Craft & Coffee Morning: Nordic Christmas Cards

We are excited to share our third Craft & Coffee morning project. At this session, on Thursday 21st November, you will be making a trio of Nordic Christmas cards and will be able to choose from 5 different designs.

These cards were inspired by Pete Hughes who used the Tim Holtz' 'Nordic Winter' Thinlits die set to make some wonderful card designs.

Take a closer look at the different card designs below....

All the information about how to book on our Craft & Coffee Morning can be found on our Workshops page. We hope to see you there!

REWIND SERIES: Scrapbook Club

In August 2018 I decided to start a monthly Scrapbook Club. A few changes had taken place in my life in terms of job changes and I found myself with a little extra time during the week which I thought I could use towards teaching some extra workshops.

I chose scrapbooking as this is a long term love of mine and I had previously taught some Scrapbook Club classes at Crafts U Love.

The Scrapbook Club ran between August 2018 and June 2019 before I decided I needed a break for a while and had become quite busy with different happenings with my new house. Since then I haven't re-started the club but hopefully it will be something I can come back to again in the future. For now I just wanted to share with you some of my favourite layouts from Scrapbook Club and hopefully to inspire you to get scrapbooking.

August 2018 Layout

This double page layout is one of my favourites and uses papers from a Prima Marketing collection. I love the colour palette and enjoyed using a rose flower Penny Black stencil to add some further detail to the background papers.

October 2018 Layout

This layout is fantastic for Autumn and the colours are beautiful. I used photos from my trip to Hever Castle for my birthday and the colours in the photos complement the colours in the papers. I also included some stitching elements to create more texture on the layout.

December 2018 Layout

Even though this layout is one of my favourites, the stars were a bit tricky to make and stick down! However I'm glad I included them as they add some great dimension and allow such a simple layout to come to life!

March 2019 Layout

This layout was originally suppose to be hosted in February but due to personal circumstances I had to postpone until March.  I love the wheel of hearts on the first layout and the colour graduation also looks so fun and makes for a bright and colourful layout. I decided to use this layout for my beautiful niece Annabel.

April 2019 Layout

This layout is a gorgeous scrapbook page for Mother's Day. The grid layout on the 2nd page is perfect for adding little sentiments or ephemera and has a lovely neatness which I love!! (little bit OCD!).

So that is a summary of my favourite layouts from my brief Scrapbook Club. I do hope to get back on the scrapbooking train soon but I'm waiting for a certain craft room to be finished in my new house before I can delve back in again!

If you have a love for Scrapbooking then I hope these layouts have been some good inspiration for you or if you have never scrapbooked before then I hope I have inspired you to start! It's a great way to tell a story and you can create some fabulous layouts and albums to look back through.

Well I am excited to say that there is only ONE more blog post to go for our REWIND Series which seems to have lasted quite a few months. Our last post in the Rewind series is a Christmas workshop project from 2018 so definitely worth looking at!

Christmas Craft Fairs 2019

The second half of 2019 has seen us get back in our stride when it comes to workshops and posting more on the blog. That also means we are back on the road again to sell at some local Christmas Craft Fairs and we want to give you all the details you need so you can pop the dates in your diary.

Our first Christmas fair will be 'The Fairy Tale Fair -  Craft & Design Fair', but this time we are going to be at the Patcham Methodist Church. Previous years we have attended the Christmas fair at The Charmandean Centre in Worthing but we decided we fancied a change.

The Fairy Tale fair is a fantastically organised event and fun for all the family. The majority of stallholders are local makers who sell a fantastic variety of craft and design wares that are perfect for Christmas gifting. To find out more information about this event please click here.

Our second Christmas craft fair is the 'Christmas Gift Fair' in association with Friends of Sussex Hospices. This event will be taking place at the Norfolk Pavilion South of England Showground Ardingly. This is a new fair for us and will be taking place during the week on Wednesday 27th November between 10am and 3pm. There will be over 50 stallholders for you to peruse and shop til you drop!

For more information about this event please click here.

Over the next few weeks we will share with you some of the items we will be selling at these events and if you see something you like we recommend coming along to either of these fairs as we don't sell online. 

Please remember that these fairs are often filled with local makers who may often only sell during the festive period and therefore don't have any fancy card machines available, so please bring plenty of cash! We hope to see you at these fairs and be sure to say hi when you stop by our stall.

Craft & Coffee Morning

We are excited to announce that we are starting a new series of mini workshops which we are calling a 'Craft & Coffee Morning'. These will be relaxed crafting sessions where you will be making a small project whilst having a natter and enjoying some comforting refreshment.

The Craft & Coffee Morning will take place on selected Thursdays between 10.30am and 12.30pm. To find out further information on what dates we will be hosting these workshops over the next month, please click here.

We wanted to share with you below the projects that you will be making over the first two C&C mornings. As you will see since we are now leading up to the festive season, many of the projects will be Christmas themed.

The first project will be this adorable Christmas Snowglobe featuring a cute festive scene inside a glass snow globe decoration.

The 2nd project will be this wonderful Village Scene decoration inside a clear acetate box.

The next few months will be a trial period for this Craft & Coffee Morning and hopefully if we get a great response from you and you wish to continue coming to these mini workshops we will hopefully be able to continue into the new year.

More dates for our C&C Mornings will be posted shortly and you can find these on our 'Workshops' page and also listed on our Facebook page.

We hope to see you there!

Holiday Memories Workshop Recap

Yesterday's workshop was another great day full of craft, Christmas, food and laughter!

As you may notice from the image above, the finished project differs from our promo image (a frame I bought from Michaels that we were basing our project on!). If I'm honest, I do think our project tops the other frame and we enhanced the village scene at the bottom with some festive lights!

I will come back to some close up photos and more descriptive instructions of how we made the project at a later date leading up to Christmas.......but for now let's recap the day.

As per each one of our workshops we prepped all the different elements for our guests, including papers and die cut houses. We also pre-drilled holes through the aperture frame and backing board so that they could easily feed their lights through the project in the right place.

All tools were on hand in the middle of the table so everything was in easy reach.

We set the scene for our first Christmas workshop with some soft Christmas jazz music playing in the background.

Once our guests arrived we got them started straight away with sticking their background papers in the frame and assembling their miniature houses for the Christmas scene.

After the morning cake break it was time to get out the glitter!!! We used different glitters for the rooftops, trees and snowflakes so you can imagine by the time we all finished, everyone was practically covered in glitter from head to toe!

After lunch it was time to start assembling all the pieces together and we needed to start with the lights so we could secure them in place and then our guests could take their time to add the rest of the  Christmas scene and snowflake decoration.

The final touch to their scene was to add some fluffy snow around the trees and the houses. They could then carefully arrange each layer of the frame with the perspex and wooden surround frame to complete the project.

I think I can safely say everyone were extremely happy with what they had created and it will definitely be a treasured home decor piece that will come out at Christmas year after year!

Thank you to everyone who attended and we look forward to the next one!