Something old

Is the craft room done yet?

No, not, nada, not at all. Un-blinking-believable.

I know, it is hard to fathom how it could possibly take so long, but there have been so many glitches along the way I have stopped counting. The last being the floor, my beautiful wooden floor which now has to be my old carpet put back and simply cleaned floor. The guy who built our house did not posess a spirit level, the floor dipped by more than 8mm on the one side and after much deliberation and many a tear shed we decided it would just not work. The floor has to be level or the wood might crack and there was no way we could prop it up properly, believe me we thought of many ways. Of course we found this out AFTER we had completely prepped the floor, scraped off the yukky carpet tape, bought the wooden flooring strips and underlay, opened the pack ... you know, spent a whole day getting it all ready, just to pack it all back in the car and pray that B&Q would give us a refund.

I did get a brand new VAX carpet cleaner out of the deal as a consolation prize, so it is not all bad. We cleaned that old carpet to within an inch of it's life last night. It is sparkling and fresh all ready for me to drop paint and ink on it. Of course the inevitable fate of a clean carpet.

By now I am suffering from a bit of crafting withdrawal. Every now and then I just open up an inkpad or a box of stamps and give it a good whiff. I gently run my fingers through the packs of papers stacked on my lounge floor and if I am feeling particularly in need of a fix I grab punch or two and attack my paper bin.

Thing is, once I am moved in and ready to craft again, I am off to South Africa for a month, so there is going to be no crafting in this neck of the woods until January.

I will just have to go with the inkpad sniffing for now.

And then we get to the something old - some old projects, which I am sure you probably don't want to see, but I am afraid it is all I got, unless you want to join me in some ink sniffing :)

One of my favourite projects for Practical Crafts magazine used to be the 9 for 5 feature. I loved that. Make 9 cards with just £5.

My materials for these were a sheet of pattern paper, some sheets of coloured cardstock, bottle tops and string. I used my pc to print the greetings and a paper piercer to add detail.

Here are three of the nine cards, I will post the others in the next few days.

Bottletops are so inexpensive, I love to use them for cheap decoration. These were bought from Wilkinsons for something like 79p for a whole bag full. Flatten them with a rubber mallet and voila. The little flowers are cut from the patterned paper and the row of holes was made with my dress makers tracing wheel and every second hole enlarged with a paper piercer. Cheap and cheerful!

For this card I printed the letters onto the back of patterned paper (mirroring them first) and then cut out. The rest of the message is printed. Simple simple simple – just the way I like it, again adding some detail with the little holes.

And lastly, the little flower stem is normal stock standard cheap string that you can buy anywhere. I pricked holes and used a large embroidery needle to sew the stem. It is a bit bulky on the back, so the panel with the flower is attached to the tag with 3D pads.