Shadow Box & Pretty In Pink

I started a shadow box several weeks ago and have just started to decorate it. I will show it in it's various stages of completion - it may take a while!! Here is one of the sections:

The flower is a sunflower cut on the Silhouette. I am going to use glossy accents on the Butterflies and the flower middle just to get them to stand out a little. I have decided to keep the colour scheme quite neutral at the moment so it will all be in browns / creams / greens.

Here is how it looks in place:

All the edges will be decorate when it is finished but for now that is one slot done five left to go.

I have been blog hopping for a few months now and the list of things I have bookmarked to try is expanding. Now that the Christmas cards are out of the way I have decided to make a start and have a go at some of the projects I have seen. So, a big thank you to everyone who has posted tutorials etc and I will link all the projects back to the original crafty creators.

Here is a Birthday card I have made for a work colleague. You can see the original card made by Janine here: Crafting Crackers

You may have recognised the flower - its that sunflower again. I just think it makes a lovely flower whatever colour it is cut in.

Here is what was used:

Base card: Neenah Solar White from Crafters Companion
Backing paper: Sweet Owl 8 x 8 paper pad (The Range)
Candi
Pink gems

Silhouette & Encaustic Art - Picture

I am a member of a crafting group on Facebook and some of the group have been posting gorgeous work they have done in vinyl. I 'found' some vinyl I got as part of a pack a couple of years ago but it has just been sat in a cupboard all this time. Just typical that I found it after I had purchased some more - go figure!! Anyway, after being inspired by the group I decided to see if I could combine an encaustic painting with vinyl to produce a picture I could hang on my wall.

Here is the results of my first attempt although the perfectionist in me means I will have another go just to iron out a few problems. If you don't do encaustic art then alcohol inks or ink pads would create fantastic backgrounds.

So, the background is an encaustic painting and the black silhouettes are vinyl cut out on the Cameo. To start I took an A4 sheet of paper used for encaustic painting. The colours used are the reds, burgundies, pinks and black as per the bottom of this picture (please ignore the blues / greys as these are for the next attempt):

I painted the wax over the paper to create the background, polished and then sealed the painting to prevent it from fading in the future. The black silhouettes were purchased from the SIL store and are as follows:

Words (Be the Change) #49539

Giraffes (Safari) #18473

Elephant #5671 (I erased the tusk to turn this into a female elephant and just reduced the size for the baby)

Geese flying #5442

I welded the elephants to the safari file and cut this, the geese and the words out in black vinyl.

Now this is were it went slightly wrong. Due to the texture created with encaustic painting when I attached the vinyl the lumps and bumps showed through at certain angles. So, if you going to do an encaustic background I would suggest you attach the vinyl to an A4 piece of acetate and then attach this to your picture. 

The frame was a bargain - I found it on the sale shelf at Tesco's.

Christmas Cards - Tree's

These Christmas cards were cut using the Silhouette Cameo. I used pearlescent white card for the main card and used the cutting file called 'card christmas tree trio' which is design number 14558.

I resized the card to 14cm x 14cm just so that it fitted well into regular square envelopes. Once the design had been cut out (using blade cutting 6), I added glitter card stock to the inside of the card. To cover this I am going to make some inserts which I will personalize.

I added some silver / gold beads and a greetings label to finish.

Simple design but I think it works really well with the glitter card stock. I have decided to make several more to give to family and close friends.