Stash busting tips

Hello there. We're still on our stash busting mission and thought we'd share some tips with you. Anyone who has ever tried stash busting knows that if you look at your stash as a whole you can feel totally overwhelmed and not know where on earth to start. We have a little tip. Pick a project, IE card making, then pick a paper colour. We chose blue, as this is what we had the least of. If you do this and still find you have a veritable pile in front of your furry eyes, pick a number, 5 will do to start. Pull out 5 pieces of your coloured paper, or all of it if you are really going for it. Now pull out just one set of stamps and one colour ink pad, or one pack of embellishments. There you have your limited project stash.

Now get creating with your miniature stash.

Normally we get our far too much and end up shuffling papers and embellishments with no real clue of what to do. Using one colour and limited embellishments was so much more productive. We utilised the spellbinders circle dies too.




We copied a design from our Get Stamping magazine for this card.


Horace was so pleased to use the final blue 6 x 6 patterned papers.


In fact, just a few sheets went a very long way. We're never this pawductive with more stash. Less is more seems to be our new mantra, unless of course we're talking chocolate, then more is very definitely more!





With love from the bears

WOYWW- nothing!

Hello, there, it's Horace here in the living room for today's WOYWW. It's so much warmer than the bears' bedroom and the sofa supports my pawly back, which is really playing up right now. I decided to try and take my mind off it by attempting to draw a chocolate wrapper. Unfortunately this meant eating the contents first, what a hard job that was!!!!



As you can see I'm attempting a one page spread in my Dylusions journal. So far I've only created double pages so this will be an extra challenge for me. I also have out my Posca white marker, which I doodled round the bubbles of writing with. I know it's not quite right, but you know what? I don't care. It was fun to draw and I've chosen to be a little less stressy about my art and just enjoy the process.

I managed to make a very small mess on the sofa with my various colouring and sketching implements. Check out my very cool pencil case, gifted to me by a very special friend.



Here's the chocolate picture close up. Mmm I could eat it all over again!!



Anyway, I need to do a hop or two, to see what everyone else is up to. Thank you so much for all the lovely welcome back messages last week. We're still trying to decide if Wilbear should continue with his studies or not, he really wants his degree but has been ill ever since restarting studying. Sigh.



With love from the bears

Operation de stash

Hullo there. It's Horace with you today with what I hope will be the start of a mammoth task of actually using some of the stash we've acumulated. We've managed to make a huge dent in the 6 x 6 patterned papers and used the junk we saved to make journals and mini books but now we really need to use the 12 x 12 papers and card, not to mention the embellishments! Despite having several sort outs every now and then, and donating stash to charity and having giveaways, our stash would still last us several bear years and beyond.

We have cardstock



Patterned papers in all shapes and sizes


Goody bags chock full of loveliness


And embellishments and random oddments.



That's not even all of it, although that is all of the paper and card we possess ( apart from the watercolour paper hidden in the wardrobe, and the A4 card and paper in the cupboard!!!!)

Hennyway, we decided to give up stash buying for lent, whilst challenging ourselves to use some of what we have during that period. Now giving up alone is of course beary boring and may lead us to cheat, so we enlisted the cub as she has enough patterned paper to decorate several hundred dens and more! Although the idea is to use the period of lent as our challenge, we thought we might as well start now.

Today I decided to make some cards for charity out of our veritable piles. First I found some random envelopes that were looking a little lonely



Then cut some 12 x 12 card to size.



I managed to cut three cards from one piece of 12 x 12 card stock. These will fit in the smaller envelopes.



Next I sorted through the patterned paper box. I wanted to concentrate on using any scraps, rather than cut into more unused sheets of paper.



And here are the (17) quick and simple cards I made. Most used only the papers and a simple embellishment or sticker for decoration.


Once I'd made my cards, I was left with more card and paper scraps.



Not to be wasteful, I glued these into the big Dylusions journal as the start of a background. I'm not sure what I'll do with this yet, but it'll be fun playing.



I need a siesta first though




With love from the bears

More junk

Well hola again, it's Cedric here at the desk again. Wilbear is in the kitchen drinking his own weight in latte and cappuccino (and believe me, this is no mean feat, at last weight in he was 2 elephants and a small giraffe) so I thought I'd repurpose some of the coffee sachet boxes as he empties them.


For some rather mad and unexplained reason, I brayered (does that word make you think of politicians laughing?) over the insides of the boxes


then papered both sides with scraps of 6 x 6 patterned paper, in a collage style. I guess you could call this junk/ de stashing journal making.


Here are the inside covers of the smallest journal


And the inside covers of the larger journal.


Not forgetting the outside covers of the large journal, this is going to be a travel journal for a friend. Her birthday is coming up and she's planning a holiday later in the year. I thought she might like a handbag sized book to take with her, to jot all her notes in.


For the inner pages, I started to work my way through the 12 x 12 card mountain that we've aquired. I cut it to just a tiny bit smaller than the covers in order to achieve a neat finish.


I think these may be a little chunky, but I can always omit pages as I bind the journal. I'll use our very handy Cinch tool for that.


That's on my to do list for tomorrow, in the meantime, here's a peek at all our finished and half finished journals, made as birthday or other occasions presents. Some have decorated pages within, but most are left blank for the recipient to decorate as they see fit. Sorry about the dark picture, it looks like we can't afford electric! It's all those coffee sachets Wilbear keeps buying!


With love from the bears

WOYWW - long time no post

Well hello there. We're joining in with WOYWW for the first time in ages. Wilbear is so stressed with uni work that the blog is sadly neglected lately. Although Horace and Cedric do their best to prise Wilbear away from study so they can play.

Cedric managed to commandeer the desk whilst Wilbear was having a short nap in between studying today, although so far all he's managed to produce is a mess.



Horace bought some fab new art doll stamps and let Cedric have first play with them, we think this was a ploy as the stamps came unmounted and Horace hates when the foam mount sticks to his fur. Anyway, Cedric is just happy to get a turn at the desk and seems happy enough stamping away and creating an art doll. We wonder what he'll make with it?

To the right of Cedric you can see a new glue pawchase, a cheap table cloth to go under the paper desk protector (£1 from the aptly named Pound shop) and a great new magazine called Daphne's Diary, which we ordered a while back after seeing it on an Instagram feed.

Anyway, we're off for a little desk hopping before Wilbear insists he needs to study again. Ttfn.


With love from the bears

Ditto, ditto!

Hullo there. I guess we've all heard of Smash books? Well Horace has been debating whether to buy one for a while and while pawrusing sites that sell such goodness he came across this;


It's called Hampton Art Ditto and is a Smash type/ project life concept. You pawchase an empty ring bound chipboard album and add to it. There are pre made inserts in the Ditto range and Horace bought himself an 8.5 by 11 insert pack to get started. It has pockets, library inserts and journal and calendar pages.


He started to fill the album from the pack but then had a brainwave. Why not cut up scraps of 12 x 12 card and patterned paper and just add your own inserts


He punched holes in the cards and papers with his ebear purchase of a Cinch and even added some junk for a really unique journal.


Here's one of the sticker sheets from the insert pack, some of it is perfectly useable, some may not be utilised, but for £14.99 it's given a great start to the album.


This is the calendar page, with space at the bottom of the page to write impawtant engagements. The back of this sheet is lined so you could add journalling of a special event, or even add photos.


Horace was a bit bored of traditional 12 x 12 scrapbooking, and thought they took up a lot of storage space in the bear bungalow. Also, he wanted to try Smash books but didn't like a lot of the spiral bound, ready patterned papers. This neat folder can be filled with Smash type pages, more detailed, journalled pages, art journal pages and quick project life style pages, all in one book. He was so enthusiastic about this new idea that he quickly threw together a page whilst waiting for his toast to pop up from the toaster.


With love from the bears