Love you forever Baby

V064

As you can see I haven't been blogging much. I'm taking a break from work to concentrate on my health for a while. But recently I got a request and sometimes it's difficult to say no. So I did it anyways. Just this particular one. I would probably make other card designs in months to come but it would be something I would do because I love doing it in my free time and not because someone asks me to. Crafting keeps me sane. I heard it does for a lot of people. It makes us happy in ways we never thought it could. Agree? :)

This card is a combination of some of my older designs. A bit of this and a bit of that from a few of my handmade card designs and they all came together in one card. Personally I wouldn't have had it combined this way but since it's a request, so I just did my best to make it look good. Combination of colours have to match too and therefore certain designs with certain colours had to be changed to fit in.

You could see that I wrote most of the text on the card and also inside it because the person requesting it loved my handwriting so much. It can be a little tricky to write on the card because you can't afford to make any mistakes. One mistake means that you would have to redo the whole card. Scary! 

All the pop up envelopes have a tiny card in them with short messages. I think that adds an element of surprise for the receiver. I used to put only one tiny card in one of the envelopes but this time around I was requested to make 3 tiny cards with messages she came up with herself. I appreciated the new ideas from her and will try it if I think it suits the card. 

Another tricky thing was writing the glittered text on the die-cut heart shape paper. Can't afford any mistakes there either. But I love the texture and how it glitters when it hits the light.

It was nice to do quilling again and I must say making pop up cards is always a pleasure. I seriously need to make more of it so that I won't lose the skill I gathered over the years. I'm praying that I have the strength to do so soon. How I miss doing it all....it was really fun. :) Till then, do enjoy the video below. 

I love you said the little birds

V062a

V062b

The cards I made here are similar to the design I made some time ago which you can view at the link HERE. Everything in the design is the same except that the wordings is changed from 'I miss you' to I love you'. Upon request from my customer, I did this new one and I gotta say that I love the effect of the distress ink I did on this new one. I've gotten a little better with the technique compared to the one I did before which was sooooooo messy....hehehe.

I didn't have time to blog about these cards earlier this month. Been so busy with work. Still am now huhuhu. Hopefully I can have more time to make cards and other crafts. Most of the time now I am busy with work related to craft tools and materials for sale. It's been taking a lot of my time off from creating. I miss creating :(. I didn't even have time to do a blog giveaway this month. Still working on that.....will combine it with the December giveaway somehow. 

I keep wondering whether the time flew so fast lately or I'm getting slower and slower....go figure hehehehe!! ;)

I miss you little red bird

V062

I was playing with my new embossing folder last night and I thought of doing something I've never done before which is embossing the pattern just a little bit at the bottom of the card. So this way, I don't have to emboss the pattern on another paper and paste it on the card as the card itself is already embossed where I wanted it to be.

From there I figured out little by little how to create a design with the embossed card. Thought of something else at first but in the end it turned out to be a Love Theme Card instead. It was all because I wanted to use that frill die cut pattern. I thought of using it to make a branch for a quilled bird. And looks like it was suitable and I loved it. After die cutting the pattern, I then had to cut some of the frills in such a way to make it look like a branch so that the quilled bird can rest on it.

At first I didn't even want to add the distress ink......I wanted it to be a clean cut design.....but at the very last minute I started to add it bit by bit.....it was very risky because I've already added all the other designs on the card.....so one little mistake when distressing can ruin the whole card altogether. But I'm glad it turned out alright in the end. Phew!

This design is definitely meant for a guy. Very simple design. Not many frills or embellishments on it. :)

Gold, silver and a bit of red!

QF010

Ok.....so here it is.....the gold and silver flower photo frame I mentioned in my previous post. I added a couple of birds for this flower arrangement. At first I thought it was not possible to do so since most of the time I make my quilled birds quite big in size and probably won't fit in nicely on this half A4 size photo frame. But since my customer requested it and wished to have some birds in either of the photo frames, I decided to give it a try by making them smaller in size.

The request from my customer was that I must think of a colour for the design that would  match with gold and silver. I used to make gold and silver flower arrangement before.....it was a combination of white, black, gold and silver and those colours seemed like a perfect combination but when I had to think of what would match just gold and silver, it was tough......until it came to me how red would seem like a good match for those two colours. Bingo! :D

But later after that, I was a bit confused when it came to decide on what colour to use for the leaves of the flowers......somehow green doesn't seem to match the gold and silver.....so in the end.....I decided to make some swirls as part of the decoration for the flowers.....and swirls can be of any colour.....and that's when I decided that they would be in gold and silver too! hehe! The idea of adding those tiny gold sequins was just something I dared myself to do.....I wasn't too sure about it and started to treat my photo frames like how I treat my handmade cards by doing that. :P

For me, the important thing is I have to be happy with the results of my artwork before I show it to my customer......as long as I'm happy with it, then it'll be ok.....and sure enough it is coz my customer was happy with it.....so it's a bonus when that happens......coz sometimes it doesn't happen that way..... you can't please everyone right? hehe......I'm just glad that I'm happy and she's happy..... hope everyone is happy too today! ;)

Sahabat selama-lamanya

HB107

Another request from my customer who was interested in my HB084 birthday card.....but in this case she wanted two birds instead of just one resting on the branches. The two birds symbolizes herself and her best buddy....that's why the title of this post is "Sahabat selama-lamanya" (Friends forever). She also requested to reduce the amount of branches on the card.....the HB084 card had too many on it....over crowded I guess....so she just wanted a simple one....and that's why I had to recreate the layout for this one.

The pop up cake inside the card is 99.9% the same design except for the fire on the candles, I changed it from yellow ochre to orange....I think orange is a better choice of colour hehe. The quilled birds has a small sequin flower on their heads....which was not added in my earlier design and the bird in the earlier design was a bit on the plum side ahahaha....whereas in this design, they are a lot slimmer. Actually in most of my recent card designs that has quilled birds on it, the birds are made in slimmer versions....I don't know why but I just love the slimmer versions better than the earlier designs I've made before. 

It was fun making the birds again....been awhile since I last made them. I still got more of the same design to make for other customers. So I guess, the fun continues! ;)

 

Mummy, Daddy and baby bird

HB098

Here it is! The birthday card that my customer ordered for her husband's birthday together with the quilled blue flower frame.

Actually if you look at it closely, this design looks familiar right?? Well, that's because it's originally a design I recreated from my old design, V042. In that design, there are only 2 love birds, but in this one, my customer requested that I put a little baby bird in the middle to represent her first born. It's so cute! I rarely make little birdies like that so it was fun to make one that small. For the branch, I decided to make a long one so that I can fit all 3 birds together on it, like one happy family :).

One thing I loved about making this card this time is the fact that it has a new kind of envelope. I saw on YouTube the other day on how to make box envelopes using the scoring board and I'm just super excited about it! hehe! How can I not be excited about it right?? It's super cool that now I can make my very own special envelopes for my quilled cards....something that fits them perfectly, no more worries about whether or not the quilling will spoil the envelope or visa versa etc etc etc....bla bla bla.....yup, no more worries about all that. Problem solved.  And of course the envelopes are made using thicker paper too to protect the quilling design. ;)

But still, I prefer to give quilled handmade cards by hand instead of posting them to my loved ones. It's a lot more thrilling to watch their happy reactions when they received the cards from me. Priceless! :)

New features to old designs

V041 (ADDED WORDINGS & BLACK CARD)

V042 (ADDED WORDINGS)

My V041 and V042 card designs were recreated especially for my customer who ordered these designs for her anniversary celebration. She adored both designs but just wanted some slight additions to it and I agreed to do it as it's just a minor one. The requests were to add names to the front of the card and some wordings inside it, plus the card itself was changed from white to black and the other one from white to metallic white. 

The female bird which is dark pink in colour, I decided to add the "veil" at her head with a tiny white sequin flower just like how I did for my wedding love birds card. So glad my customer didn't mind me doing that for the cards hihihi. Even the quilled birds has a slight change to their body shapes. I love the new shape as it is much slimmer and somehow the inner coils looks more like their wings. You can compare the differences from the old designs and the new ones when you look at the links here -------> V041 & V042. Spot the differences! ;)

Actually, I haven't made these designs for quite sometime now.....and it's nice to be able to make them again....brings  back old memories of making quite a few of the V041 card for my blog giveaways. Come to think of it, I got a lot of practice with quilling when doing those blog giveaways as most of the cards for giveaways are made with quilling decorations on it. :) Good practice for me! ;)

You can view how I make the quilled flower stalk from the video I made below: 

Love birds and weaving hearts

 V050

:) what can I say....the love birds are a favourite right now and here is another request from a customer who wanted this design to be combined with one of my pop up design I did long ago. She wanted the card to be bigger and the pop up to be like the one I made for Mother's day. You can view the design at the link HERE.

As you can see....the difference in the pop up is the colors. I had to change the colors to match the color of the card. So there is a lot of red colors used for this design. Different shades of red. :)

The card looks so empty on the outside....a  lot of space. I was thinking of doing the design again for her but still thinking of how to go about it. I thought of making the birds bigger in size but, looks like it's not possible even though the card is bigger because it just doesn't seem right if I did. It won't be able to fit in anyways....unless it's arranged horizontally instead. 

Well...I'll just have to keep on trying...experimenting with this design.....hopefully I'll find a new idea to make it look complete :).

Pink and blue love birds

V049

Gosh....I don't know how many times I've been making these love birds this month. Quite a lot actually hehe! The white ones....the red ones and now....the pink and blue ones :). This is actually a request from my customer who adored the wedding love birds card. She loved the design so much but she wanted the birds to be in soft pink and soft blue instead.....plus, she wanted me to add those quilled hearts at the top, just like the ones I did for the cupcakes card a while back. My customers do have their own ideas and love to combine some of my designs together.....like designs from card A combined with designs from card B for instance hehe. But I loved the idea otherwise I wouldn't have agreed to do it :).

It's a very simple design......no pop up inside at all.....just a paper inserted inside for my customer to write in her own wishes. I've actually done pink and blue love birds before but the pink and blue paper I used were a bit darker than this one. I think I prefer this soft colors compared to the darker ones I've used before. This is sweeter hehe. :)

Red hot love birds

 W016

One day I woke up with this idea to have these love birds red  in color on a white blank card . Not just red hot for the birds, but even for the branch, leaves, the tiny flower and the heart. :) I just wanted to see what it looks like on paper.....whether it looks the same as the idea I had in my vision or not. After completing it, I must say that it's the same as the vision I had in my head and I loved it. :) I'm not sure if others would agree as the colors are quite contrasting and the red color really pops from the white background.

I'm just experimenting with colors for this design. Trying to see what other colors would be suitable other than the colors I've done before. I must say that I really enjoy making this  particular design.  Somehow I just love the process of making it and how it looks in the end. Very therapeutic :).

Love birds with pop up

 W014b

Excited! Why? Because now my love birds card has a pop up in it hehehe....thanks to the request I got from my customer. If it wasn't for her, the card would be empty inside like the original one I made a while back. Have a look at the original design here -  W014.

I've been making this design so many times already.....so much so that I've perfected the shape of the birds by now. Now, I'm happy with the shape. It's slimmer and suits the head of the bird itself. If you look at the original design that I made many months back, the body of the bird is so big and chubby hehehe..... :D I love how the loose circles in the body of the bird forms like the shape of it's wings. :)

The pop up inside the card is actually the same kind of pop up I made for the card V034. For that card I made the color of the pop up in blue shades.....but for this card I made the pop up color more to black shades to match the card, as requested by my customer and not forgetting the printed wordings inside it too :)