Never enough!

After I discovered the joy of playing with paper and all those crafty things, I couldn't take myself of going into the deeper. The more techniques I discovered, the better and patient I became. What do you say?

On the other hand, UK has very good support for such hobbies. Especially the magazines such as Papercraft Inspirations and Card Making, and their lovely gifts such as stamp sets and papers, took me into this new world. Can you believe that you are getting such a set for free?!

Yes, OK, you pay for the magazine but those magazines are your source of inspiration, and sometime you even learn new techniques from them! Surely this is valid basically when you have an awful internet connection and can not surf on Pinterest!

So my little craft workshop started to expand; especially when I found myself in USA totally alone with my credit card! Ah please look at these...

Surely my credit card was totally full on the way back home! But I wasn't aware that right afterwards I would go to the heaven of papers; Belgium! At the beginning I was very happy to have a good use of all the nice papers I have bought from S. Korea but they weren't enough! It never is!

Recycled New Year Cards

When I was writing the previous [pst, I couldn't find the photos of the really recycled cards I have made. So this morning I had very quick shots for you. Here they are:

 

All you need is to find a coordinated coloured paper and glue this cute card front.

Surely not most of you are living under such landlords, so let's say you get a nice christmas/new year/birthday card from someone you don't like. But the card is nice. So here is a nice way to still enjoy it; cut it into nice little pieces and use them to make a new card =)

These little ones are in size of only 4"x4". I cut them from the backs of the cards; yes, you can use even tiny images!

As you see above, it might be good if you can add some nice coloured or even patterned paper. But it is very obvious that I wasn't very neat on my glue work as it has spilled everywhere and I didn't know how to clean it in those times.

In time, I got some nice ribbons, a bit of glitter and my mind started to think in a way to find use of anything seems cute, just like wrapping paper! 

 

These little cute bears are actually cut from a gift wrapper. I know it might be a pain to find some nice images, especially if you are not fan of printing. So I strongly advise you to give a chance to the gift wraps. 

And a bit more detailed ones: 

Witchie's Crafts

It took me a long while to decide how to share my cards and crafts. I was very close to have a new blog for this purpose but I really don't like the idea of having many tiny and less-active blogs. On the other hands, how attractive can be a bi-lingual blog? Would this push my audience rather than adding new ones? Ah...I know this sounds silly but this was a hard decision for me.  Anyway, obviously the decision is made to go on here. But what I will do to differ the craft ones, is to use a proper label, which I haven't used this feature of blogspot properly yet. So here starts my new label: Witchie's Crafts!

I have always been into stationary; papers, notebooks, pens, pencils, stickers, markers, clips, highlighters, agendas, calendars, etc. On the other hand, my card making adventure started only 3 years ago, when I found tons of christmas cards at the paper recycle bin. Our landlords, Armstrong family, is a well-known and old family here. So they get probably hundreds of christmas cards every year, and surely it can't be possible to keep every one of them. I should also add this information to the attention of my non-UK readers that card sending/giving is a serious thing here in UK! People give cards in addition to their birthday gifts, and what I understand is, this is nearly a must! On Mother's day, Valentine's Day, Easter, Christmas and even on Halloween, people send/give cards. Can you see what a haven this is for me?! Yeah, so what happened when I found tons of christmas cards in our paper bin is, surely I grabbed the nice ones to recycle on my own way =) I cut, paste, glitter and God knows what else I have done and created new cards our of them!

Would you like to have a look at my very first handmade cards? It is interesting to see the progress actually =)

This was made in 12/09/2011. Independent of finding christmas cards, I have already bought some card making kits when I was in Germany. So I used some elements from those kits and a bit of my own design.

To tell the truth; the idea might me nice but it was really not successful =) Thanks to my dearly friend to got the cards, appreciated this effort.

Before I stared to make cards, I have found myself struggling with lots of tiny, colorful threads; known as cross-stitching =) Everything started with this little star! Yeeep, this is my very first cross-stitching!  And when I put my hands onto cards making, surely these tiny pieces of art were my prior elements to use. To tell the truth, I quite like that star and the card itself.

I was way ahead on cross-stitching than card making in the year 2011. Though obviously I was way more patient to glue all those silver stars one by one!

There were some cross-stitches that I loved too much and didn't want to waste them as cards, so I found a way to make them lasting all year as calendars:

Well, I think this is enough for the first post. Please stay tuned, there are more to come soon!