Am Not A Natural Crafter

My cousin Wina and I are part of the Ladies Hash here and we decided it would be great to make something to sell for Christmas at the hash to raise money for Animal Shelter Brunei (their site isn't updated often unfortunately). We announced at the weekly gathering and got busy making over the long weekend. I decided to concentrate on cards since I thought it was something I know well, where as Wina concentrated on making felt ornaments since needles and threads are her forte.

When I said I thought making cards were something I knew well was true. When the weekend came I got the blank cards ready all it needed were decoration. All of the sudden I was stuck. I was blank as to what to decorate it with. Felicity was over at that time and she was dishing out snowman cards and santa cards in no time, cut cut here, cut cut there, stick stick stick, voila! Hmmmm, not something I could do.... not something I can do without having to think long and hard and dissecting it down to it's components.

When Wina was over I was passing her instructions on the making and packaging of the glitter tealights she was doing while I was making my recycled flower cards. She already made her ornaments. We also discussed a bunch of other stuff that she could do with her skills. This weekend was when I realised doing crafts is really about experience. The reason why things seems to come naturally is because they have had experience in it. Felicity used to work in a kindy nursery school and she's also a manga artist, and Wina excelled in Home Ec when she was younger and working with fabric is no stranger to her.

My experience has always been with paper in some form. I know how to manipulate it through folding such as origami, and through paper engineering. Since I'm currently in my pop up phase, I decided to make pop up cards to sell, as well as my recycled flower cards, and the few 'crafty' mini wreaths just to finish off stock that has been hanging around in my studio for yonks, and whatever else I can come up with.

I decided to donate my time and skills to create to help raise money and that all the proceeds will go towards the shelter to help with their medical bills and vet fees, that reminds me, I have to go out and buy a couple of large bags of cat and dog food to donate too.

Pictures soon...

Her Majesty's Birthday Greeting

Apologies for not updating regularly, there's a reason, hopefully it won't be for long because it's very draining. Anyhoo, it doesn't mean I've stopped taking orders and if I haven't gotten back to your email or messages, don't worry, I've already blocked in your order in my time schedule, I just haven't discussed the details with you yet.

One of the orders came from the Brunei Women's Group. I think specifically Bistari because it was the president that got in touch with me. How she got to me was because she was impressed with my wedding card (Woohoo!!). Few things she asked me to do, one was create a birthday card for Her Majesty which they are hosting a function in honour of her, the second one was to design the program book for the function.

With the timeline that was given, I could only do one or the other, and I wasn't so keen to do the program book when they already have the committee for it, or else why have the committee in the first place right?

Now the president wanted something nice to give to Her Majesty, and I showed her some of my previous works and she imediately latched onto the one that was given to Muji, and wanted that! The pop up flowers did it.

With colour scheme in tow, dictations over the phone on the greet, photo CD delivered to my place, and several hours just individually gluing every single flower and heart gem, that was after agonising over trying to get the right colours for the internal, this was presented to Her Majesty in celebration with the conjunction of her birthday that was held at the International Convention Center last Saturday night. Through twist of fate I had to be sick that night, go figure...

The original colour scheme given was peach, orange and yellow. I was very worried on how to make all that work, until I remembered they were only a starting point. I picked the base as peach and used my eyes to get the most pleasing colour combination when picking out the flowers, with touches of gold from the bow and heart shaped gems.

With the bow undone and the doors partly open...

I used a textured deep bronze for the insheets and coincidently it matched the photo. I used a particular origami paper to create the vibrant pop up flowers and punched out smaller flowers to tie in the overall look. The frame looked a bit empty and used more gems to fill it up. The body of text on the right have extra space for the Bistari president's signature.

The president was happy when it was delivered and was thinking of asking me to do the same thing for her next wedding anniversary, sure, more than happy to, I'm just a call away!