Happy New 2014

Hello and thank you for stopping by!!! First of all I want to wish all of you a wonderful and successful  Year 2014!!! I know I have neglected my blog very very much in the past year, but I can't change the past and so I will just try to be a better blogger this year. I won't promise blogging on a regular basis but I have a few cards that I made that I would love to share with you.

So here is the card I want to start my new Bloggingyear with:

The image on the card is from the new actual Launch of LOTV and is called James-Butterflies. I colored him with my Ranger Distressinks and cut him out with the Labels 2 Die from Crafts-Too and embossed him too with my Cuttlebug.

The backgroundpaper I used on the card was made by using my new Hexagon-punch from Stampin Up that I got for Christmas from my amazingly talented and generous friend Annette! I used paper from the Linen Closet stack from DCWV and punched out the hexagons. I inked the edges of all the hexagons with Vintage Photo Distress Ink to give it a more finished look. I glued them down randomly on a piece of cardstock and inked the edges with the same vintage photo Distressink from Ranger. Then I used a brown marker to draw all the sewing-lines arround the hexagons.
Cut the paper in 3 pieces and added a few nice embellishments such as metalic brads, brown ribbon  and a vintage wood-button I got from a friend once.
To finish the card I used a sentiment from the LOTV Everyday Grungy Messages set.

Please let me know what you all think! As today is National Hugging Day I send you all lots and lots of hugs :)
Have a blessed day and HAPPY CRAFTING!!!

Maria :)

I would like to enter this card into the Monthly Challenge of LOTV

find me at bloglovin

Follow my blog with Bloglovin

Hello my dear Followers,
as some of you might already know Google reader is shutting down very soon.  My friend Anne sent me a message  that had all these infos in it.
You will find my Blog under this link:
Follow my blog with Bloglovin

This is from Google/bloggers official website

https://support.google.com/reader/answer/3028851 gives yo a more accurate descriptions

in other words:

Google Reader is shutting down soon, that means all the followers here on my blog  and then all the blogs that I follow will disappear.

Here is the link to bloglovin if you want the blogbovin button to keep your followers and to still follow  and stay subbed to your favorite  blogs 

http://www.bloglovin.com/Google

I hope you will keep following me there. see you there

Happy Crafting

Maria :)

I love LOTV!!! Happy 9th Birthday !!!!

Hello and thank you for stopping by!!! Today is the 9th Birthday of one of my absolute favorite Stampingcompanies. LOTV!!! What is LOTV you will ask. LOTV stands for Lili of the Valley they are from the United Kingdom and make the most adorable stamps. I´m a huge fan of their work and have a bunch of their stamps ...and LOVE them!!You should pop over to their website and have a look yourself.
Today on their birthday they have a PARTY going on in their shop in Leeds and also on their Facebook page. You should have a look and join in. I´m sure I will be there  (online) :)

To celebrate with all their customers they also have a great Birthday Giveaway challenge on their blog.
All you have to do to enter is to make a Birthdaycard and share it on your blog, their facebookpage or to send it to them via email til 6PM (UK time) today. They offer a fantastic prize, of 9 stamps of your choice, to win. All of their stamps are amazing and they have a wide amount of stamps to pick from for all kind of occassions. 

So to celebrate their awesome Birthday I made this cute birthdaycard using some of their great products that I own.

I will explain my card from top to bottom :) The background-pattern-paper is from the Springthing Matstack from DCWV. I inked  the edges of the card with my dauber and the peeled paint distressink from Ranger.

On the top of the card I stamped a very cute sentiment from the A5 Verses set from LOTV.

The Image I used is from their Summer Bears Companion Stamp Set and I colored it with Distressinks. I cut it with a Die from Nellie Snellen and embossed it too. I added the It´s your Day stamp from the Calendars Stamp set with the peeled paint distressink.

Under the image I tied a light green ribbon to a bow and added a button from studio g. 

On the bottom of the card I stamped the birthdaygreeting from the Handwritten phrases set. 

 I love how harmonic the paper, inks, image and all elements appear and work together :) I just LOTV stamps and they help me to make nice and very cute cards :)
Thank you LOTV for making such adorable stamps and also great sentiment stamps.
HAPPY BIRTHAY LOTV!!!! I wish you more successful years ahead and more wonderful stamps to come :)
What do you think?
I hope everyone is going having  a great weekend. See you all soon :)
HAPPY CRAFTING :)
Maria :)

I like my friends and my friendships

Hello and thank you for stopping by!!! First of all I want to wish all of you a Happy New Year and all my new Followers ( hi Niamh) a warm welcome to my random-updated blog lol. It´s almost end of january and this is my first blogpost of the year...well let´s see what I can do with that. Let´s hope I will be a more active blogger this year :)
So on to today´s card I want to show you. My wonderfully talented Friend Anne-Marie is a DT-Member of the Twist of Faith Card Challenge Blog and so she shared a challenge they have there right now with the theme Friendship. Normally I don´t do challenges as I´m not the type for it. But this time I just wanted to try.

The last year was very tough for me and my family and I had a couple of wonderful people supporting me through that time and beyond .  One of these amazing people in my life is my friend Annette. I was able to visit her and her wonderful husband Ron last year in the USA. They made my trip there a supercool and unforgetable adventure.

Annette and I at the entrance to the Timpanogos Cave

Annette and I at the Stampin Up headquarters on my birthday

 As I appreciate her friendship so very much I created this card for her .

The stampset I used for the little characters is the Stick Family set from Stampabilities. It´s a build the characters yourself set and was fun to put the characters just the way I wanted them to be.

 I colored them with my distressinks and I think they turned out pretty cute. I also added a selfmade paper flower that I colored in with my distressink and put a purple rhinestone in the middle.     

                               
The sentiment is from Fiskars Friends Forever Quotes set. The sentiment reads : Friendship is the golden thread that ties the heart of ALL THE WORLD. And to fit the sentiment I tied some golden thread ribbon arround the label diecut from Spellbinders and made a pretty little bow with a purple flower button on top as purple is Annette´s favorite color :)

 

 I embossed some light purple cardstock with my polka dots embossing folder from cuttlebug and sponged it with Tim Holtz Dusty Concord Distress ink . I distressed the edges a little more to pop up from the white.

As last step I added 4 nice corners and decorated them with purple rhinestones.

What do you think?
I hope everyone is going having  a great weekend. See you all soon :)
HAPPY CRAFTING :)
Maria :)

Happy New Year´s Eve everyone

Hello and thank you for stopping by!!!!
I just wanted to wish all my followers a Happy and safe New Years Eve and a Happy New Year 2013!!!
Thank you for stopping by now and then to read my posts throughout the year. Thank you for your amazing support and very nice and kind comments and words, they warm my heart.  Thank you for following my blog, you are all amazing .
I hope to be able to share more of my creations in the new year and also to make more video-tutorials after winter will be over.

Happy New Year 2013 for you all!!!

Have a great time everyone
Big hugs and lots of love
Maria :)

I like this cute turkey 2.0

Hello and thank you for stopping by! Today I won´t show you anything new, but I want to share with you how to make these cute turk-owls I made last year  so you can use it for your THIS years Thanksgiving-decoration.
You can find the original post of this little darling creatures here.
I hope you will enjoy the little videotutorial.
Sorry that it ended so suddently, but as i took my video with my phone my mom called and so the video ended without me wanting to....oh well ...good that the tutorial was almost at the end.
If you have any questions on how to make the turkowl, don´t hestitate to comment below :)
Thank you for taking the time to follow my blog and the videos, I hope they inspire you a little.
Let me know what you think

I hope everyone will have a great weekend.
HAPPY CRAFTING :)

Maria :)

I love to color with my distressinks

Hello and thank you for stopping by!!!!

First of all I want to thank you for all the lovely comments of my last post and video-tutorial. I felt very flattered that you liked it that much and I will try to include more videos in my future posts.
Today I want to show you how I color my stamped images unsing my distressinks.
What you need to color with distressinks are:
- acrylic clear block
- fine and medium watertank-brush
- distressinks in different colors
- Papertowel
- stamped/printed Image to color

So here is the tutorial I made coloring a Lili of the Valley stamp from the Summer Bears Companion Stamp Set.  Hope you will enjoy it.

And here is the card I made with the same image for a craftingfriend.

What do you think?
I hope everyone is going having  a great week. See you all soon :)
HAPPY CRAFTING :)
Maria :)

I like Mr. M.B. Hedgeh-Owl

Hello and thank you for stopping by!! Here fall/autumn is just arround the corner and so a lil fellow came into my mind the other day. My hands started working and created this little guy:

After long time thinking and discussion with a few friends I named him Mr. M.B. Hedgeh-owl.
The name should give it away that  did him with me lovely SU Owl-punch. I think he is just so cute :)
So here are written instructions on how I made him.
1. I cut out his body out of beige/cream cardstock and snipped of his ears and made a small nodge on the tophead.
2. I cut out a second body but only the down-half of it to have his feet and a little space above it. Then i cut little arms on this feet on both sides.
3. I punched out a beige/cream heart and a pair of eyes for the little guy and a black nose with a simple whole punch.
4. I inked arround the edges of the body , arms and the heart with brown ink and a sponge dauber.
5. Then I started to glue the whole body together starting with the heart, which will be the nose of Mr. Hedgehowl and then added the black spot for his nose and his eyes.
6. Then I glued the arms on the back of his body.
7. Next step was to cut out his spikes with  zig-zag-silhouette-scissors, while using his body as template.
8. As last step glue the body on the spikes and voila...he is finished!!!!!!!

If this instructions are to complicated to understand for you...I appologize...but in that case I have a little goodie for you today.....my first ever official online crafting Video-tutorial. Please bear with me as it´s my really first video-tutorial for a blog. I hope you will like it a little bit....sooo here it is:



If you have any questions or comments just leave them down below and I will get back to you as soon as I can. Thank you so much for stopping by and following my blog. I really do appreciate it.

I also made a fall card with this little fellow that will be sent to one of my biggest craftidols soon    

                                        

What do you think?
I hope everyone is going having  a great weekend . See you all soon :)
HAPPY CRAFTING :)
Maria :)

I like skype-craft-sessions

Hello and Thank you for stopping by!!! A lot of things happened in my life during the last months and because of that I didn´t got to craft and blog . I´m sorry my dear followers. I will stop making promises when I will blog next, as its hard for me to keep with this promises, sorry.

Yesterday night I was able to have a skype-craft-session with my amazingly talented friend Petra from South Africa.  Or lets say she beared to craft with me. We decided to try a technique that we both never did before. We came to the conclusion to do step-fold-cards for eachother.
So while my friend Petra got her card for me done in no time, I struggeled with putting my pieces on the right spot and needed about 4 times more time than she did. Yes I´m a slow crafter at the moment. As Petra loves pink, flowers and butterflies I tried to put all of these elements on her card.
I used my Stampin-up flower petal punch and a fitting stampset I got from an amazing friend for my birthday to make the flowers on the card. The butterfly-doily was made using my new spellbinder die (which I love). The ornament in the back was made using my new Martha-Steward-punches :) nice, huh?
Inked everything with pink ink as Petra loves pink lol.
So to not let you wait any longer, here is what I came up with:
My Step-fold-card for Petra

complete step-fold-card front-view

front and middle layer

Close-up of the flower in the middle

Bacllayer with a punch ornament and more flowers for Petra

Stepcard from the side

What do you think?
I hope everyone is going having  a great week . See you all soon :)
HAPPY CRAFTING :)
Maria :)

I like easter-crafting

Hello and thank you for stopping by!!!! As easter is only a couple of days away I want to share with you the eastercards I made this year and that I sent out to all my wonderful friends all arround the world.
The main characters of my eastercards are an Owl-punch-bunny and an owl-punch chick.

I found the idea for them on Michelles blog here. I thought they are so cute and perfect for some eastercards. I made some card basics in Egg-shape and embossed them using my cuttlebug. After embossing I used my spongedaubers and Ink-pads and colored all of the backgrounds. To give the bunnies and chicks a better spot of attention i layered them a color-fitting oval that i cut out with my nestabilities and popped it up with some foam-pads. As last step I used my Word-window-punch and cut out a strip and hand-wrote my sentiment on it.
So what do you think? I hope these cute little fellows will bring some joy and springfeeling to my wonderful friends around the world, even if some of them will arrive after easter, due to late sending out ;)
I want to wish everyone a very HAPPY EASTER!!!! Might the Easterbunny be kind and generous to you :)

I hope everyone is having a great week and a greater Easter-weekend.See you all soon :)
HAPPY CRAFTING :)
Maria :)