It's a Creative World

Goodbye 2007

We hope that you're all looking forward to the New year and have your party poppers and bottle of bubbly ready.

We have had an amazing year with It's a creative world and are so excited to say goodbye to 2007 with some more artwork from the children.

We will announce the winner of the lucky dipper tomorrow.

by Rebecca aged 11

by Callum aged 14

by Andrew aged 8

Thank you so much for all your support this year.  You, our readers, are all very special to us and keep us going when our *mojo* is on walkabout.

The generosity of our sponsors has been amazing and we are so grateful for every donation that we have received.

We hope that you will pop by tomorrow and catch up with our hopes and dreams for 2008.

Happy New year xxx

Ooh, we've had a couple of last minute entries so we thought we'd pop them in.

Hannah is five and her Mum said *she has made them her self including folding the cards and cutting all the letterson her new cuttlekids and added chocolates with a glue dot after seeing your link this morning*.

And, we're ending our childrens art with brothers Charlie and Alfie.

Charlie is 12, and created these cards completely by himself, it was his first attempts at stamping and watercolouring.

Alfie is 4 years old, but loves using Mum's cuttlebug.  On these cards he has embossed the card and cut the letters.  He has then used metallic rub-ons to colour the embossing and painter dabbers on the letters.  Mum said that  he had a little help putting it all together .

 

I'm sure that you will all agree that these are fantastic cards and we're so grateful to all the children for joining in the fun.

Don't forget to pop by tomorrow to see who won the art set very kindly donated by our own Angela.

I'm dreaming of a white Christmas

Oh, if only but twas not to be.

Today we have some fabulous cards to share with you. 

These were made by five year old Josh and inspired by our very own Joanna and Freya.

We all love these cards at It's a creative world and will be commissioning Josh next Christmas.

There is still time to share your child's creations.  Simply email them to us at [email protected]

We hope that you are enjoying the festive break.

New Year Celebration Card!

Hello Everybody.  Joanne here again.  I hope you all had a lovely Christmas and are now happily playing with crafting goodies that Santa brought you!

Today I've made a card which I thought would be nice as a New Year card - always handy for anyone you forgot to give a Christmas card!  It could also be used as a general card too. 

As you can see I am a complete convert to Bella stamps - it has become quite an addiction with me! This is Winobella and I think she suits this celebration card well.

I basically took a ready made 15cm x 15cm lime green card and attached a 14cm x 14cm piece of patterned paper to it.  The patterned paper is Scenic Route Laurel Whitaker Street.

I then stamped Bella with black Stazon and coloured her in with water colour pencils.  She was then attached to a piece of cerise cardstock and I die cut the word "Celebrate!" using Quickutz Sunshine alphabet and stuck it down the side as shown. 

The whole thing was then attached to the left hand side of the card and I embellished it with a few American Crafts Playhouse Chipboard Stars.

I hope you like this card and I would like to take this opportunity to wish all our IACW readers a happy, peaceful and prosperous New Year!

Joanne x

Happy Christmas

We hope that you are having a fabulous day and Santa bought all that you wished for.

We have had a couple of entries to our Creative children project and these are from Chloe and Harvey.  We would love to show some more of your creations while we are enjoying our Christmas break.  Simply email them to [email protected].

Mum Sonia said "Just wanted to drop you an email showing the Christmas cards my children, Chloe aged 10 & Harvey aged 5 made for their class bases."

They used cardstock, printed papers from Pink Petticoat & an array of wrapped chocolates.  They used the little brown dinner money envelopes to post them in.

They really needed no adult assistance other than printing the papers & cutting the paper & cardstock to size*.

We at It's a creative world wish you a joyous Christmas.

Wishing you all...

All the girls at It's A Creative World would like to wish our readers a very meRRy chrIStmas!

Christmas is a time for love, peace and goodwill to all, and I hope that whatever you do this Christmas you have a great one!!

(that's Caz in the red gingham outfit, heehee!)

Take loads of photos this feSTive seASon, and go potty scrapping them! Oh and feel free to share your work with us, we want to set up a readers gallery in the new year :) [email protected]

We will be taking a little break between Christmas and New Year, but please keep checking back as we have some lovely Kiddies art pics to share with you each day :) and maybe a few photos and LOs too!!

And of course we have the A-Z journal starting on the 5th January, that's only 12 sleeps!! For details see here. And collect your A-Z button here!

loVe to you all, and
haPPy creATing
tHe creATive giRLs
xx

PS.Please give extra thoughts to our lovely Joy, who lost her dear little brother in an awful accident recently :( We love you loads Joy, and we're all thinking of you

Scrapping lots of photos!

Sometimes (okay, always) it seems like I take 10 photos when 1 would do! I do love my digital camera but it has left me with more photos than I know what to do with and I love them all, and that means I want to scrap them all!

Problem is, I am a sloooooow scrapper and sometimes I just want to get a lot of photos on one page to capture maybe the essence of a day out or a family event (Christmas is going to be a very good example) and have found a very quick, simple and effective formula for this.

The main rules I stick to are using a grid system, keeping the columns or rows of photos the same width, using minimal embellishments and only simple titles and, where possible, keeping the scale of the photos similar. If you stick to a least a couple of these then your photos will stand out and not just become a big jumble of images.

This page captures my garden for me this year (it was a BIG thing actually to have non-weed flowers growing in my garden!!) and although it took no time at all to piece together it really captures what I wanted to remember.

I have so many photos of our day trips to Kew, and I know I will never have the time to scrap all of them, so it is really nice to be able to capture some of my feelings quickly and effectively whilst the memories are still fresh.  Here I also used one big photo in the strip across the middle but still managed to get 8 photos on the page.

This page captures the first year of my little boy's life, I love being able to see the whole year, although very simplified, on one page. I think I might try to do something similar for Christmas Day for each hour of the day we are awake! It will be fun to see a photo of the early calm with all the presents still intact under the tree, to the midday chaos of all the cooking and present unwrapping, to everyone taking a nap in front of the telly in the evening!

I hope you have been inspired to put together some of these simple pages, and I wish you all a very Happy Christmas indeed!

Charlotte x

Easy Peasy handmade bag

A big Hi from a happily creating Caz!

Todays post is a little bit of bag heaven :) We are going to take a few quarters of fabric and create a cute, everyday, run around bag!

The idea for this project started when I discovered I needed a small, easy to carry bag for my few art supplies. I selected some co-ordinating quarters from my supply and decided which pattern I would use for which part of the bag.

Now I didn't have a pattern, so I had to make it up as I went, lol.

As you can see from the diagram below I only had a very rough idea as to what I was doing! The body of the bag is made up of 5 parts, the front and back, the sides and the bottom. (if you are using a large length of fabric you can make it out of less bits ;) ) And as the bag is lined we have the same amount of 'bits' for the inside.

My quarters are only 22 inches in length so I had to sew two bits together for the handle. And to strengthen it I made sure is was 6.5 inches wide so I could stitch it along the length, then turn in right side out before attaching it to the body of the bag

I do love the end result even though it is not 100% straight and accurate :D

Have fun creATing!!

Caz

xx

Quick'n'easy chocolate biscuits!

If you're likely to have people dropping in over Christmas, these are great to have on stand-by, (if you can keep them in the biscuit tin for long enough!) They taste fantastic, are so quick and easy to make, and while they're cooking your house will smell like a chocolate-filled...erm...house!!! They also make a great last-minute gift, packaged in a pretty box tied with a ribbon, or a plastic confectionery bag.

I've adapted the recipe from a Marks & Spencer one, because the quantities given in that recipe are, to be frank, miserably stingy. The M&S method is overcomplicated as well - this one that I use is tried and tested, and gives perfect results every time.

For 16-20 decent-sized biscuits, you will need:

230g butter (plus a little extra for greasing)

180g plain flour

5 tablespoons cocoa powder (good quality - I use Green & Blacks)

110g caster sugar

1 generous tablespoon vanilla essence

Method:

Pre-heat your oven to 190 degrees C, 375 degrees F, Gas Mark 5. Grease two large baking sheets.

Cream the butter, sugar and vanilla essence in a large mixing bowl - I use my electric hand blender for speed. Sieve the flour and the cocoa powder into the creamed mixture, and mix until all the ingredients are thoroughly combined (and the mixture resembles something akin to brown Play Doh!!)

Drop teaspoonfulls of the mixture onto the baking sheets - the easiest way is to use two teaspoons, one to scoop and the other to scrape. Space the dollops so that they have a little room to spread.

Bake in the oven for 17 minutes - this is when your house will smell absolutely divine! As soon as they're out of the oven, carefully transfer the biscuits to a wire rack to cool. They will still be soft, and I use a flat slice to take them off the baking tray. They will harden as they cool. Enjoy!!

This is my last post before Christmas, so I would like to take this opportunity to wish all of our readers a very Merry Christmas and a peaceful New Year. Lots of love to you all!

Jo xxx

Tie Dye

Hi everyone!

Today I want to share a project with you that is fun. quick and easy to do. It would be great to do with older kids.

Over the last while I have been experimenting with fabric and regular fabric dyes, when I got my glimmer mists I thought that it would be good to try them on fabric.

First I took 2 muslin bags.

I folded one in concertina style and wrapped elastic bands around it.

The second bag, I "pinched" the centre of and wrapped an elastic band around. This was repeated on the other side.

Then I put the bags into plastic bags

and spritzed them with various colours of glimmer mists, working them into the fabric.

I then sealed up the bags carefully, and left them overnight to soak.

The next morning I opened the bags and held the fabric bags under cold running water and then carefully removed the elastic bands. Then I washed the fabric through one more time and hung them up to dry.

A short while later they were dry.

I then filled them with stuffing, but you could use whatever you want.

Have fun creating!!!

~angela~

Creative children

Hi, it's Maria here to remind you of our current project to get our children creating.

We will be taking a break between Christmas and New year but don't want to leave our cherished blog all lonely and unloved.

So, here is where you lovely readers can help.  Simply email your child's creation to us as at [email protected] and we will make sure that it is shown right here.

There is no set criteria and we would love to receive anything seasonal that your child has created.

Everyone who enters will be entered into a lucky dipper and one lucky child will win an art set.

Imagine your little one's face when they see their work up in lights.

And there's more ....... There really is.

The lovely Angela at Angel Crafts has donated a prize to continue our fund raising for breast cancer awareness. 

Simply make a donation to our Just giving site and you will be entered into a lucky dipper.  We would love to double our initial target and every penny counts.  Whether you donate ten pence or ten pounds it all makes a difference.

Toodle pip