It has been a while....

So what can I say? 

Well, my life got a little insane for a while with commitments at home, at work and a couple of unexpected trips to my home town.  All of which were quite stressful and basically sapped all my time and energy for creating anything. 

Thankfully, the home commitments have settled down and will even more when school is out in a couple of weeks.  The work commitments have slowed a bit as well and the unexpected trips home will not be unexpected this time but anticipated and planned for the end of July.

Mojo has not fully come back yet but I anticipate a full return soon.  The longer days with more sun usually spur me to create more.  This summer, the kids are spending two weeks on the farm with their Grandparents instead of the normal one.  I will have two whole weeks of kid-free time to create.  I still can't believe I agreed to them being gone that long and I will probably go stir crazy with the quiet but everyone keeps telling my husband and I that it will be good for us. We will see....

Even though I haven't been creating anything in the last few weeks, I still have been actively acquiring new paper, embellishments and other wonderful items.  One of those items was the new quilling dies from Cuttlebug. 

I have been waiting for these since the moment that ProvoCraft announced them.  I must say that I have never quilled before but my mother does such beautiful work that I have always figured that I would give it a try some day.  Well, someday has arrived.

These dies come in a set of three and each set has 4 dies, a quilling tool and some flower stems with it.  That is actually my only complaint with these dies is that if you want all three sets, you have to purchase the 3 quilling tools as well...you really don't need to have 3 quilling tools.  It would have been nice for ProvoCraft to have the option to just purchase the dies without all the extra bits.

The dies are easy to use and the learning curve to produce a decent result is small.  As I played, what I discovered is that a thinner weight paper works better than a thicker paper.  It is still possible to produce nice flowers with the thicker paper but it took a bit more playing.

I don't think it took more than 5 minutes to make a flower but what to do with them once they were done.  I had originally planned to make a card but for some reason this layout popped into my head instead.

Materials used:  Bazzill cardstock, 7Gypsies pattern paper, Prism cardstock, Pink Paislee Artisan Tape, Grungeboard, Making Memories Journalling page, Prima butterfly from a vine, Copper Krylon marker, Tatter Angels Chalk Mist, Cuttlebug quilling dies, DMC pearl cotton.

I think that mojo is slowly coming back after all.

Happy Sunday....and I am off to play with more cardstock and pretty paper.