Making rubber stamps

Remember my nearly totally free stamps I made before? Well this is a bit of a step up. You have to buy the rubber to cut them from. But they are still pretty simple to do.

My friend Em was really awesome and organised a crafty gathering at her house. Just in case you are thinking, that sounds really great ... well, it was! This is pretty new for me, I've not known a lot of people who are into the crafts before so I was excited to meet some new folks and give this one a go together.

It seems like its best to go for a simple design and to use a scalpel/craft knife to cut away the excess rubber. We tried it with lino cutting tools too, but the lines came out really wobbly :( The rubber is like a high quality eraser in a big flat sheet. A little softer maybe. You can cut it down with scissors.

I made a new set of 'flags' since I miss the cardboard ones I made before. They have a high-easiness-to- impressiveness factor. By that I mean they are easy to cut but look way cool. I also made a cloud that was a bit more difficult (curves!) and a cute little camera for when I get round to some more scrapbooking.

Em has written something a bit more like a tutorial if you are interested. Check it out on her blog.

Comic Relief macarons and cupcakes

This year for Red Nose Day a group of people from my work decided to participate in the Comic Relief Bake Off.

It wasn't a competition or anything, we just arranged to each take a day and bring in some treats. We put out a donation box and raised some cash for a good cause.

I made these vanilla cupcakes with a cherry on top and bright red macarons with a white chocolate ganache filling.

I was concerned that folks might not fancy them being that RED but they disappeared very quickly, in fact only crumbs remained by 11am. You gotta move fast at my work when macarons are on offer!

Chalkboard art - my first attempts

I'm not usually one for going with a trend, but this one has tickled my fancy. It's 'chalkboard art'. We always called them blackboards when I was at school, but now its all interactive whiteboards.

Anyway, I've made a Pinterest board with a few of favourites so far on it. Some of the best examples around at the moment are by Dana Tanamachi  an artist/designer based in Brooklyn.
 
I'm not great at drawing generally, but I do a lot of typography, so I thought I'd have a go myself. I actually drew this in pencil and used a little photoshop magic to get the effect, but I might get round to using actual chalk after a bit more practice. This photoshop tutorial is very helpful for getting the effect.

I'm quite pleased with it for a first attempt. What do you reckon?

Italy travel mini-album scrapbook

I put together some pages about our trip to Italy. It seems a very long time ago now, but I wanted to show you some of the pages since I talked about what supplies I was going to use here.

I've been trying out different page shapes for scrapbooking. I've only actually put together one 12x12 page which is the main page size nowadays. For this book I choose 12x6 inches. It's very wide!

I've not finished the covers for it yet, but here are some of the pages: