My Bit Of Charity

This post is better late than never... Three weeks before Christmas, Wina and I decided for this Christmas why not raise funds for Animal Shelter Brunei? Rather than wait for someone to organise something, why not take the initiative to do it, and we did.

We sold stuff we made and all proceeds went to AS. With the help of the ladies from the Hen House Harriers, and a few friends, we managed to raise almost $400. Thank You!! We only did our selling after our weekly run, so that was pretty good in two nights.

These are some of the stuff we've made for the first night, the second night which was the week after we sold totally different stuff which I don't have pictures of, mainly the pop up cards I made, didn't take pictures of those, but they all sold out! Yay! And some old cards I made from years back which all sold out too. Double yay! And books I made which I sold off at a ridiculously low price just because I got tired of seeing them. Whoever had coveted them, you could've had them for a steal!

The idea for this was to use up stuff we have and donate our time and effort. We only had a few days to make all these things and we made sure we had at least a dozen per item or try to...

On our first night it was pouring buckets, but that didn't dampen our spirits, from the back of my car we did a quick set up. Fortunately we moved to a more dryer location when we had the shout out at our joint master garage, we were able to set up the small tree and hung all the ornaments and displayed all the cards. Unfortunately, I forgot to take a picture of that.

These are some of the recycled greeting cards flowers I made using old greeting cards. I like these because they're a present and a card at the same time. You can write your greeting at the tag that's hanging from it. Anybody interested it's $4 each, various colours and always making them because they come in handy for last minute stuff. So all proceeds I make from these goes straight to AS.

My attempt at making Christmas wreath or any wreath for that matter. It looked so easy yet so hard! I ran out of ideas after the fourth one, hence why there're only four, all sold out.

Glittered tealights that Wina made and packaged. Finally got some use out of the many packs of glitter and curling ribbons I have. Packaged all pretty too. The silver purple all sold out, and we made gold and red, anybody want those it's $2 per pack, all for AS.

Wina called these colourful snowflakes, you can see them hanging in the first picture, we sold these for $4, I think there are 3 left and she used them as decoration to hang on her when she dressed up like a decorated Christmas tree.

These are really cute Christmas tree ornaments that Wina made and beaded. She checked out the ones they sold in the shops and hers are way better and cost less too, and it's all for the animals. She also did beaded and sequined candy cane ornaments as well. I must ask her to make me a beaded tree just for my collection.

Our next lot we're targeting Valentine's Day and St Patricks, there're going to be lots of hearts and four leaf clovers in the plan. Hopefully, we'll be able to raise more for Animal Shelter. We also have a donation box and a basket for people to donate pet food as well, it was great when people tell us to put their change into the box, extra money raised!

So if you feel really strongly about a particular charity, find ways to help them and do it. This is just my way of helping the charity I strongly feel about.

I linked this post up to one of the many blogs I read, it's my first time participating, hope I did it right: Your Favourite Project of 2009 on Tip Junkie

My Wedding: The Wedding Invitation

Continuing on the wedding series, man I'm really dragging it out aren't I...

The front of the invite

Pop up flower!

Close up of pop up flower

I designed the invitation myself, keeping to the colour theme of the wedding. The intention was to keep the design minimal, non fussy and low cost. I stuck with black and white with a shot of red. For those of you who got cards to do, keep the following in mind when going to the printers. Factors that pushes up the prices are:

1. Any die cutting (cut shapes other than a straight line)
2. Any embossing (those raised patterns on the cards)
3. Any foil leafing (usually text in gold or silver)
4. More than one colour (more inks and mixtures of inks to get the colours you want)
5. Extra pages inserted in (more paper, more inks)
6. Fancy envelopes (especially if it has to be customised to the cards)
7. Type of paper or card used (anything which isn't a flat non laminated or pearlised)
8. Awkward shape (more paper had to be used to account for wastage)
9. Any extra emblishments that needed to be added on (more work)

So, the fancier your invite, the more it will cost.

For myself, I designed my wedding invite around the pop up flower. I already knew how the card was going to come out physically with the prototype I made and had the information laid out using Illustrator. I then bought the prototype and the file to the printers, after fiddling a bit more on the file with the head designer the layout was done. Chose the paper and came back a week later to collect all 600 pieces.

During that week I hunted for the right shade of red and grey for the flowers. 600 pieces of red and 600 pieces of grey flowers were needed. To see the process of making them click here.

Then it took me another week to stick all the flowers together and into the cards. I glued half in already when I realised the glue I was using was staining the card which was visible on the front, I half hoped majority of the people who recieved the invite had poor lighting.

After the wedding mom announced she held back 100 pieces. I slightly had a fit because we could've invited more or save money and time on not having to print out that extra hundred and make the extra hundred flowers.

So what am I going to do with these extra cards, If you're interested in recieving a wedding invitation with the pop up flower, email me with your address and I'll send one over to you.

P.S, my wedding invitation worked out to just under a $1 each. Not including the cost of pizzas for the volunteers to help cut the flowers out.

Buku Hantaran: Tuyy's Flowers

I got an email one day with an attachment that says, "I want something that looks like this, with this and this. Is that possible?" I took one look at the picture and go, no problem.

The attached picture in the email

I thought it'll be easy to find a print like that, it was all the rage, notice 'was'. The closest thing I could find was a silver backed and the pattern outlined in flock. Would the client go for it I wondered and emailed her. Fortunately for me she said yes. Fantastic!

Next was the flower, I must admit between the time when I first saw the picture to making the actual thing was a couple of months, and now when I look at the picture I didn't realise it wasn't the same type. The flowers got a lot of compliments though because they came shopping with me the whole day, so that was a good sign.

She also wanted their names in the window, which I decided to turn it inside out to simplify the creation process and it allows me to create a non tying fastening by using velcro instead, I've been wanting to do that. There were some bits which I thought of then forgotten and only realised after everything was stuck down but it's ok, only I noticed.

And after all that, I came up with this.

I had a bit of a challenge with making sure the flowers stay. At first there was only suppose to be one flower, but the bottom corner looked too bare and I figured each name must have a flower hence why there're two. Then I thought it looked too full but went with it anyway.

More pictures of the folder can be found here.

Verdict: She totally loved it! Oh I was glad. I received an email from her that had lots of hearts in it. How lovely was that. I hope you had a great moment on your engagement day Tuyy!

Buku Hantaran: Aqua or Turquoise..?

The email for this order was interestingly long. Colour combination of silver, white and turquoise was the theme. I visualised something clean and crisp and I wondered whether I could get away with snowflakes since it was a winter order.

I used minimal flowers in various shades of blue greens, and used the silver as accents. I especially like the silver leaves at the ends of the ribbons, I don't know if I am able to pick up some more in time for the matching guest books.

The blue heart shaped gems, oh man, it was a killer gluing them down one by one, but it was necessary. I thought of using more feathers but turned out one was enough.

Matching guest books next on the list, three to be exact...

More pictures can be seen here.

What New Year Brings

Hello.

I've been away for quite some time...
Am slowly uploading pictures of past events...
Playing catch up so to speak...
Bear with me...
A huge chunk of it is thanks to this one...
Who would've guessed, not me that's for sure, I was convinced I was coming down with something and it was anything but this...

How was I suppose to know apart from being nauseous like hell, on top of that I was fasting which made it worse. I was convinced I was lacking in certain minerals or vitamins. And the fact my period was very late made me sure I was sick.

Figured before I head to the doctors I better eliminate a certain question which I'm sure they'll ask. No way I'm going to give them that satisfaction.

It was late in the day when I did the stick.

Oh...

Right...

So that's what all that nausea was about!

First trimester was spent with the toilet bowl and bed all day long, I didn't get morning sickness like most people did, my morning was great! It was after I got out of bed was when the tsunami hits. I was in no mood to do anything, although for some bizarre reason I was cooking often but not eating.

I'm in my second trimester now, and feeling better. I'm back in the studio. This year I planned big things in this space. And I only have a few months to do them in before my whole life changes again. Better start cracking...

Happy New Year Everyone!

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!