HAPPY NEW YEAR, EVERYONE!

And welcome to the Roaring Twenties!

What happened to last year? I blinked, and missed it. Something must be happening to the space-time continuum. Perhaps I have been travelling at Warp Speed for too long, or encountered some sort of space anomaly causing a temporal distortion… Sorry, been watching a lot of Star Trek recently!

What’s On Your Workdesk this Wednesday?

In between other activities, I’ve been busy working on the new Card Factory.

I’ve been concentrating on completing one card only, because it is a friend’s birthday today. Unfortunately I didn’t get it finished in time to catch the post on Monday, and forgot that 1st Jan. is a bank holiday with no post, so she’s going to get it late. The glue (silicone – Julia knows all about that lol!) and the Stickles weren’t dry till yesterday.

Following on from last week’s posts about these cards, all I had to do was add some embellishments in order to complete this one. I had various small flowers and leaf trails in my stash that I cut ages ago with my Cougar cutting machine, so I used some of those, adding a small butterfly as well. The flower centres had been made with Stickles so I added some more to the butterfly wings. I also stamped a couple of tiny bees on the brown cardstock in the circular window, to add a bit of interest.

Opening the card is where the fun begins. The little “curtains” are pulled back to reveal the gold embossed bee underneath.

I stamped more tiny bees on the inside, using the same Antique Linen Distress Ink that I’d done the edges of the pieces with, and added a cut sentiment from my stash.

I made an envelope with my envelope punch board and decorated it with distressed edges and stamped bees as before.

I made a liner from the envelope, decorated as before.

I also added a subtle honeycomb detail on the envelope front. Unfortunately I can’t get this to show up on the photo. I don’t have a honeycomb stamp, so I experimented using the die as a stamp. I put my thick embossing mat on the desk and the envelope on top, and then inked up part of the die and stamped with it. Initially I used the back of the die, thinking there would be more surface for stamping with, but it just looked like bubble wrap stamping. The result with the cutting edge of the die was more or less OK, and quite subtle, once I got the colour right. Antique Linen Distress Ink didn’t show up at all, and Gathered Twigs and Brushed Corduroy were too dark, so I ended up using Pumice Stone. You’ll have to take my word for it that it makes a difference to the overall design!

So – in this card design, I used a die three ways – for cutting in the traditional way (on the alternate design which you can see in my earlier post here), for embossing, and for stamping.

I now have five further cards on this theme to complete – four of which are bee-themed, and two spares.

Cutting machine

Recently I’ve been following Jennifer McGuire on Youtube, and loving what she is doing – her use of materials and her designs are awesome. It’s really got my juices going again. She has a simply enormous and stunning craft room stocked with every imaginable piece of equipment and stash – well beyond the means of most of us, but as she always says, this is her living, and she always encourages people to use what they’ve got, and that they are under no obligation to go out and buy everything she uses in her tutorials. With this in mind, I thought I could do a lot more with my Cougar cutting machine, and start cutting more sentiments and shapes usually cut with dies. I’ve had this machine for years and am ashamed to say how little I have used it – mostly for cutting flower pieces in order to colour and hand-emboss and assemble into usable 3-D embellishments. Part of the problem has been the intermediate software required for sending the design to the machine in order for it to cut – I have found this to be an absolute pain and not user-friendly. I’ve managed to get my head around Inkscape (a very powerful free, open-source vector drawing application), and just wished there was an easier way to cut the stuff I was designing. The machine came with a licence to use the intermediate program and I never explored this any further.

This week I decided to take the matter in hand and do some research. First of all, I downloaded the trial version of Make the Cut, which I found wasn’t cutting where I thought it should be, and I wasted a lot of time over that. Doing further research and reading various forum posts, I decided to give SCAL a go. This acronym stands for… wait for it… “Sure Cuts a Lot” lol lol! I’ve known about this program for years but I think recently it’s got a lot more advanced and versatile. You can set up a virtual mat for your machine (they have lots to choose from, and if your machine isn’t on the list, you can make your own custom mat), and everything you place on it will cut in exactly the same place on the real mat. I did some successful trial cuts – the fully featured trial versions of both Make the Cut and SCAL make extra cuts right across your work, ruining it, but at least you can get a feel for what the applications can do.

Making the bee card, I wanted a narrow gold ring to surround the window on the front of the card, and I didn’t have enough circle dies to do this. This was the impetus for getting the cutting machine going again. Unfortunately the gold mirror card was quite thin, and having already embellished the front of the card right up to the edge of the window with embossed card, the result was a bit bumpy, but one lives and learns!

Anyway, SCAL seems to tick all the boxes for me. You can design vector images within the program, and the pro version also gives you features that my original software provided, such as being to select by colour which parts of the design would cut, but I can live without that feature for now. I am so used to Inkscape, and will probably continue to use that for designing, and I have been designing shapes in different colours for the purpose of cutting them separately, and all I need to do is export each colour one by one to get the same result. So I purchased the full version of SCAL and am looking forward to getting really stuck in with this in the coming year.

One feature I really like about the program is the availability of loads of new fonts, which are suitable for cutting. I have been adapting text in Inkscape – converting the letters from objects to paths and editing the nodes, which is somewhat laborious but definitely do-able, but SCAL offers a lot of shortcuts in this direction.

I have been following several of Jennifer’s fabulous card tutorials where she makes surprise mechanical cards – pop-up tunnel and shadow-box cards, for instance, which fold flat for posting. She gives all the measurements, and I am making some cut files from these, so I can save the template and simply cut them when I need to. Unfortunately most of her stuff is based on American paper sizes (their 11 x 8 1/2 is wider and shorter than A4) but I can get round this by using 12 x 12 card – nothing will be wasted because I can also cut embellishments and mats at the same time, and colour them accordingly.

If anyone has an electronic cutting machine of any kind, or knows someone locally who has one, and already works with svg files suitable for cutting, I am more than happy to share my designs freely with you.

Watch this space to see how I get on with this.

No “real” drawing this week as I’ve been busy with other things, such as Christmas.

Food

As promised last week, I will now share our alternative vegan Christmas dinner. It was surprisingly good! Recently I found a Youtube channel called BOSH, which is full of fabulous recipes. They also have a website, and a printed recipe book, but the videos are plenty for me to be getting on with for now!

Recipe of the week

This is their vegan Christmas dinner, all cooked in one roasting tin, apart from a bit of par-boiling beforehand.

And here it is, served up and ready to eat.

I kept enough back for me to have the next day on Boxing Day when we were with my hubby’s family. From past experience, I know what a pest one’s vegetarian friends can be and I don’t want to be a nuisance – taking the last of the jackfruit with gravy in a microwaveable box, I was able to tuck in with the rest of them and eat everything on the table except the turkey.

Have a great start to the New Year, everyone, and I look forward to sharing our creativity in the coming months.