Getting Crafty

Good morning!

Have you by chance stopped by to see what we came up with for the first ever Ready Set Craft! - The Get Crafty Challenge (details here)? Well I’m happy to say that we didn’t disappoint: procrastination is the name of my game, but knowing that others are expecting me to do my part allowed me to complete the challenge.

Since Halloween isn’t really my thing, I didn’t want to get carried away purchasing materials for the craft. I went to the local dollar store and bought three things:

a package of six halloween brads

some halloween confetti in four shapes (cats, bats, pumpkins and spiders)

a small package of ribbon with writing and halloween images on them

I had some black paper at home, and thought I had seen some orange paper around, so my plan was to make a dramatic card that would be predominantly orange and black.

I ended up making two cards:

Card #1 - Go batty

While all the brads I got were cute, I really liked the bat one, so I knew right away that I wanted to use that one. In an effort to encourage myself to experiment with something other than perfectly square corners, I tore up the orange paper, as you see. I then used some confetti bats to cover the page so my bat brad wouldn’t get lonely. And for those who had forgotten when Halloween was, I added the white ribbon. This card was ready in about 15 minutes, most of that time spent thinking out loud: Does this look better like this or like this? Should I add more ribbon?

Card #2 - Spider’s delight

A great way to encourage your imagination along is to challenge yourself to use things for reasons other than what you obtained them for. Although the flame-like paper that covers most of this card looks like it’s Halloween themed, it’s actually from a sheet of Harley Davidson paper that I had bought to make marble magnets with. The colours happened to be perfect for this theme so I had to use it. Again I used some ribbon, placed very symmetrically, as is my tendency. The theme of this card was spiders so there’s the spider brad peeking out of the hole.

I felt like something was missing though, and so I decided to try to create a “web” effect with orange thread. I won’t dwell too much on the imperfections that this decision caused (you can see those for yourself!) but I like the effect.

As I write this, and remember how hard it was to make the needle poke out where I wanted it to, I realize I could have done one of two things to make the job easier:

• poke all the holes with the needle in the pattern that I wanted first, then sewn it with the needle
• bought and used a a tool I saw at Wal*mart the other day: it’s a little wheel that rolls and creates little holes along the way. I could have used this tool to draw on the holes, then sewn it.

This card took nearly an hour, with the majority of the time spent sewing on the web.

Emma’s card
I declare this challenge an absolute success, but don’t take my word for it! I have Emma’s card to share and I encourage you to visit her site to read more about what she did:

I’ve only known Emma for a little while but what I’ve noticed about her is she is always tries to find the good in things (and people too, I suspect) and is a generally positive person who likes to be happy and have fun. This card reminds me of her for that reason (if you excuse that lovely skull prop-so apropos though, isn’t it?):

• fun stripes
• a grinning pumpkin (which she so carefully cut from another piece of scrapbooking paper
• the “trick or treat” message which makes me think of the fun that playing tricks can be (too bad most just want to give/get candy–no thoughts of tricks nowadays!). She hand stamped the message on other paper from her stash.