Wednesday 27 February 2019

I'm BAAACK!

Hello, and welcome!




Well, I’ve been away from blogging/YouTube for longer than I expected.  Without wishing to bore you with the dreadful details, I’m still recovering from the worst bout of flu I’ve ever had.  (Recovery was not helped when my husband went down with the same thing three days after I did!)

I’ve been back to my day job for over a week, but I’ve been left with no energy and no crafty mojo.  I began to think that energy and mojo were never, ever coming back…

Eventually, though, I started to feel a bit more like my old self again.
Before the dreaded lurgy struck, I’d been working on a couple of projects – filmed but needed editing and uploading.  Over the next few posts I’ll be mixing those in with some filmed later.

So this is the first of them.

I love pop-up box cards.  They are easy to make, look impressive and don’t take up much room in their folded state.  Here’s my latest version, sized to fit in a C6 envelope.


Hope you enjoyed it!

I'll be back to my normal schedule from now on, so do come back and see me again soon!

Till then, keep crafting!

Keren



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Wednesday 13 February 2019

Crafting with UFOs!

Hello and welcome!

It's fair to say that things have not gone according to plan recently.  And it is probably going to be a while before things get back to normal, because I have been suffering from the flu.  Not a bad cold, you understand, but the full-on flu.  And it's left me with no energy. None. At. All. Not for crafting, blogging, or filming and editing.  
So, for the next few entries, I am relying on some projects I finished before the dreaded lurgy struck.  Today I'm sharing the card I made with some of my UFOs (that's UnFinished Objects).

This is what I started with - 
And this is what I made- 

I think it turned out quite well - what do you think?

And that is really all I have for you right now. Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible (I hope!)

Keep crafting,

Keren

Wednesday 6 February 2019

Pour me a cuppa!

Hello and welcome!

I’ve always been fascinated by pop-up and kinetic mechanisms in paper craft.  (If you’ve followed this blog for any length of time, you might just have noticed that!)  As a child I spend hours trying to figure out what made the magic happen in my pop-up books – and then when my own children were small I did the same with their books.


So I’m always thrilled when I get a new (to me) mechanism to work the way I want it to.  Here's what happens when you open up the card - 


I found the instructions for this in a book BY Duncan Birmingham Pop-Up! A Manual of paper mechanisms.  (The book is out of print, and second-hand copies sell for ridiculous prices, so if you spot one at a reasonable price I’d snap it up if I were you.  You can also visit Duncan’s YouTube channel – The Pop-Up Channel).


Of course the Tea Together stamps and framelits were perfect for this kind of movement.  I wanted it to look as if the teapot was getting ready to pour tea into the cup.This is how I made it - 


There was some trial and error associated with this card – I think I made five or 6 prototypes before I was happy.  In the end I was really pleased with how it came out..

The direction and the amount of rotation is controlled by the position and angle of the fold in the cross-piece and where the "L" shaped piece is placed.

This arrangement will move anticlockwise -




A wide angle will give a lot of rotation



A narrow angle will give you a smaller amount of rotation


If you like this mechanism you might want to try changing the relative positions of the working parts.  And you should DEFINITELY give visit Duncan Birmingham's channel.

Keep crafting

Keren


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Saturday 2 February 2019

Double Z fold card...FAIL!


Hello and welcome!

Every once in a while, I start work on a project and everything works as I want it to and the finished item looks like I imagined it would.

This is not one of those projects.

I made a few schoolgirl errors while I was making this card.  If I’m honest, by the time I finished it I was sick of the sight of it and I almost decided to remake it.  I even started a new version, and all was going well – except that the file wouldn’t save, whatever I did. 
Bad language was used.

However, with the passage of time, I’ve decided that I quite like the card after all and that you might enjoy learning from my mistakes, so I’m sharing it.  The YouTube video is quite long because I’ve kept the mistakes in.  See what you think!

Keep crafting,

Keren

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