A birthday card for our little princess

Hello, I know you probably can't believe it, Anice has blogged more than once in a week!  But I am really trying to stay on top of my posts..how many times have I said that before? Too many to remember, but you can't blame a lass for trying!

Today's card I made for Steffi, Ians niece and both of our God Daughter. She is a real little princess who loves pink, and plenty of bling!  I went for the pink..but I don't think I added enough bling..see what you think..

The backing papers on the card are from the Funky Hand Colour Me Happy CD ROM  (Blissful Baby collection) The Cupcake image is from the Happy Happy Birthday CD.  I use just two of the papers from the collection but by reducing the size of the pink polka dot paper in the Papercraft Factory workspace I was able to make the pink spots much smaller that the green green ones though in the collection they are the same size. 

I layered up the cupcake image using the green paper and more white card.  I decided to rough up the green paper and used a file to distress it a little.  Here's a closer look..

I also added some shiny colours to the image using Promarker Metallic Markers.  I love these markers. In the centre I added just one Card Candi to reflect the green layered outside the image. You will see that I added three more Card Candi at the top of the finished card, they are all from the Cotton Candy collection.

I wanted to add some simple bunting to the corner of the card as I really like that look from other handmade cards I have seen all over the web recently.

Making the bunting was very easy.  I cut four squares out of the green polka dot backing paper and then cut a 'V' into each of them making the bunting shape. I wasn't to worried about them being perfect but you could take more time if you wanted completely square bunting. When I had cut them, I found just using them as they were meant they seemed to just disappear into the background of the card. So, I decided to add some simple doodling, drawing around the edge of two of them and then drawing around the dots on the other two.  It's amazing how doing such a simple thing can make the same paper look completely different. I attached them to the card using Collall PVA Glue only at the top of the bunting and when they were dry I folded them a little to give the impression of a little movement.

I was quite pleased with the results.  I think Steffi liked her card so that's the important thing.

Speak again very soon.
Anice xx 

CAS birthday card for my brother

March is always a big month for birthdays in my family, that's my excuse for not showing you the card I made for my brother before now..the middle of April!

Gary, my brother, isn't really bothered about handmade cards. Unless he needs a card then he is very happy to go through my Moms collection of cards she has made rather than go and buy one!

Anyway, I have to admit I made this card at lightening speed and kept it very simple, and flat, so it wouldn't get damaged or cost me a fortune to post!  That's Sisterly love for you..ha ha!

Right less chat, here is the card..

The base card is black, I can't remember which company I got it from but, they are perfect for male cards I have found. I mixed up a few papers and an image from different Funky Hand Papercraft CD ROMS. The backing papers are from Colour Me Happy (Jovial Man Collection) and the Balloon image, I used the pre coloured version of for speed, and the 'Happy Birthday' banner are from Happy Happy Birthday.

I doodled some black lines around each of the backing papers before I layered them on top of each other, then added the image on top of them.  I inked around each of the layers with a dried up black ink pad to give them a little definition.  As the base card was black I found that I didn't need to do any more to it.  I suppose I could have added some card candi or a button or two but..Gary wouldn't have noticed them and I didn't want to waste my stash!!  Awful to admit I know!!

So, there is the card for my brothers birthday this year.  I like to think of it as clean and simple, rather than the fastest card in the west (or North East!)

Right I'm off to get back to designing my next download collections.  Anyone ready for some Wedding papers? I hope so as that's what I am working on!

Speak again very soon.
Anice xx

..and the winners are..

It might be a little later than I promised, I'm afraid I've been a little under the weather, but here are the winners of the Funky Hand Easter Egg Hunt held on the Funky Hand website www.funkyhand.com over the Easter Holiday weekend.

First up are the winners of the Easter Eggs: (Both of these young gentlemen have very kind Mums who asked me to award them the eggs)

Adam C

Jacob C

and the lucky winners of the £5.00 Funky Hand vouchers are:

Helen J

Jocelyn S

Sandra C

Trish V

Michela M

Congratulations to all the winners. Thank you very much to everyone who took the time to hunt down the Easter Eggs over the Easter weekend.  It turned out to be so much fun that we may well do something like it again.  Keep a look out !

Speak to you all very soon.

Anice xx

It's SALE time and you could also win a prize !

It's a nice long Easter weekend so we have decided that you all deserve a nice long Funky Hand SALE!

The Funky Hand SALE on our website www.funkyhand.com is now on. There are great discounts on every item for sale so, go and grab yourself an Easter bargain. 

As well as a SALE going on we also have an added bit of extra fun for you this Easter.  We are having our first Easter Egg Hunt. There are prizes to be won, Two fabby Thorntons Easter eggs are waiting as first prizes for two lucky winners and there a five prizes of £5.00 vouchers off Funky Hand downloads for the runners up.

It's very simple to enter, somewhere on the Funky Hand website from today Friday 29th March until midnight Monday 1st April there will be a picture of a collection of Easter Eggs, they could be anywhere so you need to search every page.  Once you have found the Easter Egg image just click on it and you will be taken to a new page where you can enter your details to be put in the draw for the prizes.  The Easter Eggs will move to a different page each day over the weekend so you need to come back each day and search again!  The more days you hunt for the Eggs the more chances you have of winning one of the prizes. You can only enter once per day, if you enter your details more than once each day only one of them will be entered into the draw.

So, there are two reasons to visit the Funky Hand website www.funkyhand.com over this Easter weekend. Great SALE prices and a chance to hunt Easter Eggs all weekend and be in with a chance to win PRIZES.

Happy Hunting!
Anice xx 

Lots of lovely new downloads!

I'm really pleased to be able to let you know that the new backing paper download 'I Love You Sew' and the seven new digital stamps that I have been hinting to you about are finally on the website www.funkyhand.com

Here's a taster of them all...

This is of course the new backing paper download I Love You Sew

Here's a couple of images of the new digital stamp range I'm A Mug For You

There's a new house on Tree Stump Lane..here's Number Three,

and another new collection called Large Letters, here is one of them LOVE..

There are plenty more new downloads for you to take a look at on the website, they are all very reasonably priced.  The I'm A Mug For You images are £1.29 each and the Large Letters are only 99p.  Pop over the website now to take a look www.funkyhand.com or click one of the images and you will be taken right to that page.

I hope you like the new downloads.  We have alot of new items and ideas that we are working on in the Garden Studio at the moment.  So, many my poor brain can hardly keep track!  As always I will keep you informed all the way..

Speak again very soon
Anice xx

A special day for us..

This post isn't about crafting but as this is my personal blog as well as about Funky Hand I wanted to post about something special. We have had our rescue dog Travis for one year today!

This picture is him a few days after he came to live with us, and he looks the same today!  I have to admit that I didn't consider myself a dog person.  I'd owned a cat many years ago when I was single and she was super easy to look after... but a dog?  Ian really wanted a dog so, I decided that we should give it a go.  We searched and searched all the shelters, near and far, for weeks looking for the 'right' dog.  Then we met 'Chester' as he was called then.  The people who had given him up had left no information about him at all, we didn't even know how old he was but, he seemed to have been looked after OK, he had a micro chip etc.  He seemed to like us, even though he was very very scared in the shelter, and we liked him.  So, he came home. We changed his name to Travis, he never answered to Chester, so maybe that was a made up name?? and started getting to know each other.  He is a Border Collie/Black Labrador mix so that means he's really clever but also pretty mad!!

Things I have learned in the last year:

• Don't worry about trying to keep hair off the carpets/sofa/clothes all the time. It's never going to happen.
• You do get over being licked about 10 times a day, hands and face.
• Expect to have mud in your office & then you wont get mad.
• Remember to look behind you regularly a dog can be very quiet when he thinks you might be going to do something interesting, actually it doesn't even have to be interesting! 
• There is more to life than working all the time.
• I didn't realise that I could love an animal so much and receive that love right back.

So, that's the end of my post. I just wanted to mark this day on my blog so I could look back at in the future and you could know a little about my life outside of the Funky Hand walls.

I promise I'll be back with crafty fun next time..infact it will be very soon. There could be some new digital stamps and a download ready for release if I remember correctly ! :)

Big love
Anice xx

Mothers day..better late than never!

Well, it's been a while since I spoke to you.  But at last I have something to share with you.  Mothers Day was a little while ago and I was able to fit in making cards for my Mom and Ian's Mum.  I thought I'd share Ian's Mums card with you today..my Mums will have to wait as I made it with a yet to be released backing paper download and digital stamp!  They will be available pretty soon so I'll show you my make then..

Anyway, back to the Mothers Day card I can share with you..

I decided to make this card pretty clean and simple so I only used a backing paper from my Colour Me Happy Papercraft Factory CD as a layer behind the image which is the Flower Cake download available on www.funkyhand.com

I had a dig through a bit of my large amount of craft stash and found an old favourite of mine that haven't seen the light of day for a while Prima Flowers.  I used to add these to every card I made and I have no idea why I stopped!  I didn't use brads to fasten the flowers to the card but stuck them down using PVA glue and then added buttons and flat backed pearls as centers.

Here is a closer look at the topper..

 

I coloured the Flower Cake digital stamp with Letraset Promarkers and Metallic pens.  I'm still working on my colouring abilities but it came out OK. The little banner on the cake is great for adding little messages, just leaving blank or colouring.

I've been trying to get back into the swing of making cards so hopefully you wont be waiting to hear from me again for as long as this time!  

I can let you know that we have something special planned for the Easter Holiday on the website so I'll definitely be back before then to give you all the details.

Speak again very soon.

Anice xx

Love is in the air..

Once again Valentines Day approaches and once again I am behind with my designing!! I promise I do have a new love themed download collection near to being finished and a new digital stamp and they will be released very soon...

So, I thought I would share the video I recorded last year of me making a simple valentine card just incase you didn't see it.  I used the I Heart You download collection, enjoy!

Speak very soon
Anice xx

Lots of new Funky Hand releases..

As usual I have neglected my blog but I have very good reasons this time..I've been working on new Funky Hand downloads.  They were released on our website www.funkyhand.com last night, so I'll stop the chat and show you what I've been up to!

First is a new backing paper collection called Just For Jen.  This was created for a very special lady in the Funky Hand teams life that has been dealing with Breast Cancer.  I decided to create a collection that was inspired by the colours for Breast Cancer Awareness, pinks and greys.It's priced at £3.19  Take a look..

We have decided to make a donation to the Cancer Research Charity for each download collection of Just for Jen that we sell, so if you purchase it you are not only getting a craft backing paper collection but also helping out in important research.

The next lot of releases are a bit scary for me, they are digital stamps. Simple enough I hear you say but, I've drawn them!  There are two sets of stamps the first images of funky cakes. Flower Cake and Star Cake

These images have been coloured in but you will obviously get plain images for you to colour.

The other set from this release are the first two of a collection I intend to add to.  They are titled, 'Where the Faeries Live' The first two digital stamps are Number One Tree Stump Lane and Number Two Tree Stump Lane.  I hope you like them!

All the digital stamps are priced at £1.49 each. 

So there you go, why I have been absent alot this month!  I'll be back soon showng you some of the fab cards the Design Team have been creating with the backing paper collection and the digital stamps.

Speak again very soon
Anice xx

How tough are boys cards?

Well, here we are 2013. It seems like just a few months since we were welcoming in 2012. I suppose it's my age, everything just goes by so quickly now!  That's the excuse I'm going to use for the awful space I've had putting up a blog post here... not a good one I know, but it's all I've got!

Right, so first off I want to wish you all a very Happy New Year.  I never make New Year resolutions as I can never keep them!  Have you made any?  I'd love to hear what they were..and if you have kept to them or broken them already!!

Onto the crafting I think.  Ian's nephew has his birthday right between Christmas and New Year, we always make sure we treat them separately as I know the poor lad gets 'combined' cards and presents and he's still just a lad..well 15 is a lad to me !!  He is really into his football and pretty good at it as well from what we hear so, I thought I'd use that as a starter for his birthday card.

As he's a 15 year old boy I needed to keep it straight forward and not use too many embellishments.  The spotty backing paper is from the Funky Hand CD Colour Me Happy and that's where the football boot digital stamp came from as well.  I used Promarkers to colour the boot and wrote the sentiment using the impact label font in the writing section of the Colour Me Happy CD.  The great thing with that is that I could use the same brown colour from the paper for the sentiment so it matches perfectly but also isn't so harsh as using black.  I talked about embellishments earlier.  It's always tough on male cards as the usual flowers etc just can't be used..obviously. So, for this card I used some bakers twine..that I am very excited to tell you will be available on the Funky Hand website www.funkyhand.com VERY SOON. It's wonderful quality and you will be getting alot of it for your money..less of that now though, back to the card!

I searched through my rather large box of buttons and found this brown button that had been cut off something many years ago. Ians Mum was very kind to me a few years ago and gave me her box of old buttons. There are the most amazing 70's buttons in there and newer one's of course but stuff you could never buy. My advice to you is NEVER get rid of any item of clothing without first cutting off all the buttons, unless you are giving it to the charity shop of course!  It is amazing how useful they can be when you are crafting and you save money as well.

So, to finish of this card I used the old button threaded onto the bakers twine and then the twine tied simply on the opposite side to balance up the button.  I know it's a simple card but perfect for a 15 year old boy who is a big football player and not really bothered about handmade cards!!

Well that's me done for today, I'm in the middle of creating a couple of new Funky Hand download collections so I had best get back to finishing them.

Speak to you again very soon.
Anice xx