Friday Favourites

  Every Friday I'll be presenting some graphics, a font and a cut file that have caught my eye.  This week I bring you a gorgeous set of watercolour images featuring floral cameras with birds, an elegant serif font and a set of kitchen-themed monogram frames.

  So first of all, the Watercolor Spring Floral Camera Bundle.  These watercolour images are just gorgeous 😍.  There are 10 PNG images in the set featuring old-style cameras adorned with flowers, birds and butterflies.  

  I used one of the bird images to create my own decoupage sheet, which I then assembled and put in a box frame.  I love the end result.  It was given as a gift but I plan to make another one to put on my own wall.  All of these images would look lovely on a variety of projects, like greetings cards, notebook covers or wall art.

It's difficult to see the 3D in this photo, but it looks great in person!

  

This week's font is Rise of Kingdom.  This elegant, serif, all caps typeface is available as a free download from Creative Fabrica.  There are over 100 pages of free fonts available on the Creative Fabrica website so it's well worth a look.

  I recently used the font to create this kitchen sign, which also happens to be the cut file of the week:

  The split monogram frame comes from the Laser Kitchen Split Monogram Svg Bundle, although I got it as part of the Cute Paper Craft SVG Mega Bundle both from Creative Fabrica.  (The latter is an absolute bargain by the way, with over 300 sets of SVG cut files for only $11! I might have to do a separate post or two just for that.)  

Happy creating!

Butterfly Name Sign

  A few weeks ago my friend asked me to make a personalised gift for the daughter of a friend. I used one of the split monogram butterflies from this set.  I welded the name to the butterfly and then turned it into a multi-layered design in Affinity Designer.

  I exported the resulting files as SVGs, which I then imported into my ScanNCut to cut the various layers.  After gluing them all together I decided to use a spray varnish on both sides to protect the card and increase its longevity.

It's so pretty!  To display it tie some string to the antenna or glue it to the back of the butterfly to make a hanger, or put it in a box frame.

SUPPLIES and RESOURCES

Butterfly SVG set - https://www.creativefabrica.com/product/60-butterfly-svg-cut-files/ref/98543/
Rise of Kingdom font - https://www.creativefabrica.com/product/rise-of-kingdom/ref/98543

Spray and Shine High Gloss Varnish - https://tidd.ly/3D17HPP

Affinity Designer - https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/designer/

Romantic Parisian Tag

  I recently completed a class on Creative Fabrica about creating a digital tag - From Paris With Love - Create a Romantic French-Inspired Digital Tag.  I really enjoyed it and ended up with a very pretty tag that I really like.

The end result.  I went a bit off-piste, but I like it.

  All the materials that Traci uses in the class are provided and she explains everything really clearly.  Despite the class being demo'd with Photoshop I was still able to follow along using Affinity Designer. However if you are using a program other than Photoshop it would help if you were somewhat familiar with it so that you can replicate what Traci does. 

  The techniques that I learned were actually super helpful in helping me to create the tag that I designed for this post.  I will definitely be putting my newfound knowledge to good use and creating more tags and background papers.  In the meantime you can download a sheet of the tag I created here.

  To view the class you will need an All Access Subscription.  The subscription allows you to download absolutely everything on the site with no limits!  There's a great deal on at the moment where you can get yearly all access for just £4.59 / $4.99 a month (usually £26.99 / $29 per month).  I'm not sure how long that offer is going to be around so get it while you can.  Just head to the Creative Fabrica homepage and click on the "Upgrade Now" button on the blue banner at the top of the screen.

Friday Favourites

  First off I have to mention this incredible, huge bundle from Digital Attic Studio on Creative Fabrica.  The Ultimate Vintage Bundle consists of 60 individual sets including digital papers, backgrounds, junk journal kits, ephemera and clip art. Even if vintage isn't your thing there are so many elements to choose from that you're bound to find something that you like.

BUT, it's only free for a limited time.  The bundle expires at 23:00 (GMT) on 18th January.

  I created this tag using a handful of elements from the Vintage Celestial Bundle - just one of the kits available in the full bundle. 

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For the font I have chosen Underwood Champion from Creative Fabrica.  It's a retro, typewriter font with a slightly grungy texture.  I used it to create these sentiment strips mentioned in this blog post.

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And finally for the cut file I've chosen this cute Welcome Sign from Design Bundles.  The design is listed as a laser cut file, but could definitely work with paper too.  It comes in a layered version or a flat version.  If you're familiar with any graphics program you could modify the files to create your own layered version as well.

Happy creating!

Easy Christmas Cards feat. Golden Mandala Digital Textures Set

I found this lovely set of golden mandala textures on Creative Fabrica and I thought that they would make pretty Christmas cards.  I could have used the images for the whole card front, but I decided to just print them off directly from Windows Explorer.  The resulting images were 9x13cm and would fit nicely on to the front of an A6 card.

I felt that the resulting cards needed a little bit of jazzing up, so I tried out various embellishing techniques like using glitter glue, glitter washi tape, paint markers and Nuvo Drops to enhance the images.  I also tried out different die cut and peel-off sentiments to see which worked best.

Gold acrylic paint marker around the edge of the image, some red glitter glue to highlight the red areas on the image (not very visible in this photo) and a Merry Christmas die-cut sentiment all on a black card blank.

Red glitter around the edge of the image, a few dots of red glitter glue on the image and a Merry Christmas die-cut sentiment. 

Gold glitter washi tape around the edge of the image, a few dots of glitter glue on the image and a Merry Christmas die-cut sentiment.

Gold glitter around the perimeter of the topper and a few spots on the image.  Merry Christmas peel-off sentiment.

They're simple, but pretty cards that can be put together easily; perfect for batch making.  Go check out this designer's shop.  There are lots of gorgeous backgrounds and textures - from Christmas imagery to cotton candy clouds and fairy gardens.  I've downloaded at least 15 of the bundles and plan to add to my collection!

By the way, if you want to buy from the Creative Fabrica website and you're only being given the option to take out a subscription, change the currency to US$ via the drop-down menu in the top right corner of the screen.  You should then be able to see individual prices.

Watch the process video:

Spooky Faces Wood Slice Ornaments

A quick and easy project today - spooky faces wood slice ornaments.  I used the Halloween Spooky Door SVG Bundle from Creative Fabrica.  I started by importing the images into Canvas Workspace, grouping the faces together and resizing each face so that they were about 45-50mm each before cutting them out.  I used white card, but you could use something a little more robust.

• Simply paint the wood slice with acrylic paint and leave to dry.
• Choose a stencil and then apply the glitter paint through it.
• Carefully lift off the stencil and allow the glitter paint to dry.
• Done!

SUPPLIES

Wood slices 

Spooky Faces SVG bundle

Iridescent acrylic paint set

Iridescent acrylic paint (single colour)

Izink Diamond Glitter Paint

Spiderweb Hanging Decoration

 If you've read my blog before you'll know that I am the QUEEN of last minute 👑!  My youngest has been begging me to decorate for Halloween and I've been putting it off.  But with only a handful of days to go I'm going to have to go into Halloween crafting overdrive in order to keep my promise.

So for the first decoration I went back to The Enchanted Forest Bundle from craftbundles.com (I wrote about it here).  It has a few different mini bundles consisting of different forest animals, including spiders!   I chose the design that looks like a hanging cobweb with spider attached.

I cut 6 of that design from black card using my ScanNCut, then glued them together back to back.  Don't make the same mistake I did!  Layer them one of top of another without flipping the stack over.  I did not do that and ended up in a bit of a pickle!  But the end result was still very effective.

I used a Spectrum Noir clear sparkle pen to roughly coat the web portions and give them a subtle glittery shimmer.  There were also some round nodule types of things in the design, to which I added 6mm acrylic gems in purple, lime green and orange.  I could probably have used larger gems (up tp 10mm), but I only had the 6mm size in those colours.  The final touch was to add some metallic thread to the hanging loop and then hang it up.

Watch the process video: