Crafted by Alison

 Hello & welcome to my blog, If this is your first visit, I hope you enjoy it & come back again. If you are returning, welcome back & thank you! This weeks cards are almost good enough to eat! They are made with the Sweet As a Peach stamp set, Peach dies & You're a Peach DSP. I hope you like them as much as I enjoyed creating with them! As I was looking for inspiration on Pinterest I noticed there were a lot of cards with gorgeous peaches plus a couple with the pretty flowers. I wanted to show something a little different with this stamp set & I found a post by Mary Knabe at StampinPeace where she created all different sorts of fruits using the peaches from Sweet as a Peach. That's how my first card started. I started by stamping some leaves onto the centre panel & also stamped the smaller peaches in a variety of colours. I liked the look of the Gorgeous Grape for plus & then decided an easel card would look cute. I used Gorgeous Grape & Pear Piz

 Hello & welcome to my mid week blog, These mid week blogs are designed to be shorter than my Sunday blogs so that I can share techniques, card designs or other tips and tricks with you. This week I will show you how to create some fun fold cards with a cutaway front. To create this card I used 1/2 a sheet of Flirty Flamingo cardstock in the portrait style & die cut part of the front away to leave a cute border pattern. A small piece of DSP gives some contrast. For the partially covered front & the inside of the card I used another half piece of cardstock but this time in Basic White. I stamped one sentiment & some foliage on the 'front' of the card which will show the bottom design when closed. When the card is fully ope you see the second sentiment with a few small leaf designs plus a large area for a personal message. This piece is attached to the base in the reverse of a normal easel card so that it folds down to open, giving the card 3 distinct areas. I lov

 Hello & welcome to my blog, If this is your first visit, I hope you enjoy it & come back again. If you are returning, welcome back & thank you! As I mentioned in my previous blog, last week I participate in Stampin' Up's On Stage event where demonstrator's achievements were recognised & the new brochures were unveiled PLUS we got to craft along with international demonstrators & staff from Head Office. We also made some cards using the new products we were able to purchase in an early release. Such lovely stamps & dies made it easy to create a whole heap of lovely cards! There's quite a few to show today so I won't go into my usual detail of how I made them & what I used.  Here are the sets I made following along with the SU staff on the day. Each of these sets has a 'follow the instructions' card and a slightly different 'crafted by Alison' version. All of these cards were made using the one stamp set - Blessings of Home

  Hello & welcome to my mid week blog, These mid week blogs are designed to be shorter than my Sunday blogs so that I can share techniques, card designs or other tips and tricks with you. This week I will show you how to create 2 cards with the one stamping technique! You've got to love a time saver right?    So to start off the technique, you first die cut a large design that allows ink to make a shadow effect when you blend the ink over the die cut. I used the Many Layered Blossoms dies that co-ordinates with the Blossoms in Bloom Stamp set. I didn't need to use the stamps though as I could get a similar result with just the dies & some ink. In these photos yo can see that I've layered 3 different greens (Soft Succulent, Evening Evergreen & Soft Sea Foam) over the die cut floral piece using one of the super soft Blending Brushes. This leaves you with a diecut now shaded in pretty greens & the Basic White cardstock that was under the die cut when I was blen

 Hello & welcome to my blog, If this is your first visit, I hope you enjoy it & come back again. If you are returning, welcome back & thank you! I've had a super busy week this week. We had an excursion at work which was a little tiring but loads of fun then from Thursday night til Saturday afternoon it was Stampin' Up's On Stage event where demonstrator's achievements are recognised & the new brochures are unveiled. WOW, it was a great few days & I got to see some amazing card making presentations, new materials & play around with some of next years goodies. More about that later in this post though.  Firstly, this post is all about Christmas & cute little pets. In a previous post I gave you a sneak peak at some Christmas cards & gift packaging that featured some of the cute animals from the Sweet Little Stockings stamp set & Sweet Stockings DSP but also included items using other DSP & stamps. Today's cards are made just wit

 Hello & welcome to my mid week blog, These mid week blogs are designed to be shorter than my Sunday blogs so that I can share techniques, card designs or other tips and tricks with you. This week I will show you how to create cards that open much like an envelope either as a fun fold or to hold a message or gift card inside. The first card is a cross between a gate fold & an envelope.  When closed it looks like the back of an envelope. The card base is made from a piece of 12 x 12 cardstock, scored at 3" & 9" on 2 sides with a notch at the 6" mark. This is where you cut to make the 'mountain' cut for the triangular, front folding flaps. Here are photos of the steps it took to achieve this result.... I wanted to keep the DSP consistent throughout the card so I used the reverse of some & kept the theme of peaches & blooms on the front & inside. Once I'd finished adding DSP to all of the flaps I added 2 more triangles to the front of the