Racer boy

Vrrrrrroooom! This little guy loves anything with an engine, and quite a few things without one. A paper filled with cars seemed fitting.

I inked the edges green on this multicolored paper, and followed it up with green bubbles/circles and an arrow. The blue is matched up with bubbles and the tags, and so on.... His mother wanted happy colors and not just "standard" boyish theme with blue tones. I really like the outcome.

I had this skyscraper stamp in my drawer that I colored in grey shades....it made the blue background look like sky (with flying cars I guess... :)) and added some weight to the base.

The tiny cars are stickers, just the right size for the road. Arent they adorable?

 



After negotiations, I was allowed from my boys to glue this cutie onto here.

A yellow bike button to match the yellow cab.

Name embossed in green along the side.

 

 

I haven't entered any blog challenges in a looong time, so now's about time. Today, I wanna play along in the following challenges:

 

Cupcake craft - Cool men

OLLCB - It's a man thing

Craft your passion - Make it cute

Simon says stamp - Anything goes

Aud sentiments - For a child

Creative card crew - Masculine

Stampin' for the weekend - Anything but a card



Collection II

Ok, so I've deleted my previous post. Here are the correct pictures :) Maybe a sign that I have too many bracelets, since I can't keep track of them even in photos.

Anyhow. All of these are made in the same way, with double cord and pearls threaded in between.

First, two blue toned summerish bracelets. I even enhanced the beach feeling by using a nautical button and leaving the ends a bit longer on the top one.

 Same bracelets, only the back...hm. Front side? Top? Ah. The other side.

 This is it! The origin of my obsession and the reason why I fill post after post with bracelets. :) I made this a little while ago during craft night at church. I'd read something about making bracelets like these somewhere online, and thought I'd have a go at it. I couldn't remember exactly how to do so I just tried a few ideas and went with what looked most right.
I had so much fun that night though, chatting along with my friends, that I accidently made it too big for me. Oops!

Luckily it fitted hubby like a glove, and I had to make some more that would fit me. :) So this is why.

(and btw, I had made a few itty-bitty mistakes with it so I re-threaded it later)

 This one is all mine! A double wrapped model in soft multicolor. I like the mixture with clear/opaque/matt/shiny beads in an irregular pattern.

This is a tiny one. Too small even to fit my boys, it now adorns the wrist of little Molly. She's happy. I'm happy. :)

Teacher appreciation, part E

About time to post the last two teacher letters, especially since the new semester's already upon us. :)

E for Eva.

For this letter I used the colors blue (of course) and turqouise with splashes of yellow. The background paper is a blue tinted newspaper since I think books and papers ought to fit a teacher. Or maybe that's just in my head? Anyway, I softened the rather strict paper with quite a lot of swirly stamps.

I'm rather fond of these minimini tags...

Creme white roses got inked with a warm yellow that worked really well.

The straws are stamped in yellow and then enhanced with some distress stickles. The buttons were just cute. :)

Folded pocket card

One of my sweet aunties had a big birthday coming up, and since we live far apart and don't get to visit that often, I wanted to make her a special card.

The idea for this card came from the Meander fold mini album and is made from a single sheet of paper but I wanted it more card-sized, so instead of all those folds I made only two.
First in half, and then half of that, wich left me with a 15x15 cm card, with the possibilities of two pockets. I went with one facing forward, and one upward.

I thought the front was kinda nice already so I just drew an additional swirl, heat embossed in copper brown, and added a few flowers with a gemstone center.

Once opened it looks like this. The big brown butterfly is part of the paper, I put two friends there for company and gave them all glitter bodies. For the opposite side a printed quote and the cutest little clock charm.

These are the tags that slides into the pockets...

...with birthday greetings of course. I printed it onto cardstock, and again added some glitter. Glitter makes everything more festive, don't you think?

For the back pocket I slipped in a few photos and made it look like I taped them on the tag. It's not washi tape though, the rose patterned one is some sort of plastic, and the brown dotted one is made of fabric.

 

The lovely quote again. In translation, it says:

The people who has got the most out of their lifes

isn’t the ones who has lived a century,

it is the ones that have lived every minute

On the wishlist

Last week my little baby turned 5....wich, I guess, means he's really not a baby at all. :O
On his wishlist was things like LEGO and a Star Wars-sword and a real horse (yikes!) and - bless his big big heart - "one of those letters you do mom, they are so pretty". Who can resist such a cute request? I sure can't, so here's what I made for him:

He wanted a red letter, and I found this cool paper that is boyish but not too childish in style, filled with bikes wich is good in two ways. 1. He loves bikeriding, and 2. I finally got a chance to use my bicycle-buttons!

Again I used the wired heart, with a smaller heart inside. For me, the big heart symbolizes our love, protecting and embracing his - the smaller - heart, and life. 
I also tagged it with his date of birth, using "supercool, real screws" to attach it. :)

Just hangin'.

The hearts and &-sign are stamped directly onto the H, and then embossed. The sentiment is pieced together from two stamps (I love you and Friends are forever). 

A tree for growing, and a dog because he LOVES dogs. If he could, I bet he'd be a dog....

He wanted his name on there too. :)

good times meander fold mini album

So, this is my second mini album. I'm having SO much fun making these, and it really is super easy so I recommend you to have a go at it too. :) I found a tutorial on Youtube some time ago (sadly I can't remember exactly what it was so I can't give credits, but just search for "meander mini album" and I'm sure you'll get there), and first I couldn't almost believe that it was possible to make a mini with all this space for photos and tags, using just a single sheet of 12x12 paper for the pages. Whoever came up with that idea in the beginning?? Awsome. :)

 A sneak peak at all the tags and flaps sticking out everywhere. For the cover, I tried on a design that I thought out along the way, but I'll show you a better picture of that further down.

 Lots and lots of pages. Each page is 3x3" (7.5x7.5 cm), for obvious reasons. My "photo" stamp has been very useful lately...

 The upward-facing tags. Instead of ribbons I used buttons that I thought fitted this layout better.

 Two of the pages have pockets that are open both up- and sideways. Normally, one side would be closed but I wanted to do something new and left it open. This allowed for a cute felt flower "handle" in the corner that turned out pretty nice. The punched circle in the center was spot on!

 My blooming tags. :) The first one has two felt flowers with a punched circle center, but for the second one I used a plastic flower with two circles on one side, and for the other a smaller nylon flower and a brad center.

 For one of the pockets I made a double-tag with a flap. The ball-fringe adds a cool touch, or so I thought. :)

Ok, this is a closeup of my "cover design" with the front, back and spine all in one piece. Most likely someone has already done this, but I actually haven't seen it anywhere around. I like this style much better than previous one I made (forever love mini album), it's looks more like a book this way.
For my next one (already in progress) I'll make the weak spots (i.e. the folds) stronger somehow. Maybe add tape...? I'll let you know! :)

I'm entering in the following blog challenges with this post:

DYSU - Anything goes
Aud sentiment - Anything but a card (plus sentiment)
Allsorts - Free and easy
Crafts and me - Bright colors

More button bracelets

I couldn't stop myself from making a few more bracelets.

It's made just like the teal/green one in my previous post, but this time I threaded it tighter and that was better.

I really like the colors in this one, so autumny. Chestnut, ivory, walnut, maple, pumpkin, amber....very much autumn. :)

In action.

Then I experimented with some other techniques, like threading with a thick wire. I'm thinking about remaking the top bracelet though, cause I've found a neat little button that would be nice in between the big ones. We'll see. Too bad the turqouise button looks so plain here, it's really a very nice shimmery button. :P 

 Very comfy on the wrist. :)

For the two bracelets here I tried using a ribbon instead of thread. A loop works as the clasp, I think. Not that easy to put on singlehandedly. Hmm...

 A single ribbon for the red/white bracelet...

 ...and a double for the ivory/brown one.

If you manage to put it on, it looks pretty good.

I'll think about these threading techniques some more, they're not perfect...yet. Hahaha :D

And, of course, I found some cool challenges too:

Craft your passion - Anything goes + brown

Dream valley - Anything goes

Button bracelet

Was thinking I ought to DO something with my buttons... So I googled of course, cause that's what you do nowadays, and got quite a few ideas. :) This is my first project, a button bracelet in teal and green.

 For this I used buttons ;) and elastic thread, made small piles of two or three buttons and just threaded through each button. You can't really see it, but every other button is a simple, smaller button that will be on the inside of the bracelet.

 All piled up. :)

There are so so many cute buttons! If you look closely, you might catch a glimpse of the 'back' buttons.

This was so much fun and easy to make! I'm sure I'm gonna have loads of bracelets soon... :)





...and so I did, haha! I'm sorry for the poor picture quality but it's pitch black outside and I just couldn't find a brighter lamp at this time. :P

A bunch of shimmering button bracelets.

 I think I have a thousand of these golden honey colored button-ish buttons! Luckily, cause it took quite a few to make this one... and it turned out pretty alright. Hard to even tell it's buttons.

 This bracelet was a bit more tricky. I wanted the small gray button to stay in place between the large white ones but it didn't go my way at all. Maybe if I had a wire and made it a more solid type...I dunno. Naja, I don't have any wire so I came up with the idea of a small supporting button in the back (like on the first one), so that the white button is wedged in between the smaller buttons. It's working so-so, but it'll do for now.

 The red/gold bracelet actually is the simplest. It's just one layer of buttons all the way around, on top showing the button with golden rim, and for the back a plain red button.

A bit crowded with all three on the same wrist, but it's just to show you what it looks like to wear them.

Now there won't be any more bracelets done tonight (it's almost midnight here), but I do have a stack of autumny buttons waiting for me... :)

Even though these aren't really scrap stuff, I just can't resist entering some fine blog challenges that I found. Check them out! :)

Simon says stamp - Buttons

Papertake weekly - Anything goes

Paperplay - Button up!
Scrappekammeret - minst 2 knappar
Dream valley - Anything goes
DYSU - Teal
Crafty Catz - Anything goes
Allsorts - Anything but square   Hmm.. ;)