Categories
Craft Notebooks Stationery

New stock- A4 books

I’m not entirely sure what to market these as. Sketch books? Journals? Scrap books? Do with them what you will, they are darned pretty.

Categories
Art Inspiration

Weekly Inspiration- colouring in

When freezer_girl told me about her new colouring book I was very excited. Yes, colouring in. Quite true, we’re not children. And yes, genuinely excited.

BECAUSE IT’S AWESOME! Not only is there colouring of pretty pictures to be done, but you can doodle your own designs in there. And they’re all fun things that you’d really want to doodle designs for.

So, I got one too, and we’re going to colour and compare.

Categories
Craft Notebooks Paper

Note book commission – Company visitor sign-in book

Recently, I was commissioned to do a visitor’s sign-in book for a company. So much fun! I got to design a template for the inside pages, and play about with lots of different types and textures of paper. I used 4 different types of paper for the cover in the end, ivory paper with grey text for the insides, and fastened it all together with some nice sturdy plaited string.

Categories
Origami Paper

A very papery first wedding anniversary

Categories
Craft

Fun Day – Saturday 26th May

There’s one going down in Daventry and The Craft Fantastic will be there selling delicious treats and other stuff, too.

http://www.northamptoncollege.ac.uk/news/item.aspx?NewsItem=734

Categories
Tutorial

Weekend baking- peanut butter cups

While we were in Florida, I picked up a whole new load of candy making stuff- mostly Wilton. Actually, I think all of it was Wilton!

I got peanut butter flavour and dark chocolate candy melts, a new candy mould, some squeezy bottle things, and some decorating brushes. Making peanut butter cups meant I got to use EVERYTHING.

The squeezy bottle things say you can half fill them with Candy Melts, then place the bottle in a bowl of hot water until they melt. Well yeah, sure, that sounds simple enough. Except the bottles are still light and half full of air, so the just float- you end up having to hold the bottle in the water! And then, (because you’re trying to keep it so the water can’t get in) all the melted candy is at the bottom, and it takes aaages to work its way to the nozzle when you’re ready to start, by which time it’s cooled a bit and is reluctant to come out. Bah. Bah!!

I squidged a little melted dark chocolate into the bottom on the mould and then used the little brush to make sure the sides were covered. This bit was a lot easier to do with the brush, however because the choc had cooled a bit, by the time I’d done half a dozen cups the brush was basically a stick with a lump of chocolate on. But I got there. Guess which one I did last:

While these were cooling, I got on with melting the peanut butter candy filling. After the first attempt, I modified my method slightly, and left the bottle to rest like this:

It still took a while, but at least I could leave it where it was for a bit. You do have to keep sqidging the bottle a bit to make sure it’s melting right the way through.

Anyway, onto filling the cups. This took a lot longer than the old dolloping-in-with-a-spoon method, and in the end I gave up and reverted back to my old ways- which were quicker, but a heck of a lot messier!

Phew. Nearly done. After the filling had set, I smoothed more melted chocolate over the base to seal, and once that had set they were done and ready to be turned out into pretty little cases:

YUM. Worth the effort!

Categories
Craft Origami Paper

Simple Origami Sunday

These little origami hanging people remind me so much of the hanging monkeys my grandma had! I don’t remember there ever being a barrel.. I was quite content just linking monkeys…

Categories
Craft

Steampunk inspired bracelet

I really enjoyed making this! Basically, I just took stuff apart and linked it together with random stuff…

Categories
Art Craft Inspiration Lunchtime Lusting

Lunching Lusting- the Yorkshire Sculpture Park online shop

What do you do if you were all excited about seeing the Miró exhibition at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, but were too ill to go?

Sulk, then remember about their website, then get distracted by the wonder of their online shop.

I particularly like these letter press cookie cutters:

And I have no idea what I’d do with it, but I want one of these:

Totally inspired by this farm stamp set:

Oh, and the Miró stuff in the exhibition shop is pretty good too.