Three ways on how to decorate your envelopes

Hey people! Now usually, when you are sending a letter, you usually pop it in a white or cream envelope, lovely and plain, place a stamp on it, and then send it off! Well today, I am going to give you three examples, I did myself, of how to make your envelopes more decorative! Now, why would you do this? You may think. I feel, doing this you have really put time and effort into this letter, it is actually really fun to do, and also I think makes it more interesting for that poor postie delivering your letter on that cold rainy day to see that someone has made the envelop a little interesting. (By the way on the subject on post men, do any of you feel that the post men may read your post cards as they are not in an envelope and then are able to know what is going on in your life? Just a little wondering question I've had? Anyway, I've waffled plenty! Let's get on, and as always, big pictures are down at the bottom if you are not interested about the writing!


So this first one is so simple, but then so cute I think! First you just draw the clouds, sun, rainbow, and rain drops in black sharpie. I did it in sharpie so when I put the water colours on, it wouldn't leak or run as sharpie is permanent/waterproof pens. And then basically you just fill in the sky with water colours, I blended colours, adding some purple and green to the sky just to mak
e it more interesting. Then I just coloured the sun, rainbow and rain droplets in with sharpie again!



This one is quite wacky and fun, alittle like an optical illusion. So first of all you must start with drawing a box for where your address is going to go, you could also draw a little box for the stamp in the left hand corner but I didn't on this example. Then you just start in from the address box and just draw swirls going outwards until yo have covered the entire surface! Then you are done. Ta da!!






This envelopeis quite similar to the first one with the cloud although s little simplar with a little bumble bee in the clouds. This has not back ground colour with just the bee as a pop of colour!!









                                                                         x--PICTURES--x

Hope you enjoyed this blog post and that you can re create them please share them with me and any other ideas for decorative envelopes! You can find me on instagram @anna_crichton or on pinterest under Anna Crichton or leave a comment on my google+ account, anna crichton !!! Hope you liked todays post, I shall see you very very soon!!! Love ya! xxx

Scrap booking equipment

Hi guys! Today I am going to be sharing to you about my scrap booking equipment! This is kinda a follow on from a previous post I did on my scrap book flip through, to give you guys inspiration of techniques and ideas to do in your scrap book! So go and check that out if you want. So, lets get started!

So obviously, first of all you need a scrap book. Now you can either get one of those fancy proper scrap book, (I have only one of them) or, you can just use an ordinary notebook like I do most of the time and as you can see, I have quite a large collection!! With note books, there are so many kinds, small, big, lined, plane, squared, thick paper, thin paper, coloured paper, patterned paper, plain paper and then obviously the front cover. So really, you need to think about what you are going to be doing in your scrap book and what type would be the best for you. For instance, I have a scrap book with quite thin pages and I use a lot of water colours so I regret not getting a thicker paged notebook.

To start off with, you basically need the straight forward basic essentials. This mainly consists of glue, scissors, tape, pencils, pens, ruler, and a c
raft knife and cutting board. I find a cutting knife and board so useful for scrap booking, I just use then all the time!! You can just get craft knifes from any stationary shop or craft shop. I got mine from PenToPaper for I think about 99p but I'm not to certain!





Now these things are just amazing!!! They are photo corners and are just so good, I love them so much. If you don't put pictures in your scrap book, just ignore this, but for all you who do, I would really recommend them. They are basically little sticky corners which you put on the corners of your photo and then stick it down! I got mine from Paperchase for a really good price. Also, Paperchase has some amazing stickers and scrap booking stuff so go and deffo check out there website here: http://www.paperchase.co.uk/





I use water colour paints alot in my scrap booking, as my scrap book has plain lined pages and I like to make them a little more colourful by using water colours. I like merging colours and doing different techniques with them for example sprinkling salt on the wet paint and using the wax resistant technique. Any water colour set will do, I used to have the miniest bog standard one and I loved it to bits! Although now I have upgraded to a Winsor&Newton one which is extremely nice with amazingly good quality paints! If you don't have a water colour set and are thinking of getting one, I would really recommend this one, there website is: http://www.winsornewton.com/uk/

And then obviously to go with the paints, you need paint brushes. These can range from cheap plasticy ones to very expensive amazing quality ones and  have mainly got a mixture of both. It is also good to have a range of sizes because it may vary what you are painting and how big/small you want the paint stroke. I would recommend WHSmith for straight forward paintbrushes: http://www.whsmith.co.uk/ and for more up market and better quality, I would recommend Winsor&Newton, see link above.

Washi tape!! Literally the best thing ever!!!!!!! Now I only got this set of washi tape a couple of days ago, and already, I AM LOVING IT!!! All you can say is I am definitely going to be purchasing more of it! You can just do so much with it, and it just makes everything so much more fun and creative. I really regret not ordering some sooner, it is just so good. The only slight thing about it is it is slightly expensive, like not massively but I think for a packet of 5 this was £12 or something, I can't remember exactly! I would recommend amazon for getting washi tape or this online website called scrobby. Now scrobby is in the Netherlands, but I would really recommend ordering some stuff, their scrap booking stuff is A MAZE ING!!! Scrobby's website: http://www.scrobby.nl/

The same with stickers basically! They are just so useful and fun, especially these super good quality ones which are slightly 3D which I think I got from paperchase. I feel that there is not very many good places to get stickers from because I was trying to hunt down for some stickers on amazon and I just couldn't find any nice ones anywhere!!! So for stickers, I would advise Paperchase, Scrobby and Smiglge.
Paperchase: http://www.paperchase.co.uk/
Scrobby: http://www.scrobby.nl/
Smiggle: http://www.smiggle.co.uk



Sharpies! Sharpies! Sharpies! Who doesn't love sharpies?? They are literally the best thing in the world!!!! They are so good for doodling and amazing art work as well as fantastic colouring with no ink lapping at all!!! I have always loved sharpies and will always love them! You can order them on practically any stationary shop, WHSmith, Amazon, PenToPaper, anywhere!!!!



Well that is it on my scrap booking equipment blog post! I hope you enjoyed it and don't forget to leave me a comment on what you use for your scrap book which I haven't mentioned here!! Thanks for reading! Bye!
                                                                                 -xxx-                                                                      

Scrap booking Pages

Hi guys! It's me again and today I am going to show you some of my scrap booking pages and hopefully they will give you new ideas and inspiration! I absolutely love scrap booking for any of you who don't really know what it is, it is basically a journal of anything you like, photos, diary entries, memories, quotes and so much more! These are also known as smash books! So, let's get started!! BTW IF YOU CAN'T BE BOTHERED TO READ ALL THIS, SCROLL DOWN TO THE BOTTOM FOR JUST THE PHOTOS IN LARGER SCALE!!

So this is actually a very recent page from yesterday when I went to my best friend's house! So as you can see I use water colours to give the pages colour! I do this with all the pages because I feel it just looks so much more bright and cheerful! Here as you can see, I have used a kind of photo booth layout with long strips of photos. To do this, I used an app called "Retrica" which allows you to have different layouts, you can download this for free in the app store onto your tablet, iPhone, iPod excreta!




Here I have kind of done a Polaroid effect with one picture per page. And then I have given it a short title and the date. I have tried to mach the water colour background to the pale lilac sky.Also with this photo I have illustrated it with some faint little clouds with smiles and rosy cheeks. This just gives this extra touch as I felt without the illustrations, it looked slightly plain!With the backgrounds,  I also sometimes sprinkle salt onto the wet water colour which gives it a very lovely grainy textured effect. You have to be careful to not make it too watery otherwise it can sink through to the other side! To go around this problem, you can buy thick, better quality paper, or only do one entry on every other double page so that no entry is back to back. Or, like me, just try not to water down the water colour to much!

This is a entery of me writing about a bath bomb called "shooting for the stars" As you can see, for the background I have mixed many colours to try ans mimic the bath bomb. Another great thing to do for backgrounds is that to mix and merge the colours with kitchen towel. You have to wait for the colours to have dried slightly and then you gently mix them up. Try not to rub too hard otherwise you will rip the paper. With this you can also see that I have made a little folder for the wrapper by just using paper and double sided scelotape. And then again, as you can see, I have stuck in a photo of it to give you an idea of what it was like!

Here is just mire inspiration for how to lay it out! I usually give my pages titles in many different kinds of fonts! I have also used arrows so you can see which photos I am talking about. I also decorate them with little illustrations, liike the holly in the corner! The only slight problem is that if you do it in sharpie (like I did) Is that if you don't have think paper or you use both sides of the page, sharpie does go through the paper as it is permanent marker!

Now I know in the previous page, I said that sharpie was a problem because it went through the paper, well I actually used sharpie for this page! I feel that if you have stuck something on on the other side, over the paper, and you won't be able to see that it has come through, that is fine by me!! This is basically a whole page of things I love. I just feel this has a very positive feel and makes you think about the good things in life as most of the time we only remember the bad and horrible bits!




I also love to put in bible verses into my scrap book, I put in ones that encourage me, make me think harder and more thoughtfully and ones that are just wonderful in every single way!!! Here are some bible verses I would recommend: Psalm 46:10, Philipians 4:13, " Corinthians 5:7, Proverbs 31:3oEphesians 2:8, 1 Corinthians 13, Psalm 27:1, Psalm 25:1-2, 1 Timothy 1:15. Now I could go on and on of amazing verses of god's word, but I'll stop there!


There's not really much to say about this entry! it is just a mixture of photos with a water colour back ground. There is some fancy font at the top, I feel different kinds of fonts always make things better! And then I have just written about how I went into town that day!!!








Here I have done a illustration and a painting of Christmas shopping! With more fonts and everything! If you are stuck on what font you should do, go on pinterest, there are some amazing ideas there!!






What I find great with scrap booking, is to stick memories and cards in! You can either make little pouches for them, like I did with the path bomb one (look above) Or you can just stick them straight in! Here, I have got my first Christmas card of the season, 2k15. I always like to write a little title as well, short and sweet like a polaroid title! This is also the perfect oppertunity todo sharpie stuff on the other side as it will go through the paper, although the paper will be covered up with the card so perfect!


On both of these, I have put quotes and bible verses, again, Pinterest is a very good place to find inspirational quotes or any kind of quote. To let you into a little secret, I get all my quotes from Pinterest and then my bible verses from my good old trusty bible!! And then you can illustrate them! For the left hand picture on the right page saying "you are my sunshine", I have used cardboard for the sun's face just to give it texture and for it to be unique!!

                                                                  PICTURE TIME!!!

 Hope you guys enjoyed this! I am also going to be going a blog post on scrap booking materials, so keep an eye out for that!
                                                      AND MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!!!!!!

The Perfect Spa Night Products

Hi guys! Its me again! Now I know I haven't been writing lately, but I have decided to try and start it up again, and get blogging more often! So today I am hopefully going to give you some ideas on how to have a really relaxing and enjoyable spa night! So let's get started!!
First of all, I like to run a nice hot steaming bath and light a scented candle. At the moment, I have been loving the "White Company" Christmas candle, which is their winter signature candle, it smells amazing!!! I feel that White Company just have so many amazing scents as well as clothing! Although they are on the pricey side, I would really recommend them! If you want to go and check out their website, click on the following link: http://www.thewhitecompany.com/

When my bath is running, I like to make a little bath cocktail which is basically a mix and match of different products!

Lush has always been my favorite bath bomb /bath crumble shop. It is so amazing and so scented you just really get the most of their products! I could literally talk about how fabulous they are all day, I would recommend them so highly so if you wanna go and check out their website which I deffo think you should click here: https://uk.lush.com/ So anyway, I just crumble in my bath crumble, the one on the far right, called the Comforter and use my magic wand reusable which is the middle one! This makes the water of my bath go super pink, with frothy bubbles aswell as the wonderful sweet scent!! 

These are some of the products I use in the bath! The furthest one on the right is a Sanctuary Spa face cleanser,scrub. I unfortunatly don't have any face masks so just use this as one which works very well! I love this product and find it very beneficial to the skin! If you would like to look at their website click here: http://www.sanctuary.com/
Next I love to use the Soap and Glory shower scrub! If any of you know me, you know I adore soap and glory!! It is just fabulous and very relaxing as well! Go check out their website here: http://www.soapandglory.com/ You won't regret it!! Now going back to Lush I have been absolutly loving their  winter edition shower gel, "snow fairy" This is just the most wonderful shower gel ever with the most wonderful candy cane scent as well as it being so lovely and creamy! Once out of your bath you will smell good enough to eat! Go check it out: https://uk.lush.com/ and I apply all these products (apart from the face scrub) with the soap and glory face polisher, (look above to see link!)

And now for the very last thing! I know this isn't even something to have in your bath but it is just too amazing and I also had it in my bath and it worked great! And yes it IS ANOTHER lush product, it is Woosh, one of Lush's Shower jellys which I recieved as a secret santa and have been loving! It has a fruity tangy scent that reminds me of fruit pastels and it is basically just as jelly glob that you rub on your body to get clean! It is also very fun to just play with in the bath as it is so slippery!  ; ) see for the link to lush above.

Once I have finished my bath I usually hop out and like to moisturize my skin.For this, I use the soap and glory body butter which I really like and it is so very creamy and rich, great for dry skin, although does take a little bit longer that I would like it to to dry and soak into my skin. See above for the link!

I hope you have enjoyed reading my post and I hope you have been able to think a little more about what you want to try! Also Christmas IS coming up so maybe you could pop a few of these down onto Sana's stocking list!! Hope you all
have a very merry Christmas!

Revision

Revision

Now, lets face it, no one likes revision! It's a horrible thing you have to waste your holidays on, slaving over it, while the rest of your family are on an outing somewhere nice. Especially as it's half term, revision, is taking over it.
In this post I'm going to share with you a little how I revise and what I use to do it with. Hopefully this post will help you what to use to make it easier to revise. 

Highlighters

Highlighters are a very important part of revision work as they color code things and make something stand out to you which might be helpful. I got the Stabilo Boss Original highlighters which are really good and last for ages. If you haven't got any highlighters click on the word here: http://www.amazon.co.uk/highlighters and check out the super good ones I got!!!

Fine Liners

Fine liners are also a very useful color coding source and are perfect for writing out flash cards and drawing diagrams and graphs. You can pretty much get fine liners in any stationary shop like Pen To Paper, WH Smith, Paperchase, and even Sainsburys!
Here I got a packer of 20, and the brand name is Staedtler, which is amazing as they last forever!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Flash Cards and Memory Notes

Flash cards and memory notes are basically the same so I am putting them together as a memory thing! These are really good to have as you can take them anywhere with you while you go about your day. I find them incredibly useful as I memorize stuff on them gradually. I would really recommend writing a few of them as they are really good. The memory flip cards things I got from Blott (best shop ever!!!) If you want to have a little more of a look at it click here: http://www.blottshop.com/ Anyway these are just a smaller version where you could write a question on the front and the answer on the back!

POST-ITS

Post its are the most useful thing on earth!!!I have about ten massive packets of post its around because they are so useful. Stick them to anything and when you are going around your day you can glance at them and slowly memorize the info on them!!! For french they are also useful for color coding as you could write a feminine word on a pink post it and a masculine word on a blue post it and then you'd think of the word as pin or blue meaning it would be masc or fem!

Notebooks

A notebook is always a good thing to have around for revision. They are easy to whip out of your pocket at any time of day to either make notes or read a little bit of yr previous notes! These you can as well get in any stationairy shop and are super cheap, perfect for revision! If you want you could make your note book and decorate it a bit and make it into a cool snazzy journal/diary/filofax.

All in all I just love to go stationary shopping so in the below I have listed a couple of my fave stationary shops websites, enjoy:

paperchase: http://www.paperchase.co.uk/
blott: http://www.blottshop.com/
WHSmith: http://www.whsmith.co.uk
Pen to Paper: http://www.pentopaperonline.com/

My Room!!!

HI everyone! Today, I'm gonna write a bit about my room, as I am gonna get it redecorated! Yay!!!! So if you don't already know, my family and I moved into this house just outside of Headington (Oxford) and we are having builders in, which is really chaotic. Anyway, after all the building work we are getting my room getting decorated, and I am sooo excited. 
I've decided to go with Farrow&Ball which is a really nice, amazing quality type of paint! I love blue so why not go for blue paint! My room us quite small so I decided that going for a dark kind of paint would not be wise. These paints I have chosen makes the room feel so much bigger and spacious! 

Pavilion Blue. 
So for the walls I am going for a paint called Pavilion Blue although it is more like an off white and it is super white, meaning it will let in more light, which is the main reason for choosing it! So here it is:
  Blue Ground.
 Now I love this paint, I think it is the BEST!!! It is a really nice color which is kind of a really seaside look blue, which I super like!I think this goes really well with the Pavilion Blue and I can't wait till we paint my room!If you want to take a closer look into the Farrow and Ball paints check out their website at: http://www.farrow-ball.com/