More cards for sale

Last week I sold all of the gift boxes and 10 general greeting cards, and I made $50 for the church because the guy who bought all the envelopes was so generous he gave me $40 and wouldn't take change... and I have four people who told me that they will definitely be buying some today. So I sat down and made some more (after I went out and spent $10 buying some more glue! The ATG tape runner made 50 cards and expired.) I also bought a new Christian sentiment stamp on sale for four bucks. I think I'll get a lot of use out of it, especially if I keep on selling cards at the church. Right now I'm thinking that I'll repeat the card sales for each holiday that comes up and see how it goes.

In other news, I've ordered my christmas present online - I really wanted to get a $400 Zing cutting machine... but somebody put the Cricut Cake machines on sale for $50 each with two cartridges included, and I'm assured by people who have already bought one that yes, you can use it for paper if you change out the cutting blade for a 'paper' one instead and buy a sticky mat (the frosting mat is nonstick). Even with the extra cost of the  mats and blade, it's less than $100 for a machine that can cut 12x24 (the one I've got now only does 5.5x11.5) I'm so excited!

How many cards can I make in 90 minutes?

This many! This morning I finished off making some cards for our churches' card ministry before I went to service. I gave Birdie 38 cards in all, but here are the ones I made this morning.

Craft Sale coming up!

Our church elder just let me know that we're going to have a community yard sale/craft sale at the church in December... they're going to charge thirty dollars a table, and I'm going to have one to see if I can have any luck selling some of my paper crafts. Wish me luck - I think I'll need it! I haven't done a market or sale in at least ten years... when I was a teenager my mother and my aunt used to do markets, and I'd help mama on some weekends. It's a lot of work and she gave it up after a few years and only did special events, like our church Fair. She hasn't even done THAT for about ten years...

Anyway, I'm going to have a go... so now I need to come up with some ideas for things that are fairly quick and easy (and inexpensive) to make, and that people might want to buy shortly before Christmas. I'm going to do some of my altered picture frames with bible verses on them, (if I can get some I'll do some smaller frames the same way) and I can do some bookmarks pretty easily. And of course there are cards... I need some more ideas though. Any profits I make will be pumped straight back into my craft supplies so I can make more cards for Operation Write Home, or else given to the church (depending on how much I make.)

Happy Pastor Appreciation Day!

If you're a church-goer I hope you made a few moments on the weekend to recognise your pastor/s for the hard work that they do... being a pastor is very hard work! Our church elder asked me what we should give them, and I suggested that I could make some picture frame collages... he thought that was a good idea, so I sat down looking for a suitable poem on the internet. I found one or two that were nice, but I didn't see anything suitable for our worship leader, so in the end I decided that I'd just have to write them myself... that way they could be personalised! Three days later, I had them finished and here they are. Click on each image to see a full-sized version and read the verses. I wrote personalised acrostics for each pastor. They're not
identical, but they have the same general idea...

A scrapping frenzy!

I haven't done a scrapbook layout for well over a year... but we had an empty bulletin board to decorate at church, and I've been meaning to make a Church scrapbook basically ever since we joined the church! I've just never had the motivation to get started and do it until now. I asked about old photos of the church and our Elder told me there was a whole box of them in the office, so I grabbed them last night after Bible study and took them home with me. Talk about a bonanza! It's a big jumble of course... but it's fascinating to see pictures of what the church was like long before we joined it. We've only been members for five years, and the church has been established for over fifty! It was originally in an entirely different location, and alas there weren't any pictures of what that church looked like, but there was a picture of 'our' building when it was up for sale, and photos of them putting in the gardens etc etc. I started working on the photos at eight this morning, and by the time I called it quits and went to the church to put up my finished pages it was four o'clock... and I had seven completed layouts in my hand, plus one that I made earlier in the week. Because I was in a hurry the layouts are pretty simple and I'm not entirely happy with the last one I made, but I'm still pleased with myself for getting them accomplished at all! Our new inkjet printer is as cheap as we could get, but it prints out very reasonable results. I've attached the page that I'm the most pleased with - our church history. I pieced the history together from a couple of old church directories (one from the 60's, one from the 80's, and what I was told about the move... but what I'm most pleased with is how far I stretched a very small piece of dark blue cardstock. I used blues/yellows on all the layouts and I tried to use the same papers on more than one page to help tie them all in together.

Altered Tissue boxes and picture frames

I haven't forgotten about this blog... but I've been busy doing other things and I haven't had time to sit down and do anything noteworthy. I'm thinking of trying a 'card a day' project to get myself into the habit of blogging more regularly.

The visitor counter on this thing must be way out of whack. I just can't believe that a blog that's only been running for a month and that has as few entries as this one could possibly have had so many visitors. Last time I looked at it it was sitting at about 100 and now it's magically jumped to 11000 and something?! It's feelgood but I'd rather have something accurate!

And now for my crafty project of the day... I decided to make some altered picture frames for our church. I got a pair of frames from the dollar tree. One of them had a broken glass but that's okay - I didn't want it anyway because my collages aren't flat. I pulled the glass out of the frames and glued a sheet of cardstock straight onto the cardboard backing for the frame. Then I pulled out some co-ordinating papers, a couple of rubber stamps, and some stickers, and fired up my laser printer to print out a couple of well-known verses.

It didn't occur to me to photograph the creation process, but here's the finished articles. Two pictures to hang on the wall, and I used the scraps and leftover paper to decorate a pair of matching tissue boxes to go with them.


Here's the front side of the tissue boxes... the coloured butterflies are cut from a wallpaper border and the square flowers are a recycled greeting card. The other decorations are stickers.


And here's the other side of the boxes...

Lastly, here are the pictures.