Thought I would add some printables…

I am working on a project that is taking more time than I would like. Typical. Also, as the window replacement inches ever closer the thought of having to clear my window area is bone chilling. As part of the project, I collected a sheet full of what I am calling ACTIVE AFFIRMATIONS. Lots of lists are (to me) seemingly random words. These are ones that I see as ACTIONS. Single DO words and BE phrases, all in a simple typewriter font, east to cut and use. Download via the link as the image is very low resolution!

I used some of them, you may recall, in the little collage boards I made from last week.

I am still considering where to mount these, although for the moment they sit above my main desk, precariously perched and likely to tumble down on my head as I work. LOL!

Anyway, I have been dithering about adding them to the box o’cards I have shared but then I recalled another project that I had in the back of my head and thought that might be better. I have been hunting for a tutorial and for once, YouTube has failed me. I’ve seen the odd thumbnail of what I want but never instructions. It’s taking me a little while to settle on the best method. Watch this space!

WOYWW tomorrow and oh but my space is a catastrophe at the moment. Time for a quick tidy up, I think…. Don’t worry, I’ll share both the messy and the clean. Full disclosure, always!

Playing card book DONE!

Yippee!

The theme is all around a difficult decision I have to make on adding a rather nasty medication to my list, to try to keep my condition under control. I am still (perhaps foolishly) hoping that when I do my August bloodwork it will show that the upped dose of a medication I am already taking is working, but not massively optimistic. I have been considering this for a couple of months now and it’s coming down to crunch time. For now, till the test results, Indecision IS a decision, of sorts. I really like the way the book has an almost circular effect. Opening the cover and pulling on the right to open out each page reveals one side, with all the worry and confusion and emotions

And then, flipping to the back, it all circles around to the cover again, and the indecision decision cover that ends the book where it began.

Kinda fitting, I guess. Look back to yesterday for both the construction info and the link to download the no-so-positive words for printing and cutting to use yourself.

I am hoping for some play time over the weekend, but as Darling Daughter is now out of education, I suspect we will be doing a LOT of Mommy/Daughter time till September. Then it will be the replacement of the windows and that is going to require a LOT of prep work and a few weeks of chaos. Not sure at this point if I will try to blog on a reduced schedule or just skip a month. Time will tell….

Progress on my little playing card book

I made a lot of progress on my little book, and it was a lot of fun to make. Let me do the construction, then when I finish it I can talk a bit more about the theme. I used a set of printables from Roben Marie, as I mentioned yesterday, and a method for making “washi tape” (i.e. not really) using Scor-tape from Robyn McClendon. The process is exactly as you would expect, just reading those words LOL!

The printables

fit two widths of tape perfectly

and cut in strips

The tape really has none of the properties of actual washi tape that make it so appealing but it is decorated and sticky, so it works. I covered the playing cards with some of my gel prints

and kinda ignored the little rounded corners. Each corner was covered with tape, in my version, so it didn’t matter. Also my cards were smaller than the decommissioned Vegas cards Robyn used and I had no reason to make them even smaller by cutting anything off! From there I only had to lay them out, decide on the tapes to us, and stick them together.

I did every join (rather than every other, like the original) and also the first and last pages so when the book was closed you can see the colourful tape on every edge.

I really love it – it’s so tiny and cute, and should be quick to decorate. I am delving into my pot of not-so-positive words (I shared these to download and print a while back) and I think they will be perfect for my planned theme.

With luck, finished book tomorrow!

Just a quick one while the house is in chaos

I was working on Easter cards for the family and as I made them, I figured I might as well share them, as the painting and minor repair etc. will mean the house is chaotic and getting to do actual crafting is tricky.

eastercardDownload

I am also experimenting with a new way to add the PDFs. Not sure how much I like it but we will see when it publishes how it looks! Sometimes, “improvements” are not!

Anyway, easy peasy. Print and cut the quadrants then pop them on a cardfront. These fit an A5 card but should be easily trimmed to fit a 1/4 US letter size or perhaps even a few others.

Darling daughter is mad keen on anime, and she has been missing her annual trip to HyperJapan for the last few pandemic years. They did hold it online in 2021, but it’s just not the same. Anyway, kawaii cute cards are perfect for here, and these bunnies made me smile. Hope you find them useful if you need a quick card!

I’m curious – is it better to do a card with the front arranged so all you have to do is print and fold on plain printer paper? I always cut the high-quality printed PDF images then stick them to the front of an actual card base, either a commercial one of one made from quality cardstock leftovers. But I always wonder if more people would prefer the easiest and most basic option. LMK!

More words for Art Journals (or ATCs) – not overwhelmingly positive

Hands up if you work in your art journal to help you process things in your life that aren’t all fluffy bunnies and rainbows…. Yeah. Me too. In exploring all the pages I see here there and everywhere, I am struck by how many times I see a page with what appears to be a totally random word plunked down on it. I’ve done it too, plenty of times. Not so much recently but I have been guilty. Well, maybe not, actually. Scrolling back thru my pages I am hard pressed to find single word pages. The only one I found was this one, in all of my finished pages:

I do find some ATCs with things like ART and CREATE and BELIEVE. But positive words are not always the thing you need. Sometimes, I make a page and maybe the right word is PAIN or SCREAM or BOREDOM. And it is both a waste of time and a hassle to create a single word to print and add, or grab my stamps and stamp it out. Since I have been on a bit of kick, making words for my art journaling that I can draw from randomly, I decided to make a couple of pages of not very positive quotes and words. No up-lifting, not artistic really, some have a slight positive spin, but most are depicting ambivalence in the best case, or real anguish in the worst. You might find them useful, unless your art journal is more about the pretty and the positive. Print ant cut, but grab the actual 2-page PDF not this image!

I did them in two styles, the ones I generally prefer, which is blackout or typewriter. I hope you find a use for them.

As a side note, if you recall I mentioned some fab paper that I use for printing.

When printing my words to cut, I grabbed the wrong paper. As I had both, I thought the side-by-side comparison might interest you all.

I know which I prefer! I’ll add it to the AJJ more for the download than the page. The custom cut stencil is very much part of my style so I guess that works!

Tidying up my blog, bad news and printable ATC backs

I am getting close to the limit for storage on my blog. Back in the good old days, when it seemed like I had nothing but space, I tended to upload quite large images. Now, after blogging since 2009(!) I find I am nearing the limit. Because I have never monetized my blog, it is not something I am keen to start now paying for. So I am going back and deleting stuff – mostly it’s old calendar PDFs. The thing is I don’t trust what I see when I click to see “unattached” images. I can’t figure out a clear way to know if they are actually attached to something or not. So there might be things (links) that no longer work, especially for old (2020 and earlier) Calendars. I have left the images of those things but I feel like I might need to delete them as well. I am also considering deleting all the Project Life printables. I feel like the style of the ones I did years ago are no longer in fashion, and for the very very occasional hit they might get, it isn’t worth keeping a big PDF file and a large image. Sorting that.

The bad news is my knitting mate has tested positive. Almost 100% caught it from her daughter and her daughter from school. Not good at all. I did a test and so far I’m negative – it was almost a full week between when last we met and her testing positive, and while we met inside cause of the crap weather, we did keep distance between us and no hugging hello. Not sure having the 3rd jab yesterday will help but you never know. Have now had to tell the potential birthday guests the timeline and test status, and will test again (and maybe again) and update them on the day for a final decision. It’s only three guests in total and if need be I can just stay well away (on a different level I think) while guests are in the house, if they do choose to come. Bah!

So now I am going to ADD stuff LOL! I have been printing and attaching backs to some of the ATCs and Coins I have made recently. I have my standard image that I tend to alter with colour so all my backs don’t look exactly the same.

It’s simple to do and keeps things fresh. So I made a set of Halloween/Creepy ones to download (see the bloody drips above for a closer look) and they look like this:

And the other set is a trio of three cards in three different patterns to download as well:

Hopefully that will be helpful.

I have quite a lot of behind the scenes stuff I need to do

Can you resolve a blurry art journal page? Printables for you

{sigh} Yeah, I had an idea but it went badly awry. I planned to do a fairly simple art journal page in my very small Roben-Marie journal and decided to begin by stamping a large-ish Dina Wakley figure on it. I thought I had worked out a way to use my stamp positioner so I could get a dark impression on the heavily coloured base page. It did not go to plan.

The page shifted, which I should have expected, and I got a bit of a double image, as you can see. There went my plan, out the window. I won’t share the original plan, cause I am not giving up hope I can use it some time in the future. I will share how I … fixed it is not right, but how I resolved it, I guess. I added some mark-making and some watercolour and stamping to complete the background and focal point image

I decided I would embrace the blur, and find a quote that said something about the blur to complete a page. After a short hunt and a bit of reading to winnow down the choices, I came up with a small handful of quotes that I thought could all work. I began working on the text, readying it for printing and while doing so I ended up making a full sheet that I thought might be useful to others who find themselves in this predicament. Only a handful of quotes, but in different sizes, fonts, spacings, etc.

I printed the sheet and cut out some to test them. You can grab a PDF copy here. I liked the ones I tried and had kinda settled on this one:

But then I saw that the final line on the page was blurry as well! I think I pulled it out of the printed before it had finished printing! It was perfect for the page:

And there you go. The longer quote bears sharing – it is from a BBC interview with J.R.R. Tolkien:

J.R.R. Tolkien: I suppose … I was about three and a half. Pretty poignant of course, because one of the things why people say they don’t remember is, it’s like constantly photographing the same thing on the same plate. Slight changes simply make a blur.

And over the last 18 months it has all been slight changes, hasn’t it, after the massive changes the pandemic brought? Glimpses of freedom, slight easing of restrictions (some self-imposed, some mandated) and really the whole thing just feels vague and unclear. There are no defined and sharp edges. Just a slight blur to everything.

Will the world ever resolve into clarity again? We can but hope.

Remembrance day poppy folds

Hey there.

It’s been a busy few weeks, with visitors coming and going. The last one is due back from a side trip today and will be gone next week.  Phew.

Triggered by a request for a “Lest We Forget” pattern, here are a few I designed.

There are the two poppies, which would work ok as a straight book fold.  They might work best as a combined Cut&Fold.  If they are done so the central section of the flower is concave, you could easily add a printed bit that says REMEMBER or the date or something similar. Don’t be worried by the overlapping darker areas in the first one.  They do not print like that.  Download that set here.

The initial Lest We Forget design is one that was requested.  The ones with the poppy variations I thought might be easier to do.  You can get that trio of designs here. I think it is very clear that those will only work as Cut&Folds!  Very complicated!

Additionally you could Cut&Fold (or maybe just fold?) the Lest We Forget words and add a poppy (knitted, crocheted, paper, whatever) in the middle rather than folding it!

If you make one PLEASE share it!  I’m sure people would like to see it.

 

 

 

 

Been a while… Tear off calendars for 2019

I have been busy and also had a little relapse of my NAM so blogging has not been my top priority.  But I did manage to make a couple of sheets of tear-off blocks for 2019.  Those of you who like to make calendar related gifts might find them useful.  There are older posts, like this one,  that show how to make a tear-off calendar from cut month blocks.

I’ve tried to make these simple to cut this time, just cut along the lines.

Here is the flat-topped circle one:

And here is a version with a bit more space around it, in case you want to make your tear-offs a bit special, like these:

You can see how I do that here. There is also a cute, simple foldable calendar card project in that post, so worth having a look anyway.

And here are the plain block ones:

No idea why the line looks darker here.  I doesn’t look like that in the PDF preview!

I hesitate to say the dreaded C-word (not THAT one, the DECEMBER one!) but if you make gifts, that Calendar card project is one you can easily whip up and have a stash on hand in case you need an emergency gift!

Also bear in mind that many of the Project Life sized cards also make nice tear-off blocks:

and you can see other 2019 calendars here.

Have fun!

PS I am still more or less keeping up with the book folding templates, getting a few requests every day, just in case people think I am not doing them because I am not posting about them.  I am.

International Women’s Day PL printables

Yes, yes, it has been a while since I have made printables.  But this year I really wanted to make a set for International Women’s Day.  2017 was a tough year, personally and for women in general.  CNN says 2018 will be the Year of Women – but then again it could just be “fake news” right? {imagine a snort of derision here}

I have been seeing a few graphics for Women’s Day and most of them are more like Mother’s Day in tone – very sweet and floral.  If 2018 is the Year of Women then I think the graphics should reflect something … stronger.

I’m still playing around with things but these two (very different) sets are heading in the right directions.  The first is a combination of the sweet and floral feel that I mentioned:

Download that one here.

The second one is a little more graphic, although it IS pink…but then, so are the pussy hats, so I think that is fine.

Download that here. There is also a trio of little circles that can be used as embellishments for anything really – might be nice as a full sheet of bits for a planner, for example.

Hope you find good use for them!