Flowers

Paper crafting has always been one of my favourite hobbies from when I was little. Lately I've into Sizzix products and learning all about die cutting. During my internet searching on ideas, I came across Susan Cockburn's line of product on making 3D flowers. Making 3D flowers is what I've been learning how to doing using Tim Holts and Sizzix dies, as well as origami 3D flowers). However her products are amazing, those dies made it look so easy. Well, it is easy. I've watched all her videos, and thinking, I had to have "all" of those dies....so I placed an order on a few of them, and then a few more...lol! Once I've gotten them in the mail, I was excited to play with them and see what I can do with them. Here what I did. I've made them into flowers in a pot.

 
I've started working on the rose, and this is what I came up with.

 
The Hibiscus is the second flower I've tried. I really wanted to make it into something that resembles a plant. So I used brown paper, twisting and forming it into branches. Which is a lot of work, and my fingers started to hurt, but it was well worth it at the end when you see the end product.

 
Then I started working on the sunflower. Sunflowers are really pretty flowers, so bright. I used to grow them in my garden, but they were hard work in the autumn when you try to pull them out from the soil/ground due to their massive broom like roots. I made a bunch of them, but haven't thought of what to do with them yet.

 
Lilies are next in line. They are quite pretty in nature. This time I've used wires for the stem and floral tape to wrap the wires. I didn't have much fun with the floral tape as they were quite sticky to work with and the sticky stuff you get on your hands were hard to get off afterwards. Also, it was hard to get the glue to stick the flower onto the stem. However, I really like the outcome of this one.

 
After all those time working with flowers with "many" pedals, I wanted to make an easier flower. The dogwood flower seems quite simple and easy to do, plus it's only two die cut pedals. The only thing is that you'll have to make a lot of them. To make life easier, so I didn't have to twist paper or use that sticky floral tape for the branches, I decide to use real branches. Which wasn't a bad idea, it made it look even more realistic. What do you think?

The last two flower in the pot is the mini rose and the Quince (which I tried to turn it into a Jasmine flower). I had so much fun with these dies. These are the few flowers I made so far, and I'm planning to work on the other ones with time.

Here's a closer look at the mini roses. I found that the mini roses are more prettier compared to the larger size one. Although I did find it a lot difficult to put the pedals together due to the size, but the end results are much pretty.



Thanks Susan for such a wonder line of product. I hope to see more new products from you in the future. Here's a link to her videos of how I made these beautiful flowers. http://www.sizzix.com/susantierney

Note: Just for those wondering, the flower pot is made by paper as well (paper quilling).

Edible Decorations.

I tend to do a lot of craft/decorations from paper. Learning how to do decorations that are edible are pretty fun and exciting. I even went to take classes on how to do these. It's so fun that I went crazy afterwards in making them. To make these decorations, I've used royal icing and fondant/gumpaste. Hope you like them. I'm looking forward to learn more on how to use fondant to make other fun stuff.

These are yellow royal icing flowers piped from a piping bag.

These are pink royal icing flowers piped from a piping bag.

These are purple royal icing flowers piped from a piping bag.

These are calla lily made from fondant

I just love these roses. It took me a few tries to make these roses look nice. There are difficult to do, but once you managed how to do them, they are absolutely fun to make.

These are fondant leaves. I was trying to make autumn leaves for my cupcake decorations. It turned out ok. I've used a cookie cutter to cut the leaves. It was hard to mix the colour to match the colour of autumn. I've mixed orange and brown together for this, but the colour didn't seem to change.

I've made these mini pumpkins for my cupcake decorations as well. I had fun making them. They weren't that hard to do, and they turned out pretty amazing.

Mini Cupcakes

Recently I developed the interest to bake and decorate. It took me a few months. I started using cake mix to bake the cupcakes and gradually baking them from scratch using recipe found from online/books. The toping for the cupcake, I've used buttercream icing/cream cheese icing to spread the top. The decorations are done by piping buttercream flowers on the tope. I've also used fondant to make little pumpkins.

Here are pictures of some of the cupcakes I've made.

Hyacinth....the paper flower

It's July already. Wow, this year is going by quicker than I expected. As with my craftwork, I've been slowing down lately since I don't really have much ideas. However there's this one day when I was at my local bookstore, I saw this origami book that teaches you how to make flowers, and you know how much I love to fold flowers. So I took the idea and tried it myself. It took me a few days to accomplish the project because each little flower look me like 30 minutes to do. I think there's a total of 20ish little flower on that one stem. Although it's time consuming, it was worth it because the end product was really pretty, I really liked it. It was good timing because one of my colleague's birthday was just around the corner, it was the perfect gift. I'm in the process of making another one for myself since I really like it. Here's a picture of it.

Happy Victoria Day

Happy Victoria Day to those celebrating!

For our family, we normally don't celebrate or do any fireworks. With this year's Victoria Day, we got rain and thunderstorm. However, something nice came up during all that rain...a rainbow. Trust me, I don't see those much often, so don't mind me if I get too excited and started taking pictures. It was rather nice to see it. I was able to see both side of the rainbow, but with my cheapy camera, i was only able to take only one side of it. I just want to share with you.

Birthday Cards

I have received some stamps from the mail from "The {Stamps} of Life by Stephanie Barnard" before the start of the long holiday. I was pretty excited to start making something using my new stamps. The stamp set I've used are "Scream4icecream" & "Cake2build", as these are the only stamp set I have. With limited supplies and medium creativity, I came up with these creations. The 3-tier cake i made with embossing each tier to give it some texture. One thing I did with the word "Celebrate" was I stamped it twice with two different colours. Originally I thought it would give it a background highlight, but it turn out looking blurry, which is neat in a way. It can be a technique used to play a trick on the person.

I like the birthday ice cream with the candles, found it quite cute. I even tried to make a wrinkly texture for the ice cream cone. Have you ever received an ice cream as a birthday cake. It's something different.

Quilling Angel & Birthday Card

Here's a Birthday Present and Card I made for a friend at work.
The pretty angel is made from quilling. I got the idea from the book "Three-Dimensional Quilling" by Jane Jenkins. It is fascinating how strips of paper can turn out into something like this. The Pop-Up Birthday card is also made by me. It consists of stamping and quilling. Because I don't have any nice colouring markers or pens and my colouring skills are horrible, therefore i've used quilling to fill in the dragonfly and created a different effect on the card.