Material of the Week

*Eeeeek*, Monday is nearly over - most probably will be by the time I have written this post - and I haven't yet updated the blog!!! Here we go.

This week I have decided on a new strategy. So far the blog has been quite a mixed bag of craft ideas. From notice board to Christmas star and on to bread rolls. All a bit unstructured. So I thought I should try and introduce the "material of the week". I intend to pick a particular craft material which I will then show a few different craft ideas with. This week I have settled on security envelopes.

I admit - the big security envelope-craze is already over. No idea who had that brilliant idea, but it is stunningly simple: Have you ever noticed the insides of those private/personal/confidential letters? They are usually printed with a blue/black pattern to protect the contents of the letters from shining through the envelope. I collected all my official mail over the last two weeks and was quite surprised to see how many different designs I managed to find over that time. You can see a small selection above right.

So with nine different patterns I decided to do something with the paper. First of all you have to carefully open up the envelopes. I then decided to invest in a simple circle punch (€ 7.99 from the art & hobby shop) with which I punched out lots of circles. Then I remembered my wonderful bag of paper offcuts from Daintree Papers and settled on some card which lent itself for place card-making.



All I used were the punched out circles, a guillotine for cutting my card and some pritt stick. Arrange the shapes on the card before pasting on - that way it is easier to design nice shapes.

Easy peasy craft - and I actually quite like the result. Trouble is - I have no real event for which I personally would need place cards... But hey, maybe my mum's 60th birthday?





Anyway, watch out - there will be a couple more posts in which I will work with the security envelope material.