a whole bag of cinnamon nuts and raisins from Kags handbag. Both of these thieving episodes have ended in a hasty trip to the vet as chocolate and raisins are very toxic to dogs. I knew chocolate was but had no idea eating raisins can be fatal! Eeek! So, it's been a big learning curve for both sister and dog and Kags now has to store things not for Rosie away really high up or in a closed room/cupboard that she can't get to.  Amusingly, she can open parcels delivered by the postie and has opened one that was a new coat for her which she cleverly placed beside her other coats... yes, I say other coats plural as she is the best dressed pooch this side of town! Greyhounds need to keep warm but she honestly has more coats than me! Rosie's history is unknown, so who knows what kind of life she had before she was rescued. I for one certainly would not begrudge her a few coats... Kags has even started knitting jumpers for her and this Christmas she went for walkies round the streets of Dundee in a beautiful Santa red and white one! Bless! So my crafting duties for next year might entail (see what I did there!) some doggy craftyness. I have already made Rosie a swanky collar tassle  - a traditional decoration from when greyhounds were favoured by Royalty and other posh folks. I think these would sell well at a Greyhound fundraiser as well as cards and other papery goodies.
   So, now that's everyone formally introduced! I hope you've enjoyed meeting Rosie and wish her all the best for a lifelong bond and amazing friendship with Kaggy!

Here they are - Little and Large. How did Gypsy get so old and short?

Lots of love for a Magnificent Happy New Year to all of you catching up with me here at my blog!
Jak
xxx

Dough Tags! Twice!

As previously mentioned...
So, yep, I had a crack at making some cornflour dough to make some tags/decorations and as usual in my life anything to do with following a recipe almost always ends up in either a large scale disaster or a smaller scale catastrophe... this trial was no exception! Haha! To start off with, this extremely simple one step, one pot recipe turned into a a major panic-driven two pot escapade when I inadvertently managed to confuse baking soda with baking powder and ended up with a seething, bubbling, mass on a scale with Vesuvius erupting - the overspill of which had to be poured into another large pot which meant I had to look after/cook two at the same time. Eeek!  The recipe didn't give any warning to expect this! I'd followed the very simple, in fact I would say foolproof instructions to add baking soda to cornflour and water only to discover at my peril that baking soda and baking powder are NOT THE SAME THING! Now can I say in my defence I am Scottish and here we have Baking Powder or Bicarbonate of Soda to choose from when baking and so I just assumed that the Baking Soda referred to in the American recipe would be known as Baking Powder here. WRONG! Lol! Fortunately after quite a bit of boiling and stirring two pots at once, I ended up with a very similar sparkly dough that rolled out well that achieved the same results - it just didn't look quite as snowy white and dried a bit coarser looking. Oh, and for goodness sake it made squillions of tags in fact way too many which is why Millie ended up with a load of them to sell at the School Fair.  Not one to be put off by such experiences - hey I take mini disasters in my stride - I decided to give the whole thing another whirl and try making them properly using THE RIGHT INGREDIENTS and a bit less of them. Result! This turned out exactly the way it was intended to! Yippee! Lovely and sparkly, snowy white, smooth dough albeit a bit harder to roll out and softer to work. This time I got a more manageable amount to work with and so in future will stick with my own proportions of ingredients.
Here's my recipe...
1 cup of bicarbonate of soda
1/2 cup of cornflour
1/2 cold water
Heat together on cooker, stirring till it boils.
The mixture will thicken so keep stirring and it will turn into a dough (hopefully, hahaha!)
Let this cool and then you can roll it out. I used some festive cookie cutters to cut out the shapes. You can also use stamps to add a bit of texture - fabric doilies rolled over the dough add a lovely texture and glitter can be added in there too, but I wanted mine mainly plain so I could stamp names on them once dry.  Mine dried in a couple of days as the room they were in was nice and warm - we had the coal fire on and I positioned them nearby to dry slowly but gently. I'm sure they would be fine by a radiator or something similar, just make sure they don't dry too quickly or they might crack.
Here's a couple of piccies of the results and how they look stamped both as a texture and stamped with ink. I've used mine as little tags on my wrapped up parcels but they would look lovely as pretty, rustic decorations hung on a Christmas tree too...
Why not have a try at making them - after all, I make all the mistakes so you don't have to...heehee! That should be my mission statement in life!!!

The top samples are the wrong ones made with baking soda and the bottom row samples are the bicarb soda ones!

You can see that these ones don't take the stamping quite so well as they have a courser texture. They definitely have a pretty sparkle but have an off white colour to them!

This is a sample made with the right ingredients and as you can see it embosses really well with a stamp. As the tags dry the embossing deepens and sharpens up. These ones are beautifully snowy white but aren't quite as sparkly the baking powder ones.

Here they embellishing some parcels.

Here they are stamped...

...and they can be written on too as they are nice and smooth!

I hope the recipients like 'em!
Have a lovely Merry Christmas everyone - I know you will all be very busy in these last days leading up to the big day so thankyou very much for taking the time to visit me here! I appreciate it so much!
Best wishes,
Jak
xxx

So, here's what we've been doing...

Hiya all my crafty friends,
   Christmas is fast approaching and all the girls here have been busy, busy, making lots of fun bits and pieces for Santa's arrival. We've fimoed and cornflour doughed and made a couple of mini loo roll albums - tonight we will be attempting yummy dog biscuits! I'm hoping my (probably pathetic) attempts at doggy treats will be acceptable and that the family pooches shouldn't be too bothered that I'm no Mary Berry when it comes to homemade bakes...
   So, Millie did very well at the school Xmas Craft Fair with her Fimo earrings/badges and managed another sellout! This time we were quite festive with our makes and did some cute polar bears and penguins as well as the old standards - xmas puddings and trees etc and raised nearly £150 in sales! Just when I thought it was safe to put the Fimo back in the cupboard, little Sadie said she wanted to make some bear magnets for all her friends at school for xmas presents! Eeek! I managed to persuade her that she should really only give to her very best friends and so got away with making only four more - phew! Honestly I'm seeing Fimo in my sleep! Still that's it all done now and we can have a wee break.
   

There's some gingerbread men hiding in there somewhere!

Four little friends for four of Sadie's little friends!

I kept thinking of Feathers McGraw while I was making these!

These little bears were made with transparent Fimo which makes them look like they're made of icing!

Now that they are all gone I can't wait to get my table cleaned up and get back to some proper scrapbooking. What have you all been making for Xmas?
Pop by again soon!
Jak
xxx

Tidy up time...

Hello everyone, hope you are well!
I've recently been up to my armpits in craft stash except that's not as exciting as it sounds. Basically, I've been having a good old clear out! I've been whittling away, thinning out all the stash I've accumulated over the last 7 years and I have got to a place where I'm quite happy with what I'm letting go now. I did think about asking the girls to take what they wanted before it all goes off to a good home (I've not actually worked out yet who's it's going to!) but I thought knowing my bunch they'll end up wanting the whole lot and I'll end up not being any better off for space! I admit it saddens me to see stuff I bought going unused tho' it's mostly stuff I've bought when I first started exploring scrapbooking. You know the kind of stuff I mean, stickers and rub-ons etc, stuff that seemed like a good buy at the time as they were in the bargain bin or sale. But I never did get a handle on making good use of these things. The stickers always looked a bit "stuck on for the sake of using them" and I never really got good results with rub-ons at all - usually ending with a total disaster and having to find a way of covering them up. Lol! Those were the days! How we have grown. Scrapbooking has changed such a lot since I started out. There seems to be two very different camps to be in these days. One is where you throw all sorts of textures and mediums at a bit of 12x12 cardstock showcasing just one photo and at the opposite end of the scale there is the Project Life kind of style where its just a matter of throwing some photos in pockets with a token bit of journalling and that's you done! Personally, I like to explore what happens somewhere between the two as both have their merits and advantages. Talking of scrapbooking - I really haven't done much of any crafting of late. Don't know what's up with me these days I just seem to be busier with the girls who obviously are going to bed a bit later as they get older and I think I feel less inclined to get crafting after the bedtime rush is over. I've tried doing bits and pieces while they're up and about but I'm afraid I'm one of those types that finds it hard to concentrate when there's noise and distraction around me. My craft area is actually a corner of the family room and although there's plenty space to work, peace and quiet is scarce! So, I guess I have failed miserably in my attempts to make enough minibooks, cards etc for a little craft sale of my own this year but well, there's always next year. I wonder if you are all busy making your Christmas cards, I should have been but I went and promised Millie I would help her start making her Xmas Fimo jewellery this weekend. Her school Craft Fair is at the beginning of Dec so we really do have to get cracking with it.  She wants to make Xmas Puds, Trees, Candy Canes and Gingerbreadmen. Guess who's heading on over to youtube for some inspiration...
Happy crafting everyone
Jak
xxx
PS. if you could telepathically send me some motivation that would be very much appreciated!