Tag: Crafters Companion

The Crop & Create event kicked off with a beauty of a class taught by Sara Davies with Crafters Companion. We received wee pots of gilding flakes in silver, gold and copper and this was a first for me to use this sort of product. Definitely a learning curve, but I’ll definitely try more of this in the future.

I especially loved the first card with the butterfly on the marbled paper – this combined stamping on acetate and adding gilding flakes to the back of the acetate. The pink marbled paper came in our kit, but I’m not a pink fan so I straighaway had to try again using some aqua/teal marbled paper from my stash … I really love the results!

In the below photo the top two cards (heart and butterfly) used kit supplies – I enjoyed using the stencil and glue to create the hearts, but not quite as keen using glue to stamp with for the butterfly – that technique definitely needs more practice on my part! I decided to just do one ‘extra’ card using my own stash as I didn’t have enough gold left over to do more samples – so I combined the two techniques in the one card for the bee card.

For the bee card I used a honeycomb stencil by Brutus Monroe, and the Beautiful Bees stamp set by Gina K Designs. I added the few gold flakes I had left randomly over the honeycomb stencil then added copper flakes to fill in the spaces. I love how it looks on the darker background! I would’ve loved to do a Christmas scene with gold and red, but I guess I need to go shopping for more gold gilding flakes first 😉

Things I enjoyed:

• I loved learning new-to-me techniques and the opportunity to try products I’d never seen before.
• I really love how richly textured the gilding is on the cards, and love how easy it was to apply the flakes to adhesive tape to act as a mock layer.
• I actually really enjoyed the pace of this class – normally Sara is like the Eveready bunny and there’s no way I can keep up without pausing the video, but in this one she took it as a more leisurely pace and seemed to pack so much more into the two hours than I’d expected, especially when taking it slowly. I loved everything about this class from beginning to end.

I cannot tell a lie, I’m grateful that the March event this year kicked off with a set of dies from Crafters Companion in the class with Sara Davies. After being so disappointed with their stamps in the past, I heaved a sigh of relief when I saw that no stamps were included. I don’t mean to be so rude about them as they’re a terrific sponsor of the event, but I can’t hide my relief this time round.

With them being a UK company, their dies are designed for the metric sized cardfronts, I think, so next time I use them I think I’ll try on our Australian A5 card bases to see the difference.

Things I enjoyed:

• As always, I loved the watercolour techniques to make the backgrounds, and love that we got more markers to play with.
• It was great to try a new-to-me product that holds all the die cuts in place until you’re ready to place them onto the card – that was really awesome and super helpful for this technique.
• I especially love the bee dies, and can see me making more of these in the future in different colours.

Another fun project set for us by Crafter’s Companion, and their stamp and die sets they provided will be really useful in the future!

Some of the things I loved about this class:

• Using my favourite colours in the class caught my eye early on – I love the simple layering using two tones of one colour hue with the layering stamps.
• I adore the large vertical sentiment stamp and die – this will be used a lot for sure!
• I usually make quite busy cards, so the simple layout with minimal elements took me outside my comfort zone but I really love the results. Perhaps there will be more in my future … ?
• Easel cards are one of my favourite styles of card, and this one was no exception.

Inks those I chose to use were:

• Gina K Designs: Sweet Corn, Sea Glass, Turquoise Sea, Key Lime, and Jelly Bean Green
• Simon Hurley: Slippery When Wet