Yummy Halloween Treats

I am not so much a Halloween person but I love cupcakes. They are so much fun! And Halloween seemed to be a good occasion to bake and decorate some cupcakes in true Halloween style. I baked 60 cupcakes with four different sponges (vanilla, chocolate, lsemon and roed velvet) and in a vahriety of disgcuises. For transport I chose sturdy plain white cupcake boxes which I gave a bit of an uplift:



The letters are from the Sizzix Alphabet 'Notepad', the stamps the Elzybells clear stamp set 'Mini Messages - Happy Haunting', ink from Heine.

And inside? Well, have a look ..........

Here are the plain contenders waiting to be decorated

Decorating cupcakes is always really good fun. I mixed three different types of topping: vanilla buttercream, cream cheese topping and lemon buttercream. I like the lemon ones best, they have a real tangy taste.


I wish I could let you have a bite :-) Happy trick&treat, Petra.

These are a Few of My Favourite Things

This is another great challenge from the Daring Cardmakers: make a card to share and show your most favourite crafting bits and pieces. There are quite a few but the problem is to bring them all together in one card. Finding and using 5 favourite things seems to be fine but going beyond 5 is quite a tall order.


My favourite things are:
*** I LOVE cakes especially cupcakes - baking and decorating but eating them is not too bad either - the central topic for the card
*** square kraft card - by Elzybells
*** BasicGrey paper - I used paper from the BasicGrey Granola 6x6 paper pad which was a birthday present from my friend and colleague Jane. The colours are so appealing.
*** paper flowers - by Prima
*** stamping - cupcake and sentiments are by Hero Arts 'Cleardesign Cupcakes'
*** paper piecing - I really like to to piece a stamped image together from different layers, in this case I chose the cupcake: base - BasicGrey paper, cupcake topping and cherry on white card and coloured
*** glitter - red stickles for the cherry and glitter gold pen for the cupcake decoration
*** ribbon
*** dots - little white dots on the ribbon and dots/circles on one of the papers
*** buttons - found in my sewing basket
*** brads - felt and painted brads by Woodware and BasicGrey

I might have forgotten some of my favourite things but I think I keep it for the next card! Happy crafting and thank you for this wonderful challenge, Petra.

Daring Cardmakers - missed challenge

It was such a shame that I missed last week's challenge from the Daring Cardmakers ("I can see clearly now") but took it as inspiration for one of the Christmas cards I make for my Mum and Auntie at the moment:

for the outside:
plain white card embossed with the Cuttlebug Star embossing folder
Quickutz scalloped and plain round punches
plain dark blue paper, Stampin' Up eyelet border punch
stary paper from buzzcraft
stamps from Hero Arts
coloured with Koh-i-noor pencils
white and red glitter
acetate sheet

for the inside:
the sentiment is printed
dark blue plain paper
stary paper from buzzcraft
Quickutz scalloped punch
star punch from Woodware

It was such good fun to make the card but I feel very strongly that I really need to get these German sentiment stamps. It is quite a bit of effort to print the sentiments and sometimes they don't work out quite the way you want. My next challenge! Petra.

Stampin' Up

Some weeks ago I went to my first ever Stampin' Up party. There were a lot of Ladies being involved in various papercraft activities. It was great to exchange ideas with them and to share a common interest: stamping. When I went I was determined to purchase one of the wonderful stamping sets. This proved to be extremely difficult. I couldn't decide which one and in the end decided to get an eyelet border punch I had been looking for for ages as I thought it would make nice easy lacey designs.
I was so excited when I received it and, of course, had to try it at once .... and promptly ran into difficulties. I used a very thin vellum type paper which the punch could not cut sharply :-( After a bit of trying I now use a double layer paper whenever I need to cut very thin paper, and it works beautifully. I am very happy with it now and will (and do) use it generously :-) as in the purple Giraffe card.
Petra.

Catching up

Oh dear, I just realized I haven't posted anything for ages! Looking back there just didn't seem to be any time. Peter and I went to Amsterdam for a few days. Peter had to run the Amsterdam Halfmarathon and all in all it was a good excuse to visit our friend Sylvia.

Amsterdam is good fun, hustling and bustling. They have the most amazing cafes with excellent cakes and wonderful coffee, one cafe right on the 7th floor of the public library where you can sit have a fabulous coffee and enjoy the views over Amsterdam. And all the cyclists. If you are not used to it, it is quite dangerous because bycicles have almost always priority and I had to jump quite often to get out of the way!

And elephants were in town - a whole parade of gentle marvelously painted baby elephants ...... all sculptures which are exhibited throughout Amsterdam at the moment and which will be auctioned for charity later.


Amsterdam is well worth a visit and I am sure we will go back quite soon.
Petra.

Cook Up A Card - Recipe challenge

Do you like cooking or baking, do you like recipes in general? Then this might be a challenge for you. Every month Susie posts a new recipe challenge on her blog. This month it is the first time I will take part and it was quite exciting to create a recipe card, my first one.

You take
2 rectangles ---------- in my card one horizontal and one vertical
1 button & 1 ribbon---- the ribbon goes around the middle of the card and ends in the button with a little knot
4 patterned papers---- all papers are from the K&Company 'Wild Saffron' papers whereby the fourth pattern is used as background for the sentiment
ink: VersaColour, stamps: Studio g



I am already looking forward to the next recipe! Petra. xx

For a very special person

stamps: Prima Flowers and Little Claire, ink: Elzybells, paper: Hot off the Press, punch: Stampin' Up

Party Time

It is Sunday night and it is sooooo nice to sit in a quiet corner and have a few minutes to myself. For the last 36 hours or so it was party and tidying up time. Our house had its 100th birthday (sort of ....) and it was a very good excuse to have a bit of a party. We invited a few friends last night for some food, drinks, bbq. And I must say it was very nice - the weather was excellent, food and drinks went well, the music was extremely good - and it was very busy, roughly 200 people joined us in the celebrations! Well, this was also a bit of a surprise to us including guests who came from as far as Netherlands, Norway and France especially for the day - this was so great. The last people left around 02:00 am this morning having started around 17:30pm last night - a proper full working day :-)
Yes, and today was cleaning day. We just managed the basics and tomorrow the cleaning will continue..... Some of our guests had birthday yesterday and the least I could do was to make some little cards for them. Nothing special but I used quite a few of my leftover scraps and they didn't turn out too badly:

paper: American Crafts, stamps: Elzybells 'Swirly Greetings', ink: Heine, bling: Kanban

paper: free magazine papers, stamps: Elzybells 'Swirly Greetings', Studio g, ink: Heine, bling: Kanban

papers: free magazine papers, plain cardstock, stamps: Studio g, imaginisce, ink: Heine

papers: K&Company, American Crafts, stamps: Studio g, ribbon: Andreas

Have a nice week, Petra.

Elzybells Challenge #28

The challenge is to case a card of one of the Elzybells DT members. I have not done anything like this before but I thought I give it a go. Already the first step was a challenge in itself, all cards are truly amazing. But I must say I really loved Charlene's halloween sneak peek mini cards. In Charlene's card it is all about 'trick or treat', I just went for the treat that is the cupcakes:



The papers are free papers from the 'Cardmaking & Papercraft' magazine. I very much like the colours and the design. The stamp from the Elzybells 'So Sweet' clear stamp set, blings: Kaban, ink: Heine.

I like the card a lot but I am not sure how much I really cased Charlene's card, there seems to be a lot of Petra in the design :-)
Petra.

Addicted to ATCs - Blog Candy

Are you interested in ATCs? Then this might be the blog for you: Addicted to ATCs. It is run by Jane and myself. Every month you are asked to create three ATCs according to a specific theme. This month it is: Harvest. We then swap the ATCs and send it off to you. You can find all the information in the blog.

The September swap has been done. The theme was 'Cupcakes', one of my favourite ones. The entries were absolutely amazing
mine


and the ones I received

As it is my birthday this month I will give away some blog candy for the October ATC swap. You can find the link on the right hand side. If you are interested in the ATC swap, please take a look at the swap and drop us an email.

Enjoy October and Autumn. For me it is one of the most exciting seasons of the year. Petra.

We're Folding

Another challenge from the Daring Cardmakers: we're folding. It reminded me straight away at the time when my children were small and we folded and cut star shapes, little bags, 'Himmel und Hoelle', and much more.
I wanted to keep the card quite unfuzzy with only a limited colour palette but make the folded part the central element of the design.
The card has a folded outside which you can open:

Supplies used: white cardstock A6, paper: American Crafts, K&Company, stamp: from
magazine, eyelets: Fiskar, ink:Heine

This was good fun and I will definitely do more folding in the future. Petra.

WCMD - yesterday

Can you believe this? I missed it! For weeks or probably even for months Jane and I have been talking about this event and I completely forgot.
I can only say in my defense that I was very very busy baking cakes. A lot of cupcakes with buttercream and lots of sugar sprinkles



and some wonderful Spanish Vanilla Cake



Maybe we could have WCMD every day? But enough of feeling really depressed - some unfinished cards are waiting. Petra.

Tartan-It-Up

The challenge for this week from the Daring Cardmakers. And I am quite late with my submission ..... but it is still Thursday!
It is a great challenge, I love tartan. When I looked through the cards I made recently I noticed that almost all of them contain at least a little tiny bit of tartan ribbon. But I thought it is a good opportunity to try something a bit different and went for a rather simple make with no paper layering on the cardstock. Supplies: Kraftcard from Elzybells, tartan patterned paper from Papermania, BasicGrey, K&Company, stamps: Elzybells, buzzcraft, Panduro, ribbon: Andreas, Sakura glitter pen, brads: BasicGrey
Petra.