I also must admit that I am loving the challenge! The hardest thing is choosing what to do for each card – I made a table in Word and listed ideas for each letter and I have far too many ideas for each – and that’s my biggest problem.

I’m not working on the cards in A-Z order – just picking whichever letter appeals to me at the time I’m in my craft room – so they’re not going to be shown here in order either. If you click on each photo you’ll see the description of the card, just in case you can’t work out which letter it’s depicting . The first 6 are shown below.

D

D

D

D

D

E

E

F

F

G

P

P

W

W

Stars and Glitter

I hate glitter! I can’t stand the way it gets everywhere, is so full of static that it sticks to everything except what you want it to stick to, is so hard to clean up……..but I do rather like the way it looks.

I saw a suggestion, can’t remember where unfortunately, for putting glitter into laminating pouches and sealing them so I decided to have a go. I used the smaller A5 sized pouches as I thought A4 would be a little excessive and tried a variety of glitters etc. If you’re anything like me, you’ll have bought that ‘confetti’ in the shapes of Xmas trees, stars, snowflakes, greetings etc. and not have a clue what to do with it! So I tried some of those too. Below are the results of my ‘experiments’.

Glitter

Here you can see that I tried a variety of glitters. Didn’t want to use my PeeWee Glitters or any other tiny tubes of expensive stuff so tried some of the cheaper ones. The lavender, gold, blue and teal were quite nice, they’re fine ones anyway and so they spread quite easily although they didn’t ‘laminate’ correctly. The covers weren’t sticking together so I put them inside an A4 sheet and ran them through the machine again. Where I had some space between the two smaller pieces I put some snowflakes in (crafters don’t waste things!) with the idea that I could punch them out with a circle punch later and use them …… somewhere.

My conclusions – the chunky glitter didn’t look nice on it’s own or with the confetti so I guess I still don’t have a use for that!

Fine glitters

Not the expensive ones!

Chunky gold

Chunky + snowflakes

Greetings

Using-up some space

Confetti

The photos below show the various confetti’s I tried -– some look much nicer than others but at least they’re in a useable format here, I can put them down as backing papers and layer on top?

Xmas

Birthday

Stars

Flakes

Close-up

Layered

At this stage I was beginning to think I was wasting my time. I had glitter everywhere – all over the kitchen counters, the floor, the carrier sheet for the laminating pouches! Yikes, didn’t think it was ever going to come off that – it’s already a mess from when I decided it would be nice to laminate some favourite pieces of Encaustic Art…but that’s another story.

I decided to put them aside and look back at them another time when I wasn’t feeling so disappointed and, as I started to stack them up, I discovered that they actually look pretty good when laid on top of each other. What do you think?

Birthday

Blue & Gold

Teal & Lavender

Close-up

Greetings

Quite like this!

My Favourite

Non Sequitur Mystic Man

A few years ago Non Sequitur (wonderful stamp manufacturer in the US) had a competition for items using their images. I sent several items to them but they picked my least favourite to give a Highly Commended award to.

I stamped the image of the man onto glossy card with a permanent black ink. I then overlaid it with encaustic waxes, using clear wax to enable the stamping to show through. The dragon on the front is a nod towards my place of residence – North Wales – and was stamped, embossed and cut out before being attached to the front.

I got the great pleasure of being able to chose a plate of unmounted stamps from any of their collections as my prize – what fun! I did try to stay away from any of the usual stamps that appeal to me and go completely different. I’m not sure I succeeded totally but I did chose a lovely Christmas plate with some unusual images on it. They’ll pop up in other posts around the blog, I’m sure.

Flying Wing

Underwater Wing

Non Sequitur Wizard