Good morning! How lovely and sunny is it today?!

I was even up earlier than usual (mostly due to dog sitting this weekend and having to let the dog out early!) but seeing the sunshine just makes you that bit happier doesn't it!

With my recent house purchase going through I've been trying to keep myself busy without spending a lot of cash, those bills are flying out of my account so finding cheap things to do is essential at the moment.
Having already bought the starter kit from Paper Panda a few months ago I've been making things for friends and family, and wanted to branch out to a few other templates, and so I picked up her '20 to make' book from Amazon for £3.99.

The book actually should cost £4.99 according to the back, and with Amazon you can get free postage too so what's not to love!
What I was most interested in was the content of the book itself, having seen a few snaps on the Paper Panda Facebook page I was intrigued. Not all of them will be suitable for me but for less than £4 I was sold.

In the original starter kit there were a few gorgeous templates that I practiced on to get my skills up to scratch. It's not a difficult hobby but practice definitely helps and you get used to how much pressure you need to apply and how often to change your blade.

Here are a few I did for practice:

I love the one above, I am hoping to find somewhere to put it in my new house!

Next I started making my way through the book. A colleague has a young daughter and I agreed to try out the Unicorn template, it looked a bit small and fiddly but definitely a new challenge and the finished design looked so pretty. Here are a few progress shots:





I love how quickly you can start and finish a design when you have a template for it!
This looks so pretty and I managed to finish it in 2 evenings after work, it really doesn't take that long.
She will be putting a purple colour in the background for her bedroom.

For my mum I made the owl design - we have a bit of an owl obsession within our family and this design is really cute, I really like the heart on the owls chest and the little snail on the branch too! The little details make the designs so much better. I'd love to be able to make my own templates!

Speaking of which, I have recently drawn out my own template for my kitchen. I am obsessed with tea and Alice in Wonderland and wanted to combine the two in my own design, making it quite simple but pretty with lots of details, what do you think??

I still need lots of practice with cutting straight lines and working out how to create objects without cutting them out entirely. The hardest part is keeping all of the design in one piece!

As a first go I'm pretty pleased but I think you can always see more errors in your own designs than other people can, hopefully when it's on the wall I won't be able to notice them so much!

My next project will be to create something similar to the image below, I want to buy a map and cut out the following quote in a similar style of swirly writing. It will be a challenge to get the writing onto one piece but once that is sorted hopefully it will be easier.

I've been really getting into papercutting recently as its a really therapeutic hobby. Cutting things with a sharp scalpel does wonders for your sanity!
I'd love to do more but creating templates is quite difficult, finding them online and paying for them to be emailed to you is much simpler.....but sometimes you need a challenge don't you?

And its also great to have something completely personal to you. Have you tried papercutting? Do you like making your own designs or objects for your home?

Do you have any ideas or templates that you've seen?

I'd love to try out some different ones, especially for weddings or new babies!


L xxx

Hey All

Hope you've had a great weekend. I've spent it entering my first competition for kickboxing and was so pleased I won my category!

Back in July I saw an awesome picture of a map and decided it was something I wanted to create. I wouldn't say I was the artiest of people but I thought with Christmas around the corner I'd share some of the crafty bits I've been doing. I think these type of things make great gifts and people appreciate the effort. I recently made my brother one for his birthday!

The first thing I did was google and print out a tone of pictures of maps I liked! The next task was to draw a grid on it. As I'm not the best drawer is I do it by a grid I find it easier as you only have to focus on getting the detail in one square at a time and I find it easier to scale it up accurately.

After drawing the grid on the printout I drew a grid on the piece of paper. I'd suggest making sure you paper is standard frame size and fitting the scaling and grid to that size or it can make framing difficult.

After drawing the grid I started to draw the map. By only having on square to focus on at a time it made it much easier to recreate the map accurately. I drew it lightly in pencil then rubbed out all the grid lines to prepare to paint.

I opted for water colours for this project. I love the way you can fade the colours and think it works better for this style.

For mine I chose to do pastel colours with more intensity at the edges. When I did a version of it for my brother birthday I went with brighter colours. I love doing this and losing myself concentrating on it project. It's so easy to do and leaves amazing results. It can be totally personalised for the person! 

For mine I opted for a personalised quote but chose to leave my brothers plain.

Do you get crafty with gifts? Would you try this?

Love M

xxx