Evening!
What a lovely sunny day it's been. I've missed most of it, as I attended a Julie's Jems team training event run by Julie Kettlewell. The theme of today was cards for men, as it's something I think most crafters struggle with at times. There's loads of lovely sparkly pretty crafty stamps, colours and embellishments out there for feminine girly cards, so Julie decided to get us out of our comfort zone and challenge us! We did some crafting, which I'll be sharing over the next few days, and we had some great business training too. Stampin' Up! is a great opportunity whether you want to be a hobby demonstrator, or turn it into a business. It's flexible too, it can fit around your life and more effort can be put in when life is less busy. As Julie pointed out today, demonstrators only get out of it, the effort they put into it.
We also had a special guest today, Paula Gorry who is the UK Business Development Manager at Stampin' Up! UK. It was really nice meeting her and chatting to her, and hearing about how Stampin' Up! operates. She did a crafting demonstration for us, and we all learnt a few tips and tricks. It's great seeing other peoples ideas, and seeing things we wouldn't have thought up ourselves.
We always do swaps for out training events, and as the day was based around cards for men, so were our swaps. I spent a bit of time on Pinterest getting a few ideas together, and decided to use a tutorial to make a tuxedo card. The link to the tutorial can be found here from Lynn Pratt, an American demonstrator. Normally when we hand out or swaps, it's a mad half an hour of going around the room trying to find who we haven't swapped with yet! Today we did it in a more structured manner, which worked well.
I used Basic Black and Whisper White card stock to make the jacket and the shirt. I printed out the template and traced them onto the card stock and used the Paper Snips and the Paper Trimmer to cut them out. The Simply Scored Board and the scoring blade on the Paper Trimmer were used to score the lines. I used the Dimensionals to stick down the collar edges on the jacket and shirt, and one to hold the two sides of the jacket down. The bow tie was cut out and also stuck down with Dimensionals. Lastly I used the Sweet Buttons Embossalit die with the Big Shot to cut out the button for the front of the jacket, which was also attached using the Dimensionals.
I made thirty of these, but forgot to take a picture of them all finished, so here's a picture of just one of them.
Below is a close up picture of the button cut from the Sweet Buttons Embossalit die.
Here's a photo showing the shirt part of the card pulled up from inside the jacket. This could be the area the message is written on, or could have a sentiment stamped onto.
