A voyage to sea

Another craft which gives me a great deal of  pleasure is my paper crafting. Even as a little girl I always loved to cut and stick everything and anything and made scrapbooks years before the term "scrapbooking" was ever used. My Mum and I are both keen paper crafters and over the years have attended several classes on this art. We always had to arrange these for a day when I was not working, the children were in school etc etc so we were quite limited to what we could attend but we have been lucky enough to be taught by some very talented ladies. As well as my bead stash  for my jewellery making I also have a large stash of  papers, embellishments etc for my card making. I do have an ever patient husband, he has allowed the cupboards in my daughter's old bedroom to gradually be take over by me as my craft storage room, thank you M ;0) x


Recently my daughter's boyfriend sailed off into the sunset (well actually he's been posted to serve as a trainee engineer on a cargo ship sailing between Spain and France!) as part of his Marine Engineering course. He went a few weeks ago and is not back until nearly Christmas. Yes, a long time and I know how much she is missing him :0(  However her job as a very busy junior doctor keeps her quite distracted, especially the frantic on calls!

 Before Tom left for sea I decided to commission a little ACEO that I could use to make into a Bon Voyage card for him.

For those not " in the know " an ACEO stands for Art Card, Editions and Originals. These are a branch of   ATC s (Artist Trading Cards) where artists make little miniature works of arts to trade with one another or sell.
ACEOs are very affordable as they small, about the size of football trading cards, but they are still one of a kinds.
The artist I bought from is the talented Vita who sells on Etsy.

This beautiful little mermaid is holding up and protecting the ship and I thought Tom would appreciate the imagery - although I'm not sure how many mermaids he will meet on his trip.

I added some "sea" themed backing paper

and made a frame for the watercolour using rivets at the corners and finished off using some silver peel off lettering.......

and hey presto I had a card which he could then use as a little picture in his cabin or a bookmark etc.

As a keen paper crafter we NEVER waste a scrap of paper so I decided to also use the backing paper to make my Dad's birthday card and a couple of other male cards (these are always the tricky ones to do).

   


I used a paper folded shirt on this one for my Dad's card...

and a different variation for this one and also a third variation shown below.








It's so interesting how differently cards turn out despite using very similar "ingredients". So once I finished my crafting session I had 4 cards !

So Bon Voyage to Tom and a very safe time out at sea, see you at Christmas!

Bye for now,

Jane x