Pretending I'm a Cottage Lady

A side blog for all my scrapbooking and card making pictures. Often made while listening to lo-fi music. Let's pretend I'm a cottage lady and not a city girl with an office job.

[pretendcottagelady]

Welcome! Stay for Crafts

Welcome to my crafting blog, or rather the place where I put pretty pictures of my pages, my cards and whatever I get in the mail because I have no self control.

[pretendcottagelady]

Painting Girl Card

This card is actually one of a set that I'm in the middle of making at the moment.

I'm not sure why, I wanted to see if I could make a set from one loop of tape. This is though, the type of card where one or two images are the focus and there are flowers circling it.

Also, the colours on the rainbow is very 80s.

[pretendcottagelady]

Tulips and Paints

I think this is from a tape set I used last year.

This also was an experimentation on how I would just fill out a card with images rather than use one or two main images and then frame that image.

The first method will mean that I use very little of one tape, but a lot more of another tape. It's not a bad thing, but if I want to use up a tape in my collection (because this roll was huge) I would like to decorate with just one of the rolls.

What I had to learn was to pick one image to place in the middle and then spread out from there. Slotting more images in where I could.

[pretendcottagelady]

Morning Coffee Card

The other thing that card making is reminding me of is how much I like doing these borders with flowers. I find it very satisfying to cut the tape edges and then find places to put them back on to create this border.

It's also the reason why I like working with washi tape, it's much easier to cut. You can do this with PET tape, but it will dull the blade faster and you need the blade to be particularly sharp with PET tapes.

[pretendcottagelady]

Foxy Food Card

If the theme on this card looks familiar, it's because it's the Cat Knows lunar new year tape that I used back in February.

One of the nicer things about working with smaller card stock is that if I need to make a card from scratch for someone, it takes less time to design.

Someone I know was moving away, and he is one of those people who brings a community together, and so I wanted to make a card for him. He was talking about how he is moving to a place with a lot of good eating spots, and so I thought this theme would be better suited for moving away.

[pretendcottagelady]

Gold Gilded Bird Card

The other reason why I spent so much time card designing, when I didn't need to is because it gave me a good excuse to use tape I that I have bought and not used.

This particular one, is an old Washi Tape Shop tape, which I believe is no longer in print. I bought it because it's really rare to find washi tape that is gold gilded. Most tapes, if they have anything shiny on them are PET tapes, which I don't generally like using for card making.

This is because I don't like giving people cards that have that plastic glare to them, though I have found recently that holographic tapes or tapes with a lot of shiny on them tend to be less noticeable. I assume because there's so much shiny on it anyways that a bit of plastic glare isn't a big deal.

[pretendcottagelady]

Hydrangea Card

In the beginning of May, I finally got around to buying small card stock. This is something I wanted to do for a long time because I had ran out of my white card stock. Not only that, but I had worked with the full size card stock you'd normally get for greeting cards.

This was actually too much space to work with, and I also wanted to design cards that did not need anything written in the front. Generally because I can't write straight to save my life and at the time my lettering was pretty bad. It's gotten better, but I'd rather not.

I had actually ordered a pack of small card stock back in early December, and ended getting receiving the envelopes and no cards. Did get a refund for it, they didn't want what they sent me back, so I have no idea what to do with those.

But the point is, I didn't have anything but kraft paper card stock, and if you're familiar with washi tape, that stuff is a bit translucent. This means the colour you see is really the result of the white background, putting it on kraft paper will desaturate the colours. So, I really, really wanted this white card stock.

It came in, and I was reminded how much fun I had designing cards like these. So, I now have a lot of them and will post them up.

I have to figure out at some point what the fuck I am going to do with them, maybe give them away to co-workers who need cards.

[pretendcottagelady]

New Journal for July to December 2026

Now here is a brand of journal I have not used since the first year I started journaling, which is weird. Then again, I don't own a lot of Notebook Therapy notebooks, despite the fact they offer free shipping.

I bought this one when it restocked on the website, because I really wanted the sleeping fawn on the cover. It should also be noted that this is also the second time I've bought a Notebook Therapy journal that has a soft velvet like cover on it.

Actually the last one was also brown if I recall correctly... huh.

When I first started I used to do a lot more writing journaling. As I've taken on more digital writing projects and doing more things, I've had less time to write. Writing about life has shrunk down to just my weekly highlight section, which is really there just to continue to encourage me to consider what does happen throughout the week.

But before I had done a lot more, as a result, journals with a 192 pages have been my preference, but I can now easily work out of this one which is 176 pages, and may still get leftover pages?

[pretendcottagelady]

June Work Journal Layouts

The theme this time around was tea, though I did have to steal a few stickers from the bakery/sweets tape. It's all the same brand, which is why it's seamless.

[pretendcottagelady]

Finished Jan - Jun 2026 Journal

At some point I am probably going to have to design journal themes around material paper, because I did not use any this time around. In all fairness, despite the fact I love material paper, it takes more effort for me to use.

So make of it what you will.

The reason why I mention material paper is because you can kind of see where it is getting a bit thick, but it's not as thick as it could be. Part of it is due to it being a B5, I find that B5 and square journals don't become obviously bulky, whereas with A5s, even if all you use are stickers and tape, it is far more noticeable.

Also, why did I not get a good side view when I first took a picture of the journal six months ago?

[pretendcottagelady]

Month in Review

I think this is more room than what I would normally give this set up, but that's probably because it is the end of the journal.

My journals, regardless of the size, is designed with 6 months in mind.

Though honestly with how big B5s and square journals tend to be, they could probably fit more than 6 months. The problem is, they wouldn't fit a year comfortably for me unless I migrated other parts of it out into a different journal, but anything less than 6 months is too many pages for another journal unless I wanted to keep it into the new year.

Of course, I could probably find other things to fill the journal... maybe...

[pretendcottagelady]

June Weekly Logs

It's really in the weekly logs that the size of the journal shines on most themes. There's always a chance you'll use every bit of it, even though I technically, in the same breath, probably do not need this much room.

[pretendcottagelady]

Housekeeping Tracker

Do not ask me what the gnarly spelling mistake is about in the title, I decided to live with it. While I do have a lot of scraps that could be used to cover it, I just couldn't care.

Randomly I'm always amazed by how photographing the pages makes everything look more seamless. There's places where the two tapes don't quite match that isn't as noticeable.

Also washi far more easily melts into the page.

[pretendcottagelady]

June Monthly Log

I have a sneaking suspicion that once I work through all the large journals I have, I may start working solely out of A5s.

Originally, I had leaned towards larger journals because I had some stickers/tape that were quite large (still do technically). More importantly, my writing was kind of on the large side. It has gotten smaller as the years and practice in cursive has worn on, which has changed how much room I need.

[pretendcottagelady]

June Monthly Cover

Normally when I make a journal theme, it depends on whatever I have in my collection and then I choose the ink for the pen around that. For whatever reason I decided I wanted this vivid green grass ink for June, which meant I needed to find something in my collection that would fit it.

Which is how I ended up with this design. There were leftover tapes however, which are sitting in a box. I need to spend some time going through it and scrapbooking with it or something...

[pretendcottagelady]

A Finished (Sort of) April Tracker

I had back in April posted a mainly blank page with a sticker sheet full of cherry blossoms. This is because I didn't feel like colouring anything at the time, and decided it was much more practical to set down a sticker for every day that I did do exercise.

The dots between represents 5 minutes of movement.

Unfortunately, you'll notice I didn't manage to put down all the stickers this time around, and that's because my schedule had changed and I'm still trying to adapt to it.

Complicating matters is the fact I had caught an out of seasonal cold. In which I discovered that working through an infection can be easier than working through a cold, because at least you can breath with an infection.

Unless it's your lungs, then you're out of luck.

As much as I dislike the idea, I may have to scale back and build myself up again. In fact, I didn't actually draw or set up a June exercise page, the page exists but I am still deciding on amounts.

It's most likely I'll cut the amount into half, making it ten minutes. Meaning one go around on a regular colour averages to ten minutes a day, and if I colour all the dots into gold (meaning I did a second pass) that means I managed 20 minutes a day on average.

At least, I think that would be the ideal.

[pretendcottagelady]

Working Journal Pages

The theme is yarn I guess? I had these stickers and wanted to make frames out of everything, which was the only reason why I did this.

Yes, there is a week missing because I'm on holidays for a week.