I found a punch art bluebird on Rochelle Gould's website, which I though was adorable. It uses a large circle punch that we don't have in our Australia/New Zealand catalogue. so I decided to have a go making it using the punches I have available. I started off making one bird for the front of a notepad I was covering. When I decided to add the "friendship" stamp to the bottom of the cover I thought that one little bird looked lonely, so gave him a friend! I have had so many comments about this that I thought I had better post a picture.

This last week at my workshops we have been making Christmas bag-in-a-boxes, which are really easy to make, but make a wow statement. While wandering around the web (as you do), I came across some other designs for a bag-in-a-box. Here is one I totally copied from Patti Lee...

Creating an opening in your card so you can see a stamped image on the inside of your card is a great way to add dimension to your creations. Here are two very similar cards that use this technique. The first is using stamps from Season of Joy to create a little Christmas card that would be really great to add to a gift. The scallop on the inside of the card is the same as the ones we made at the October workshop for the Christmas voucher card. The second card is practically the same, but uses stamps from Priceless.

This is what twenty Christmas card swaps look like...

Today, being school holidays, I ran a "special workshop" just for my three kids. Earlier in the week, when I was sorting out what to do I remembered that they had a birthday party on Sunday, so decided to have them make a card for that. So,

Elmo Punch ArtFor the ladybird, I started with the instuctions found at Chic' n Scratch, and went from there...

Elmo Punch ArtHere's the Elmo instructions as promised. Recently I had a stall at our local Primary School twilight gala, where you could make this bookmark or the ladybird one for $1. I chose these two because they don't require a large number of punches and they are easy for kids to assemble. The kids loved them (I sold 30 in two hours!) and I had a great time.

Well I got the Crazy for Cupcakes stamp set, and I really love it, especially with the watercolour pencils and glitter. Here are two cards that I created for my niece's birthdays at the end of September. The large paper clips with the Elmo and ladybird punch art perched on the top are bookmarks. Since I had made these bookmarks for their birthdays I decided to incorporate it into the cards - not as easy as I thought! However I did like the finished product and when you remove the bookmarks, the cards still look good.