Pixie's Snippets Playground - Challenge # 325 - results

Royal Wedding Day today! The sun is shining for the happy couple down here in the South of the UK and Windsor is such a lovely place for the wedding.

Let's get straight on with the post - I'm typing this on Saturday morning and the TV in my craft room is calling to be turned on so I can watch events - so this will be quite a quick post!

First of all, we have a new Guest Designer, but most certainly not a new crafter! It's Susan Renshaw of 'Calling All Crafters' who is our Guest Designer this fortnight. Susan has been playing along with us for a while now:

And here's what Susan wrote about her card:

Once again I went with the mosaic idea but this time paper piecing into a die from STAMPLorations. All the card pieces are from my scrap bank apart from the cream card base which is a 5 by 7 inch. I added a strip of ribbon with a tiny scrap tied around it and the wooden butterfly embellishments. More details will be on my blog…

If you remember, Susan was one of our picks last time with the brilliant mosaic pelican card!

Bless her - the GD card above was her third idea, bit of a perfectionist like so many of us. I'm stunned by the amount of paper piecing - just fabulous!

And here's Susan to say hello to you:

Isn't it wonderful how happy you Playmates are - all the more so when crafting of course!

And a little bit of information about Susan as well:

I am a retired teacher, a mother of 4 and grandmother of 3 – my grandson with be 18 this month but my granddaughters are younger. I currently live in the UK, Derbyshire, living round the corner from my elderly parents to whom I give a great deal of support. Over the last 20 years, I have been an expat, living in Australia, Hong Kong, Abu Dhabi and India. My three sons and their families still live in Australia but my daughter is a teacher and lives near Cambridge. My husband still works – he was in Egypt for much of last year and is now in Abu Dhabi again. Rather than living overseas, I now just take the opportunity to visit him when I can. I have been a crafter all my life, turning my hand to quilting, embroidery, crochet and more. I became more interested in papercrafting when I was living in Abu Dhabi and this is my current passion. I make cards but also enjoy making ATCs and playing with mixed media. I think I use my Big Shot every day but I also enjoy stamping. I am not a great colourer! …My style is my own ranging from conventional to more ‘off the wall’. You will see from my blog that I am on a number of DTs. I like to take part in ATC and other craft swaps and I also enjoy attending crafty retreats whenever I can. The photo is from a recent Craft retreat with UK Stampers Network.

So, a very busy lady and a very dedicated crafter - with a fair old bit of globe trotting under her belt as well.

Thanks so much for being our Guest Designer Susan - we're delighted you could take on the role for this fortnight. And Parsnip is offering his services to carry your baggage next time you visit your husband in some exotic country! You gotta admit - that little bear always has an eye on the main chance! 😀

And now for the fortnight's picks - this time I've gone for some ideas you might want to try for yourselves:

Alice whizzed in early on in the challenge with this lovely Christmas card. I love it, but what else was in the post really caught my imagination and I hope it will interest you as well:

This is only one of many photos on Alice's blog post - which you can find HERE. Basically, Alice uses snippets to maintain a stock of ready die cut shapes and stores them in pockets in binders as shown above. It's really such a great idea - if you have the time to do this I'm sure it would save loads of fiddling round when working on a project. I'm a 'cut as I go' gal - but I really can see loads of merit in Alice's idea!

Liz is always coming up with great ideas for card shapes, and this time she showed us a real corker! A great card to begin for a lovely lady named Kitty who is 103 years young and still an avid supporter of Bristol Rovers Football Club. And the extra twist is the shape itself. The basic shape is known as the 'Impossible Card Fold' - the effect is very much like an easel card but the card blank is cut (very cleverly) from a single sheet of card!

I immediately Googled it and found a very good tutorial which I followed to the letter. And blow me, some of the measurements for the layers of paper to add to the card weren't correct! By all means look at the link. but do be aware that the finished article will look a bit off balance - you can actually see that on at least one of the end results on the video, the margins on either side aren't even - and really makes my teeth itch!

And here's my half finished attempt before I decided to leave it alone and go no further so you can see what I mean - I did try to use a paint tool to draw an arrow or two to point to the offending area, with no luck:

Can you see that the right hand side upside down L shape layers of the orange and patterned paper don't have an even border around them? There's a wider margin of white card on the lower right part and also the upper left part of the card? Such a shame and also a waste of some pretty paper as well, sigh. Little Miss Picky strikes again!

So, I suggest you just look at the basic card blank cutting part of the video I linked (which is very clearly explained) and work out your own sizes if you add layers of paper - Liz had done that very successfully with her card. There are tons of tutorials to be found - but the Royal Wedding is calling to me and I'm typing as fast as I can here!

 

Trina P brought us this great card - and another idea to try out from a very talented Playmate! I've shown a couple of photos above so that you can get the overall idea. It's known as an 'in and out card' - I first spotted this die cut aperture idea over on Jennifer McGuire's blog. Trina has helpfully included the link over on her blog post so you can hop over there for more about this card at the same time.

And we had three new Playmates joining in the fun this time:

Sammi

Darshana

Fiona

A huge welcome to you all and these are really lovely cards, all featuring butterflies as well! Do please hop over to say hello to our new Playmates.

So that was three new Playmates this fortnight and 58 entries. That's really good going considering you can only play once each fortnight.

Prize draw time now and what a popular prize as well. Our winner of the MFT 'Marbled Background' stamp and also the MFT 'Wish' die is:

  Trina P

 

Well done Trina! That's a double whammy this fortnight, being one of our 'picks' as well as the prizewinner :) Bet you're doing a Happy Dance right now!

Do please send me your address, with full name at the top so I can copy and paste - for speed and ease. I'll be off to the Post Office ASAP this coming week once I hear from you. Please put Playground Winner or similar in the subject line of your email in case it drops into my junk mail. Email address is on RH sidebar as always.

Remember folks, there's still almost another week to run on Challenge #326 HERE. The prize is a Waffle Flower 'Succulents' stamp set with matching dies.

And, as promised - here's a better photo of Spike the hedgehog at his feeding station. Bearing in mind that it was taken in the dark, with just an outdoor light for illumination, and you have to be very fast - I think Len did us proud! I did think he had taken two photos but it's only the one for now:

He's just had a drink from the little bowl of water that's out of shot (hence the wet patches from underneath his chin) - and is about to nudge the feeding dish lid up to get at his food. No doubt Len will be out there again trying to get more photos - but generally we just leave the hedgies to feed in peace and peek at them from a window in the kitchen.

I do hope you're having great weather right now - I'm just about to settle down to watch the Royal Wedding properly.

Love from the little white peril Parsnip, who is sat here with his flag ready to wave it at the TV whenever required - and of course me,