Jane's Journal

The sunshine has returned again after some very heavy rain at the weekend. The ponds are full and looking beautiful.
We are told that the temperature might reach 16c today...how very pleasant.
Yes my sweet little granddaughter Daisy Jane turned 5 on Sunday and as promised I am back with some more photos of her cake. She is unicorn mad and her request this year was for a "rainbow unicorn theme". 

 I confess that this cake turned out to be a real labour of love and a lot more involved than I thought! Daisy's requests were that there should be the rainbow theme, her name must be there and the number 5. The issue I had was that to get the unicorn features in the correct proportions the cake needed to be tall and that meant baking 2 cakes. Now I have been a cake maker and decorator for nearly 37 years but I have never made a 2 tier cake. The Internet is such an amazing source of information and I quickly realised that even though the cakes would just stack and be under 1 piece of icing, they still needed some engineering support in the form of dowelling.

So this is what I did;
I had to create a central support and needed a thin cake board for the top tier (which would be invisible) and then the usual drum at the bottom.
 I also added 3 dowels into the bottom cake and stacked them up.
I had made fondant icing rainbow cloud candle holders...5 of course.
Over the weeks I had also been making flowers and leaves out of petal fondant and painting them up with metallics. I also made ears, eyes and a gold horn, all from fondant icing.
So here is the finished cake, I have photographed it from several angles as it is so hard to show it in its entirety.



and yes I found a place to put a number 5 and a rainbow ribbon made a great base edging.



Her party was a soft play session at a leisure centre and was followed by a family tea party at home.
My daughter made rainbow cupcakes for the children to take home from the afternoon party and Daisy was able to blow her candles out twice... once with her friends

I think her little face speaks volumes .

What was also magical was that at lunchtime on her birthday as we were all getting packed up to go out to her party a rainbow appeared in the sky...what a blessing on my sweet girlie.

So it's a cake wrap for another year.

I wonder what her request will be for next year?
My card challenge card today is a very CAS one.....and has the perfect image..yes cake. It's a digi image from Lili of the Valley with a stamped tag. Yes we certainly did celebrate on Sunday.
It's up for sale at Dotty's now.

I would like to enter my card into the following challenges;

Not just cards 2/3 anything goes
Crafting from the heart 1/3 anything goes
Die cuttin divas 1/3 birthdays my dies are spellbinders and Memory box stitched rectangle.

Thanks for getting all the way to the end of this post and for stopping by today.

Back soon,

Bye for now,.

Jane x

Hello it is time for my Monday Design Team make for Visible Image. They have a brilliant new stamp release...a revisit to their awesome and much loved Alice In Wonderland stamps which were discontinued a few years back.

 So many people have asked for them to return and there is a magical twist. ALL the original 6 characters now have new extra stamps and words and all the words work across every stamp set. Plus there is one brand new character....the Caterpillar who I absolutely love. Do check them all out on the website here  

I have been beavering away in my studio over the last week making some samples, which you may have seen on Mark and Helen's Facebook live video. You can check that out and see the samples we made here

Today I am delighted to be sharing my first sample I made using the amazing Mr Caterpillar. I know we shouldn't have favourites as they as all amazing, but I have such a soft spot for this cutie.
I love colouring images and decided for my first samples that I would get out my much loved and well used Promarkers.
I stamped Mr Caterpillar and his amazing toadstool onto smooth card stock and coloured them. We laughed during the live Visible Image Facebook video as to whether this should be called a mushroom or a toadstool. I have always called anything bright red and poisonous looking a toadstool, My colouring takes me back to my Enid Blyton, The folk of the Faraway Tree, childhood reading. So I decided to look this up and Google states that the term mushroom and toadstool are pretty interchangeable, they are both used to describe types of fungi. However the term toadstool tends to be used when the fungus is one that is poisonous and therefore inedible. I think my toadstool looks pretty inedible to me!
I then highlighted my images with Prismacolor pencils to add some shading (you can see this further down in my finished card).
I fussy cut them and then made a background using Hickory smoke and Candied apple distress ink sprays to create a smokey background for him to feel really relaxed in 😃
I stamped and cut out the words  and added glossy accents to make his glasses shine as well as his spots.
Here he is
with some close ups
And one last shot
I really love this new stamp set and I think he is going to go down a storm in the crafting world.
Pre release orders for all the Wonderland stamps and also 2 brand new stencils can be make now via the website here and for a short period of time there is a very generous multi bundle saving if you buy all 7 stamp sets.
 Release date is 1st August.

I would like to enter my card into the following challenges;

I love Promarkers anything goes
Craft Stamper take it make it July
Fashionable stamping 3/3 use those inks any way you want
Passion for Promarkers vibrant colours
A bit more time to craft 3/3 anything goes
Studio 75 3/3 summertime
Crafteezee summer
Simon says stamp Monday add a little sparkle I used my glossy accents
Try it on Tuesday 1/3 add a quote
The artistic stamper 2/3  distress it

On Wednesday we were promised the spectacle of the brightest biggest full moon we would see for 150 years. It was also a blue moon..ie more than one full moon in the month. We did have pretty clear skies but I must admit that I have seen bigger moons in the past. One thing for certain though was the moon was incredibly bright. My little camera could not cope with the huge contrast so my photos don't show the man in the moon who smiled out at me.

Here are a couple of photos I took but as I say they don't show his lovely "face"
 The brightness was very striking.


There is usually so much detail to see on the moon.... I took this photo some time ago  and thought I would show it.
So Mr Moon inspired me to make another of my Lavinia fairy cards to restock Dotty's teahouse.
I thought my fairy could hold the moon in her hands...what a lovely thought.

I would like to enter my card into the following challenges;

Crafty Catz 1/3 anything goes
Simon says Wednesday anything goes
That's Crafty feeling blue
Sweet stampin 1/3 anything but birthdays

Enjoy a lovely weekend, we have a special visitor...Bear our son's dog...and yes Billy is in his upstairs apartment 😂

Back on Monday with my weekly dose of Visible Image inspiration.

Bye for now,

Jane x

It's 25th November which means that it's exactly 1 month until Christmas. I have been a little awol this week...with good reason...I've been in Disneyland Paris! My Hb and I took darling Daisy on a 5 day trip. It was am-az-zing and the whole resort was decked out for Christmas. It truly was Winter Wonderland.

I have over 300 photos to sort through and I will share some posts but today here are just a couple..

On Main Street it even snows! My card today just had to feature snow. We were so lucky with the weather, 2 days with crisp blue skies and the rest of the time was dry!
 I  took some Broken China oxide and built u p some layers on some watercolour card which I then embossed using a snowy folder.

I  dry brushed on some gesso which brought out the pretty snowflake pattern

I die cut some Tim Holtz snowflakes and then added more gesso and glitter and stamped his great retro Merry Christmas sentiment.
I then put on my creative hat to make my card

My card was made for the following challenges;

 The Funkie Junkie 12 tags of Christmas #8
If you would like to play along with Linda's challenge you can see all the rules here. There are some great prizes for the winners too. The challenge is generously sponsored by The Funkie Junkie Boutique Linda shares a tag each week and you just have to take something from it and make something Christmas themed. I have always chosen to make cards and it's a great way to make 12 very unique cards for Christmas.
You can also combine it with any other challenges...so that is just what I did.
This is her card for week 8 here. I took the snowflake embossed background, the large die cut snowflake and flag style sentiment to use for some of the inspiration in my design.

Dies R Us 2/3 snow

Crafty Hazelnut's Christmas challenge 1/3 #361

Allsorts 1/3 Inspired by winter song/carol Mine is In the bleak mid winter

Sweet stampin  fave Christmas colours I love using blues with kraft

Crimbo Crackers 1/3 #146

Noor winter

Card Mania 5/5 anything goes



Thanks for stopping by and for taking the time to leave your very kind comments.

Back soon,

Bye for now,

Jane x

Good morning it's time for my Monday inspiration for Visible Image. We have 10 days left for our tags challenge over on Facebook and I thought I would share another tag. Very different to my first one I shared here
For today's tag I went over to the pink fantasy world as this was made for my 4 year old granddaughter.

I worked with the awesome 

Believe in unicorns stamp set

I stamped the unicorn in blue ink and triple embossed him with several embossing powders until I thought he looked very "magical"! I then fussy cut him out.

Some while back I made a Pegasus card and to make my unicorn even more magical I added wings again from the angels are near set

I also added Stickles glitter to the mane and tail and glamour dust to the hooves.

I then put on my creative hat to put my tag together....here it is

I would like to enter my tag into the following challenges;

Deep Ocean things with wings
Crafty Catz 1/3 anything goes
Pile it on 1/3 large sentiments/things with wings
Ribbon girls 1/3 any image

We would love to see you join in with our "tag" challenge over on Facebook...all the links are here


Thanks so much for stopping by today.

Back soon,

Bye for now,

Jane x