Foil Play DT challenge: foiled snowflake card by Wellington

Wellington of the Craft Telly forum has produced the beautiful, delicate snowflake card pictured above and detailed below.

Wellington used stamps from the Snow Is Falling Elusive Images themeplate - stamped directly onto a pre-scored tall slim card using Colorbox pigment ink. She then used a Sakura Quickie Glue Pen to apply a holographic silver foil to highlight elements of the largest snowflake. She also used Paper Mania self adhesive stars to embellish the centres of the smaller snowflakes.
Thank you, Wellington, for sharing your gorgeous card!

Tamlyn Art Designs and gorgeous vellums from The Crafthouse Press

The Crafthouse Press has recently announced the name of a new artist who will be creating exclusive designs for the company - Tamlyn Chalk. Tamlyn is a talented British artist who brings a fresh new look to 3D decoupage. Her modern, fun designs are the perfect basis to produce cards for teens and 20-somethings and while they are full of life and detail they are also easy to use and quick to cut out. So if you are looking for something contemporary and chic, the Tamlyn Art Designs range is the perfect solution.
Also new in store at Foil Play is a range of gorgeous vellums from the Crafthouse Press, including a selection of Christmas and everyday designs printed in white, silver and gold.

Foil Play DT challenge: foiled and glittered cards by Little Jan

These three stunning cards were made by Little Jan of the CraftTelly.com forum.

The card above was made by matting a decoupaged image onto holographic and mirri card. Little Jan then used the Sakura Quickie glue pen and green foil to embellish and highlight the dragon's scales.
The second card is made from a printed image which was matted and highlighted with holographic foils.
The final card was made also using a printed image. Little Jan used various foils to highlight the baubles and star on the tree, and glitter for the tinsel and snow.

Thank you, Little Jan for these gorgeous cards!

Foil Play DT challenge: foiled and glittered FLAP by Wellington

Wellington produced this gorgeous FLAP (fat little art page) for a monthly swap on the Craft Telly forum.

Some of the papers and vellums are printed from the Artylicious Filigree Fusion CD with a couple of other bits from Wellington's scrapbox. Then she used a Sakura Quickie Glue Pen to write the words Autumn Leaves and glittered the word Autumn with coral ultra fine glitter from the selection of 5 pastel glitters. To finish the project, Wellington foiled the word Leaves, using a deep coppery red foil from the metallic foils starter kit.

Thank you, Wellington, for sharing your beautiful work of art!

New Christmas sheets: Golden Oldies, TIpsy Adults, Picture Pyramage

Lots of new sheets from Paper Fun and Paper Laughs are now in store at Foil Play, including monochrome Christmas and fairy picture pyramage sheets.
There are Christmas and everyday Tipsy Adults sheets, featuring fun lovers throughout various stages of the evening. Designs include:

• Tequila Grandad
• Glamour Puss
• Beer Monster
• The It Girl
• The Amateur
• Little Minx
• Sozzled Santa
• Festive Fairy
• Pie Eyed Pixie
• The Glamourous Gift
• The Christmas Kiss (pictured above)
• Christmas Karaoke Queen
  

Christmas sheets for the popular Golden Oldies range are also available too, in the following designs:

• Merry Knitmas!
• Angel's Voices
• Cosy Christmas (pictured above)
• Grand-Father Christmas
• O Christmas Tree
• Snowballing Seniors
  

All of the numbered step by step decoupage projects are printed on high quality A4 silk-art 130gsm acid and lignin free paper.
There are six new Christmas picture pyramage sheets available in a mixture of full colour and sepia designs. These high quality sheets are printed onto 250gsm silk-art card stock. You cut out all the different sized shapes of the image, then layer them on top of each other with foam pads, starting with the largest at the base and the smallest at the top. Self adhesive foam pads are recommended rather than silicone adhesive for this particular type of decoupage, as they provide more even spacing between layers.

Christmas and new everyday goodies from Kanban

Lots of great new everyday Kanban goodies are now in store at Foil Play. I've also stocked (again!) on the very popular Christmas designs, including pyramage and topper sheets, concept cards and co-ordinating foiled and mirri card.
There is a great new selection of concept card kits. The new kits each include:

• a die cut A4 sheet, some of which are foiled or flitter glittered;
  
• a co-ordinating sheet of 300gsm card;
• two white envelopes.

Each pack makes at least two gorgeous and co-ordinated finished cards.

Other goodies include new monochrome and vintage ladies pyramage sheets, pop up cards, die cut topper sheets and a selection of topper sheets and co-ordinating backing papers.

FGS Christmas Stack-its are back!

As you may be aware, it hasn't been possible to get hold of the Christmas Stack-Its sheets for the past couple of months.

However, these very popular sheets are now available again. The slightly re-designed sheets feature a delightful variety of Christmas designs, including:

• Victorian church and village scenes;
  
• traditional Santa Claus;
• Star of the East scenes;
• robins, owl, geese, pheasants;
• winter scenes;
  
• Scottish bagpiper;
• cute teddy, snowmen and penguins.

Stack-Its decoupage sheets produce toppers with a 3D pyramid effect for your card and craft projects. You cut out all the different sized shapes of the image, then layer them on top of each other with foam pads, starting with the largest at the base and the smallest at the top. Self adhesive foam pads are recommended rather than silicone adhesive for this particular type of decoupage, as they provide more even spacing between layers.

The new sheets also contain a selection of tags and greetings to help you achieve a co-ordinated and professional look for your Christmas cards.

Foil Play peel offs feature in Papercraft Essentials magazine

Check out issue 34 of Papercraft Essentials magazine for a feature (pages 68 - 70) using the peel offs pictured.

The article includes instructions for five gorgeous cards designed by Kim Fee, using swirly candle and bauble peel offs, which are available at Foil Play in gold, silver, white (gorgeous on vellum), black and copper.
Papercraft Essentials costs £3.99 and issue 34 comes with a Stamping Essentials ideas Christmas special magazine and Christmas designer paper pack, with papers, templates and card blanks.

Web site back!

The Foil Play website is now back online, I am very sorry indeed that it has taken so long to restore service.

A huge thank you to my webmaster for all his help in migrating and restoring the site!

To celebrate the site's return, I will send a free set of gold and silver rub on foils (and instructions) with every order over £10 placed between now and midnight on Sunday 19 October. If you spend over £20, you will of course receive a set of Dufex Christmas greetings stickers too!

Website outage

My apologies that the Foil Play website is currently unavailable - it is being migrated by the hosting company and unfortunately no advance notice of the interruption in service was received.

The site should be back by this evening - my sincere apologies for the inconvenience in the meantime.

My continued apologies that as of late morning Monday, the site is still down. The hosts claim to be doing all they can to restore service asp. I will post an update when the site is back up and running.

A further update - as of Monday evening, the hosting company now estimates that the outage may last for another 24-36 hours. I am very sorry for this continued and extended interruption in service.

As the Foil Play web site is down completely, I am unable to access emails until it is restored. I will of course answer them as soon as I can, once the service is restored. If you need to contact me in the meantime, please email me on sales@winspiration.co.uk.

Tuesday evening update - My apologies for the continued downtime of the Foil Play site.

It seems that the hosting company has finally identified what needs to be done to restore service. The detail, for anyone interested:

"We sincerely apologize for the continued downtime your server may be experiencing. We are in the process of changing data centers, and for many customers, the process is taking significantly longer than expected.

We have identified the issue and have a fix in place, but it will require another 24 hours or so to get it rolled out across all affected servers.

The main issue is that, in our previous data center, 32-bit VPS machines were using a particular version of the Windows Operating System. The new data center is using a slightly different version of Windows. This problem didn't impact our ability to restore containers, and to Virtuozzo, it seemed that the containers were working. However, it did impact the actual operation of several of the containers.

We are currently rolling out a new version of the OS to the affected 32-bit servers. We will then re-copy the containers and reinstall them.

Again, we hope to have all containers fully restored and operational in the next 24 hours. Many containers will come up before then (and many containers have been operational since late Sunday night). We are working around the clock and will have your containers up as soon as we can."

Wednesday evening update - still no sign of the site being restored by the host, easycgi.com. Foil Play is of course not the only site affected - there is a discussion here amongst others experiencing the same problem.

My webmaster and I are now working on migrating the site to other hosting. We aim to complete the move as quickly as possible, but inevitably it is likely to take some time.

I do apologise for the continuing downtime of the site - we are working as hard as we can to restore service as soon as possible.

If you need to contact me in the meantime, please email me on sales@winspiration.co.uk.

Thursday evening update - well I'm afraid we have given up hope of easycgi.com restoring the website, despite their latest status update. There have been lots of promises, and very little apparent action to remedy the situation.

I've purchased hosting elsewhere, and we are now in the process of migrating the site using a back up copy, so I should have more positive news to report soon.

Friday evening update - some good news to report at last! We are making very good progress in restoring the site from a back up copy onto new hosting, and the important parts of the website are now functional again, as is the email address.

However, we still have quite a lot of tweaking to do, particularly with images and how they display on the site, so it presently looks a little rough around the edges. We're working hard to iron out these issues as soon as we can.