Digikit Creativity: DIY Wedding Stationery

I was recently commissioned by Daisy Trail to create a set of DIY wedding stationery using their gorgeous "Love Birds" digikit and CraftArtist software.  I love working on these kind of projects.  Demonstrating that digikits are so versatile from creating beautiful scrapbook pages, greeting cards and, of course, your own wedding stationery.  And much more!

I created a step-by-step tutorial for creating a "save the date" card, wedding invitation and a little favour box. You can view all the details here on "Brenda's Wedding Blog" HERE

Spring Forward

 How was your Easter?  I had a lovely time with my family and also a totally chilled out couple of days with just me and Steve at home.  Ate too much chocolate and too many hot cross buns but hey ho!  It was Easter.  You're allowed.  Needless to say, straight back to Weight Watchers this week!

We've been having some interesting weather this past few days.  I love it.  It's so Spring-like.  April showers.  Sunshine and showers.  It's perfect for making things grow.  I'm enjoying this new Season and all that it brings including Mother's Day, Easter and pretty flowers in the garden.  Love, love the magnolia tree at my sister's.

 As well as enjoying all these wonderful seasonal changes, I've been experiencing new opportunities for my work.  Work.  Well, I call it work as it's how I earn my money, running my own business.  But my oh my I love what I do and as such, it's hard to call it "work".  Anyway, I digress.

My website is still being worked on.  I'm itching to get my online store back up and running.  In the meantime, apart from working on my new website, I'm designing and creating new digital scrapbooking products, paper crafting downloads etc.. for the new store and for Daisy Trail.  I was thrilled to be recently accepted as a designer, creating digikits for their online store.

I've had to go through a learning curve to get to grips with their Craft Artist software and I've been completely blown away by what you can do with it.  I'm a hard core Photoshop & Illustrator user so was a little worried about having to learn new software.  I needn't have worried.  It's extremely intuitive.  And they have a ton of fantastic video tutorials to help you learn everything from basics to more complex features such as cutting backgrounds from photos, layer effects and so on.  It's not just for digital scrapbooking.  They're templates for a greeting cards and printables.

Oh and it's a fraction of the cost of Photoshop!!  And if you want software specifically for digital scrapbooking and and computer paper crafting, I'd recommend it over Photoshop Elements too.  Wow!  Never thought I'd say that.  No, I'm not getting paid to big up Craft Artist ha!  I honestly think it's a great little piece of software.  The paper craft industry is moving forward.  I've seen so many huge changes in the past couple of years.  Digital technologies are being fully embraced.

I'm going to be doing a couple of craft projects for them in the next few weeks.  Can't say much more than that for now but once they're done and have a green light, I'll post them here.  I'm just thrilled to have the opportunity to be working with this UK craft company.

I love new seasons.  New beginnings.  New opportunities.  And always when you least expect it.  When you're not looking for it.  Those are the best.

Happy Card Making Easter!

It's Easter already!  Where did that first three months of the year go?!  I'm so happy to see Spring here now and I love long holiday weekends!

Last week, I was invited to take part in a family Easter craft evening at my son's church.  He asked me if I would host one of the craft tables.  It was so much fun.  Kids and parents alike went from table to table making fun Easter crafts.

I designed and created a fairly simple, fun Easter card kit comprising of backing papers, eggs and crosses in Spring colours.  My daughter bought some fun little embellishments for the kids to add to their cards.  And they all turned out so great.

My daughter and I made some sample A6 cards for inspiration.  If you're new to creating cards using digital backing papers and digi stamps, these cards are really a great way to get started and inspired.  They're really simple to make.  I love digital and using my computer for paper crafting.  You can use the designs over and over again.  And as you get more confident, you do find yourself being more creative in how you use your digital supplies.  Anyway..

Here's how I made them:-

• I printed out the designs onto some inkjet printer paper
• Once printed out, we cut out all the various designs, backing papers and "Happy Easter" sentiments
• I like to leave a small border round the printed out images.  This also makes cutting out a little easier.
• We then stuck the backing papers to the A6 cards and started adding the toppers, sentiments

Supply List: 

• Printable Easter Card Kit - my own design (I'm hoping to make this available to download very soon)
• Pack of 100 A4 Sheets of Super Smooth Matt Inkjet Paper 100 GSM here
• A6 White Cardblanks with Envelopes - Matt Finish (240GSM) here
• Double sided tape and foam pads as adhesives.  I can't remember where I bought these now but they're available from most good craft stores as well as QVC and Create and Craft
• Set of foam and glitter Easter embellishments from Tesco

We all had a wonderful evening making cards.  I love watching kids getting creative.  Just give them some simple instructions and they're away.  In fact, a lot of them just got on with it and made some lovely cards.

After seeing how the Easter card kit worked, I'm inspired to make more card kits.  It's quite possible I'll be spending some of the upcoming holiday weekend working on them on some new designs!  Yay!

Hope you all have a Happy Easter and an enjoyable, long holiday weekend.