My first attempt at quilling!

I've been threatening to try quilling ever since I started following Helen's fab blog, Let's Create, over a year ago, and after a few false starts I've finally made a project featuring the technique.

Mom gave me the quilling paper & tool, which she got free with an issue of Crafts Beautiful magazine, but even with the "right" tools I found that it was trickier than I had hoped... but Helen has offered many good tips, and I'm really quite thrilled my my first attempt!

I wanted to keep this card very clean and simple, so there's no edging or nuttin'. For the banner, I cut the shape out of white cardstock, ran it through my sticker machine, and smoothed on the natural cotton material. I folded the edges in, adhering them with double-sided tape. I stamped the Stampin' Up! sentiment with brown Memento ink, added some rafia, and glued the butterfly on with Glossy Accents. Easy-peasy!

Inspiration/Challenges:

Amusing Challenge: Sketch (right)

Color Throwdown #194: Crumb Cake, Poppy Parade, Very Vanilla, Soft Sky (left)

Tutorials: The Quilling Patch, My Creative Scrapbook, Origami Resource Center

Update: This was one of only 2 entries, but I still won Amusing Sketch Challenge #3! Was in great company with E.T., my Feline Playful teamie.

Thank you for visiting!

String art, via Let's Create

I've been following Helen's wonderful range of crafting projects at Let's Create for some time now, and I couldn't resist buying a few of her string art templates. (She has wonderful embellishments & crafts available on Etsy.) Helen definitely inspired me to try string art; it's not usually my kind of thing, but she does such beautiful things with it that I had to try it myself! I love the result, but it certainly takes time. A good project to work on while watching a movie!

I've only tried two of the templates: for my mom's birthday card and for a "commissioned" card for a friend of mom's after she saw her birthday card! I forgot to take a photo of the latter before sending it off to Mom, but here's her card:

The sun and "shine" sentiment are from Verve Stamps, and I won them at Mojo Monday (Thank you, I love them!). The birthday sentiment is a shrinky dink. Mom really seemed to like the card, and that was the goal!