Halloween Card

On Tuesday I released some new Halloween themed printables; I will be sharing some different ideas over the next few weeks on how you could use them - first up is this Halloween card...


Materials used in the card:
144x144mm white card blank
orange paper
black and white card
Halloween night sky scrapbooking paper (from this set)
Witch, cat and 'Trick or Treat?' digital stamps (from this set)
watercolour pencils
black and orange baker's twine
double-sided sticky foam pads
craft glue / double sided sticky tape
silver glitter glue
silver gel pen
black pen
hole punch

How I made the card...
First I prepared the digital stamps for printing; I layered the cat digital stamp so it slightly overlapped the witch image and printed them onto white card.  I decided to test out my Silhouette Cameo cutting machine's print and cut feature and was very impressed with how well it cut around the girl and cat - I'll be sharing a blog post about this another time!  You could cut around the image with scissors or a craft knife too.  The girl and cat were then coloured with watercolour pencils.

I cut a square of the night sky scrapbook paper, smaller than the card blank and mounted it on orange paper, then glued these to the front of the card.


The 'Trick or Treat?' word stamp was printed onto white card.  This was then mounted onto orange paper and I drew a striped border to match the baker's twine using a black drawing pen.  I threaded baker's twine through a punched hole before tying the twine around the card.

Using my Cameo I cut a bat silhouette from black card, you could also cut this by hand.  Drawing lightly around the very edge of the bat with silver gel pen helped it to stand out from the dark background paper.


I attached the witch, bat and 'Trick or Treat?' tag to the card with double-sided foam pads to add dimension.  Finally, I added a little silver glitter glue to the some of the stars on the background paper.

New Design Release - Halloween

Today I'm excited to be releasing a new collection of printable Halloween designs in my shop on Etsy! If you follow me on Facebook you will already have seen the sneak peeks I shared for some new designs I have been working on... digital stamps, scrapbook papers and an invitation design.  I will be sharing some ideas for using them over the next few weeks - I would love to see what other people make with them too, so if you buy and use any of these please feel free to share your photos by emailing me, including a link in the comments below this post or on my Facebook page! 

I had great fun coming up with ideas for this set of digital stamps!  The set includes 3 children dressed up; as a witch, mummy and ghost, with 3 smaller images; a cat, bat and pumpkin and 3 messages; 'Boo!', 'Happy Halloween' and 'Trick or Treat?'.

Each image comes as a separate jpg file (with a white background) and as a png file (with a transparent background).  The transparent backgrounds of the png versions mean that they can be grouped and layered to create different combinations of images...

I designed a set of Halloween scrapbooking papers which could be used with the stamps - there are 8 papers in the set which includes a starry sky with moons and bats, spider web designs, chevron, striped, star and quatrefoil patterns...

I also designed this invitation with my witch and cat drawings on a spiderweb background - it could be used for Halloween parties or birthday parties.  As with all my invitation designs, it comes with personalised text and is sent as a digital file which you can either print at home, or take to your local printers...

You can find these designs and more of my other Halloween themed printables in my hfcSupplies Etsy shop.

Spoonflower Contest - Ditsy Lizards

I had fun creating this colourful design for this week's Spoonflower contest; 'Ditsy Lizards'! You can see all of the other entries (and vote for your favourites) on Spoonflower here:
http://www.spoonflower.com/contest_voters_temp/new?contest_id=320

ps. Thank you to anyone who voted for my 90s Nostalgia design in last week's contest - it came 27th out of 185 entries!

Spoonflower Contest - 90s Nostalgia

This week's Spoonflower challenge theme is 90s' Nostalgia, which resulted in me having a good rummage around my cupboards to dig out some of my old toys and collections! I couldn't resist sharing a photo of some of the things I rediscovered... 

I felt just like a child again! Remembering the things I used to play with, like my Polly Pockets, trolls, plastic dinosaurs and animals.  I even found a website that lists all the Polly Pockets they made by year - I found the Polly Princess ring I had, but lost the Polly doll, and the Midge doll from a pencil, but I lost the pencil and dome - I wonder what happened to them!?
I also looked through some of my collections of erasers, pencils and badges which brought back memories of where they came from - like the little frog erasers from one of the first school trips I went on at a nature reserve.  I considered getting out all my old Lego too - but thought I would save that for another time since I had already made quite a mess getting everything else out!

Apart from a taking a trip down memory lane, I was searching for inspiration for designing an entry for the Spoonflower contest.  Lots of the things I came across were trademarked toys, which I didn't want to include in my design, so I chose to incorporate other things - like rollerskates, cassette tapes, floppy disks, pencils, smiley face and 'flump' shaped erasers.  The rollerskates were inspired by a pair of purple and yellow ones I used to have (but was mostly too afraid to use!).  This is the finished design I came up with...

   

You can see all the other entries to '90s Nostalgia', and vote for your favourites, on Spoonflower's website...
http://www.spoonflower.com/contest_voters_temp/new?contest_id=319

August Review

Another month has flown by and it’s September already!  That means it’s time for a look back at some of the things I did in August…

New designs, Spoonflower…

I don’t like to waste things so when I realised that I was running out of space in my current sketchbooks I decided to make myself a new one from spare pages left at the back of some old uni sketchbooks.  I used to like making books but hadn’t done any in a long time, it got me thinking about putting together some different book making tutorials – I’ve added that to my ‘to do’ list!

I used my newly made sketchbook for drawing ideas for Spoonflower’s annual Fabric8 contest.  This year the theme is Botanical Sketchbook, so I took inspiration from my garden and drew some of the plants, flowers and vegetables which I grow…

Here’s my final fabric design… Unfortunately it was not picked to be one of the 100 semi-finalists (there were close to 800 entries!), but I will still be making it available to buy from my Spoonflower shop in the near future.  (I took advantage of Spoonflower’s Free Swatch Day and ordered a sample.)  I am also planning to create some coordinating designs to form a small collection around this one.  The 8 finalists in the Fabric8 contest have now been chosen.  They are all lovely designs, you can see them here.

In August I also entered Spoonflower’s ‘Butterfly Coordinates’ contest – thank you if you voted for my design!  My entry came 78th (with 109 votes) out of 274 designs – you can see all of the other entries here.

Baking…

I baked a banana, blueberry and walnut cake which I shared the recipe for last week.  You can see more recipes I have shared on my blog in the past here.

Knitting

When I was recovering from being unwell in July I started knitting a cardigan.  After a bit of a false start (when I got in a muddle having dropped some stitches only a few rows in and had to start again) it’s going well now.  I’m knitting with Sublime Extra Fine Merino Wool DK which is a gorgeous soft yarn.  I would usually avoid wool because I’ve found it irritates my skin, but this yarn is so soft – hopefully it will feel good to wear too!

I’m using this Drops pattern, which I’ve pinned to my Knit and Crochet board on Pinterest along with other knitting and crochet patterns and tutorials…

Follow Hazel's board Knit and Crochet on Pinterest.

Other things…

A few months ago I wrote about trialling Adobe Illustrator and wanting to try Serif’s DrawPlus X8, well I now have the full DrawPlus program and have been really happy with it so far.  Learning how to do new things is so exciting and satisfying too – there were a few things I wanted to be able to do with DrawPlus but I wasn’t sure if I could.  It doesn’t work in exactly the same way as Illustrator but I have worked out how to convert my scanned line drawings to vectors and draw scalloped circles!

Well, I think that’s about it for August!  August was a bit of a disrupted month work wise, but I'm starting to get back into a more normal routine again now it's September, so hopefully you'll soon be seeing more new designs and craft projects / tutorials I have planned to do on my blog.