Living Creatively Ever After

How timely, but my sister just resurrected her blog with pictures from Hideout Cafe…check out her updated blog here! And yeah, I don’t know who Ruki is!

And I’ve updated my About page too.

Finding cute stationery without my wallet suffering is not an easy task! Quality stationery is hard to come by, I especially loathe those cute ones that I buy only to find out that there’s a misspelling or worse a grammtically incorrect phrase that’s so prominently placed on the paper/envelope.

So I decided to make my own decorated/customised stationery. I mean I do make birthday cards for the cellgroup! Besides, what better way to show off my creative side, than by instilling an expression of my creativity along with my personality (those who are my penpals know about this!).

Ohh…reality check!

Unlike some other crafters, I am poor in resources, I don’t have those stamps, heat emboss tools, diamond glaze, walnut inks, Koi watercolours and Waterbrushes, stencils, journalling templates, and those fancy schmancy scrapbook embellishments and papers. I salivate over craft and scrapbooking blogs and books because almost all the stuff they use are either (a) not available in my part of the world, and/or (b) they’re too expensive for me to buy.

 I don’t have a digital camera, nor appropriate editing software and a bank account balance that will help me pay via credit card. In short, being creative doesn’t come because of the array of choices I have, being creative comes out of the fact that I don’t have much to begin with – OK sorry, ranting is over.

But I do get by. And I learned a few things…

#1 Use what you already have.

Recently, for a pen pal community we had a St. Patrick’s Day Theme – we were going green for the whole month of March! And I didn’t have any green stationery around as I used up my cute Panda ones!

So I took some green papers from my “scrap stash” – discarded papers from previous projects which I thought would still be useful. Yes, I am a hoarder – shoot me.

the cute green baby sticker!

going circles

These are actually, mini-books with about 4-6 pages inside! Yes, I do write long letters. I only used two shades of coloured paper, double-sided tape, a self-healing mat, a pen knife (craft knives are expensive), a sticker from those which are sold for a few cents at the pasa malam and the circle cutter which I invested $38 (I waited for one year before I bought it!).

Which brings me to…

#2 Play with patterns/colours and different shapes. I used the circle cutter to make windows out of the lime green and dark green paper. I took the circle I cut from the dark green and cut another hole into it (a bit off centre) and used it as an abstract window topper. For the green baby mini-book, I cut a hole from the light green circle and used it as a border for the sticker.

I actually made one more but I had sent it off before I could take a picture!

And remember Guy? The letter I was making for Tee? Gosh, I totally messed him up!

#3 Look for stuff that you can breathe second life to. Guy is drawn on a page from a book which I had been altering. It was one of the pages that I gutted out and stored in my scrap stash.

I added a little bit of colour!

and I pasted him on to an orange coloured paper;

I wrote the letter on the back part,

 folded the parts which were sticking out

and tied it on top with a ribbon!

I also made a mini-book for Dani as I said in my last post.

Making my own stationery is also time consuming, add to that the fact that one letter takes me about thirty minutes to write! But receiving nice comments and messages about my creations are very heartwarming!

It also allows me to think outside the box, given my limited resources and to explore ways to be creative without causing a big hole in my pocket!

Offer to anyone: Want a mini-book like Dani’s? (It has six pages). Comment on this entry and I’ll see what I can do for you!