Happy Mail For Jack!

I put together this card/letter/mini project thing for Jack almost two weeks go now, but I obviously didn't want to do a blogpost on it until he had definitely received it!!

I did briefly mention a little bit about this, on an Instagram photo I posted. But basically, me and Jack are currently going long distance (again, lost count of how many times this is now), and we would always send each other mail, but recently I haven't really sent him anything.

We are going to be moving into our own place very soon, it was mean to happen at the end of 2015 but didn't. There's been delays with the process and the house is still a complete mess. BUT it's all moving along gradually, and we are closer than we've ever been before.

Anyways, I wanted to put together a nice bit of happy mail for him, seeing as once we've moved in together, this is something we will no longer be able to do!

I picked up this Paperchase card a while back, and I kept it to send to Jack. But I wanted to do something a bit more fun with it, instead of just writing a little message inside.

I had plenty of ideas whizzing around my head, so like always I just rolled with them. No planning, no initial colour scheme to go by, just my brain ideas and trying things out as I go.

When you open it up this is what you first see. I added a large journaling card in the middle so I can have an extra page to work on, and a smaller journaling card on the left with a beautiful quote on.

Because the larger journaling card was very orangey, I went with that as a colour scheme for this section. I picked out some gold and orange tapes, and also put a splash of red & orange watercolour on the bottom section. At the top of the left side I added some film strip washi tape and a fun sticker from Anke Panke, along with a little sun emoji sticker.

When you open the flap on the left, there is one of my favourite little photo collages. This is from the only holiday me and Jack have ever been on together, we went to surprise my family in Cornwall. We were laying on one of my favourite beaches in Cornwall, trying to take a nice selfie but the sun was so bright we couldn't actually see what was being taken. We were trying our best to smile and then ended up laughing because we couldn't see what was going on, none of the photos were overly posed, they were natural and lovely.

On the left hand side I added a little caption. Over the photo collage I added a little bit of 'Love You' Washi Tape from HEMA, and a kiss face emoji sticker.

When you flip the larger journaling card over, this is what it on the other side. This colour scheme was a little more random, each side sort of has it's own colours going on. 

I was going to have two flaps in this section but I didn't like how it would be unbalanced, having double flaps at the bottom of each of the pages.

The left hand side flap is a square journaling card which meant I could stick a larger photo onto it. It is a photo I found on Pinterest and has a very similar layout to our living room. Obviously it's not exact, but having visual goals is always really nice especially since the whole moving process is taking such a long time. 

Hooked onto the photo is a little Noodoll bookmark I got for Christmas from Jack. I've found these really hard to use because they are so cute, so I've been hoarding them. But adding this one to a card to Jack means I technically get to keep it about right?!

When you open the flap there's another photo, this one is actually a photo of some polaroid photos I took when we went on a little trip up to Pendle Hill. It was the first time I'd tried my Instax camera to take selfie's and it was hard to know what was in shot and what wasn't. It was also super sunny which never helps things haha.

On the back of the square journaling card flap, I attached a little bingo card. I got these in a Hey Little Magpie random grab box (I think), and the instructions on how to use them confused me. So I basically told Jack to use a random number generator to generate ten numbers. If he got a row then he would win a prize. Funny enough he didn't win, even after letting him have two extra goes!!

Last of all I added a little photo of our new house, with a sarcastic caption of 'hopefully by spring yeh?!' seeing as moving in wasn't happening anytime soon. But now looking at the timescale and what's getting done with the house, it will most likely be somewhen around Springtime that we move in! I used a mixture of alphabet stickers from Hey Little Magpie, HEMA and the 'Spring' sticker is from a Simple Stories sheet.

So that's how my little happy mail project for Jack turned out. I was really chuffed with it, even though it's a bit all over the place. I enjoyed making it and he was totally surprised to receive it, so all in all it was a success!! 

It definitely makes me want to do more happy mail projects like this, because they are so different to other sorts of mini projects. You know you are making them to make someone else smile, so there's a lot of motivation to make it as fun and interactive as possible.

I hope you enjoyed seeing what I created, and thank you for reading!

- Daisy X

Pumpkin Art Page - October Mini Projeect

So this is my second page share from my little October/Halloween Mini Project! (If you want to see the first one I did, you can have a read here) I made the booklet using the Halloween Dividers from the Mrs Brimbles Shop. You can find out a bit more about how I put it together and my initial plans for this booklet, here.

But today I'm going to be showing you a bit of a mixed media art page I did for one of the pages.

A lot of the dividers have patterns and cute Halloween themed things on them already and as I'm using this more like a Smash Book, there's going to be things I don't want to just cover up completely. This was the case for this cute little 'Jack O' Lantern' song, there was an image below the song but I decided to cover that section up and put my own there.

I chose to paint a little pumpkin, I hadn't draw or painted anything free hand in well over a year and that's not really been for any specific reason, I've just been doing other things and I simply forgot that I can actually draw haha.

I sketched out this pumpkin, (if you follow me on Twitter you would have seen the progress shots, here & here) and then painted it with Acrylic paints. I've always been quite fond of using them, I used them throughout school when I was doing my Art GCSE etc. So they are just the type of paint that I'm most comfortable using.

I drew and painted it onto some scrap paper which had a grid pattern in the background, this helped to make it not look 'perfect' I prefer it when things are mis-matched a little and it's not a 'pure' background.

Eventually I watered down some browns and blacks and washed them over the song page, so you could still see what was on it. I also picked out a Journaling card from the Halloween pack I'd got in my October Brimbles Box to go behind the pumpkin, I narrowed it down to three and then had my followers on Twitter choose the one I eventually used. You can see the other options here.

I added a couple of different Washi Tapes to the page, which are both from Cloudy Cow, and also punched out some Stars from the same scrap card I used to paint my pumpkin on.

Lastly I stuck down some of the wood veneer stars, and that's it!

I love how it turned out, my pumpkin is a little wonky and I could probably do better, but I'm pretty proud of my attempt seeing as I hadn't drawn freehand in SO long!

Thanks so much for reading!

- Daisy X