PyjamaCrafts

Another photo where I’m not sure I knew it was being taken! The layout started with the stitched background however. Having seen so many of Paige Taylor Evans’   beautiful stitched layouts I endeavoured to see if I could cut stitched backgrounds using my Cricut Explore Air 2 . It made all the marks needed for this background accurately but you need to punch the holes through to be able to thread through them. Tedious but not difficult. I made up the colour pattern as I went along, using gold metallic (ugh, horrible to sew with!), pink and light pink embroidery threads – three strands at a time. I added pink enamel stars (from a collection of different coloured stars by Papermania ) to each stitched stars. before matting the photo on card. I added two strips of card, one glitter behind the photo before adding my title. Trusty Thickers   from the Pink Paislee Moonstruck   collection I’ve been working through. All done!

For Valentine’s Day I ordered Lego Minifigures from MiniFigs.me which looked like my boyfriend and I (he loves Lego). It was a huge hit with him and our friends. Having seen this cut file by Just Nick on the GoGoGetaway blog I was inspired to do a simple Lego themed Valentine’s layout. I found some blue Bazill cardstock which had raised dots for my background.  I just cut the cut file from textured white cardstock. Then I had to work out how to make the Lego bricks. I cut small rectangles out of card scraps with a small die (you can just cut card, I’m fussy) and punched small circles with a single hole punch. I started by putting tiny foam squares under the dots… …but it looked naff. It was hard to line up the dots. So I went to my original idea (my original idea but I tried the easier idea first just in case), stacking the punched dots. Five hole punched dots made one ‘knob’ on the brick. It was fiddly and tedious but it does look good. I used my trusty Zig 2 Way Glue.

This is my first blog post so I should probably introduce myself! I am a crafter; I scrapbook, I knit, make cards….amongst other things…so content may vary. My current day job is as a Special Needs Teacher and most of my crafting happens at night….in my pyjamas…hence ‘Pyjamacrafts’… So here is my first featured layout, inspired by this layout by Kirei Baldwin over on the GoGoGetaway blog . I started with the ‘Half-Flower’ cut file by Paige Evans from the Silhouette Design Store . I use a Cricut Explore Air 2 – make sure you select the ‘include SVG’ when you checkout if you are also using a Cricut and cutting is a breeze. I cut the shape from Bazill White Textured cardstock and applied Nuvo Embellishment Mousse in Indian Gold. The mousse dries quickly so I was able to start tracing inside the spaces quickly. Really I should have trace and cut my pieces before I embellished the cut shape! Make sure you use a pencil, and trace through the reverse side of the cut file and o