Memories of New Orleans

Greetings from snowy Massachusetts - we are in the middle of a blizzard and I'm having fond memories of a warmer climate! The challenge this week for Our Creative Corner is a Mardi Gras photo.

I have to admit, this one stumped me good. I don't have anything in my stash that goes along with this theme. But I do have photos from when Todd and I visited New Orleans last April, so even though it wasn't Mardi Gras then, I decided to go with that and use the colors and style of the photo to create a scrapbook page in My Digital Studio. The layout is from an MDS challenge blog called MDS Monday.

Hm, not my favorite MDS page I've ever done - it's been a while and I felt a little rusty. But I do like the gold glimmer paper as the background, and the colors are bright and fun - much better than the winter wonderland outside my window!

I know the DT has some fabulousness to show you over on the OCC blog so be sure you stop by to see their creations. Then put on your party hat and celebrate this fun challenge along with us! Have a great weekend, and if you're like me and suffering through the blizzard this weekend, stay safe and warm out there!

Birthday Princess

It's Saturday again - Our Creative Corner time! This week Sharon has a number challenge for us - use a number prominently on your project. I dithered around and finally decided to do a birthday scrapbook page with My Digital Studio.

One of my favorite features of MDS is that you can choose colors from your photo to make everything coordinate. I picked up the pink from the crown for lots of accents and the purple from Sarah's dress for the background. I also use the opacity setting a lot - I lightened the purple quite a bit, then used it again for the toile overlay stamp. The result looks like subtle patterned paper.

I hope you'll play along with our numbers challenge this week - get creative with it and share the result with us! And don't forget to visit the OCC blog to see what the rest of the team came up with!

Live, Laugh & Love for my dad

OK, well, it's been another crazy week around here. My cold either came back after I thought I was over it, or I caught another one, and we had two days of snow... needless to say, not much stamping was going on. But I'm happy to be hosting the challenge at Our Creative Corner this weekend! My challenge for you is to use a tree image on a clean and simple (CAS) card. I hope you'll come play along!

I didn't plan it this way, but this challenge worked out really well for making a birthday card for my dad, whose birthday is today. (Happy birthday, Dad!) The colors are from the Color Throwdown: Early Espresso, Bashful Blue, Crumb Cake, and So Saffron. I took the tree image from Plant Hope and stamped it several times (first and second generation) with espresso ink, then sponged the edges. Behind it I used a panel of Bashful Blue DP (also sponged) and a saffron card base 5 1/4" square. To get the texture I actually stamped on the card base with the same paper towel I'd done my sponging with. I added a tab made with the modern label punch and a blue button (retired) tied with dark brown embroidery thread.

Last came the sentiment from On Your Birthday. I really wanted a label-style shape for this sentiment, but nothing I had was the right size. So I went into My Digital Studio, created a designer label punch in the size I wanted, printed it out, and cut it out by hand. Now the sentiment fits perfectly - and you can get any size shape you want using this method. To outline the edges I added some faux stitching before putting it all together on the card.

Be sure you go check out the creations from our fabulous team - we have such an inspiring group of artists and I know you'll enjoy seeing their work. Then please share your own card with us - we love to see what you create!

Online Spectacular Sale!

Stampin' Up! has some great deals for you this week - 20 to 50 percent off a selection of fabulous products! This includes My Digital Studio and the new collections of Christmas fabric at half off, plus tons of bundles of stamps, accessories, tools, Big Shot dies, and lots more. Click here to see what's on sale - now through November 30.

While you're there, take a look at all the other great stuff that's available for the holidays - because if your online order is $150 or more, your shipping is free! That's a savings of at least $15, plus you get hostess benefits, too!

And if your wish list is like mine - bigger than you can afford, LOL - then maybe it's time to think about becoming a demonstrator. Also through November 30, you get the starter kit - more than $300 in fabulous product - for just $87.50! Signing up now gets you demonstrator privileges through March 31, 2011, with no further sales required. If you decide to continue as a demonstrator the quarterly sales requirement is just $300. I'm here to answer your questions at any time, and if you're ready to sign up, just click here and enter "divastamper" as the recruiting password.

Don't wait to take advantage of these great offers - these kinds of sales and opportunities don't come around very often!

Pumpkin Patch

Welcome to the first November challenge for Our Creative Corner! This week we have an inspiration challenge from our November hostess, Jennifer Meyer. It's a photo of pumpkins decorated with faces, and when I first looked at the photo, I thought, "pumpkins... faces... scrapbook page!" So my project this week is a page I designed in My Digital Studio, using some photos from my trip to the pumpkin patch with my kids. I recommend clicking on the photo to enlarge it since the thumbnail may look a little pixellated.

A few days ago I was browsing my old Stampin' Success magazines looking for ideas for my workshop and card buffet, and I came across an article where a designer had found the inspiration for scrapbook page layouts in various packaging. I decided to try this approach for my own layout. One of the ICs on SCS had used a great site called Lovely Package, and it's always fun to browse. My layout came from this meat packaging (yes, really, meat). It seemed like a great layout for using several photos, and I knew I had a few good ones that I could use.

This is a pretty basic page... I'm still new at this, you know! ;) I used a pumpkin pie background paper and decreased the opacity to lighten the shade. My stamps are from Holiday Blitz, and I also put the Basic Black Distressed stamp over everything to get the distressed edges. The only embellishment is a Button Latte button, with a pumpkin pie grosgrain ribbon knot. (I hope we get some other possible ties for our buttons in a future download - I hate leaving them naked!)

I hope you'll play along with us, and don't forget to check out all the fabulous work from the rest of the OCC design team! Thanks so much for stopping by today!

Black (and Red) Velvet (or Suede)

The month is just flying by - I can't believe it's time for my fourth OCC challenge. (I'm lucky enough to get five Saturdays so you aren't done with me yet!) This week we are honoring Halloween with a special challenge. I had to put a twist on it, of course - so my challenge is to make a card or project that's inspired by a scary book or movie. As you'll see from my sample, it's OK if your creation isn't Halloween related.

I had a little help from Todd on this one, seeing that Halloween is his favorite holiday and he loves all things related to Halloween and mad scientists and nineteenth-century British literature... but I digress... I am really not a fan of spooky stuff, but I still thought this would be a cool challenge. The first thing that came to my mind was the story by Edgar Allen Poe called "The Masque of the Red Death." The story progresses through a series of seven apartments, the last of which is the most important to the story, and it's described in this way:

The seventh apartment was closely shrouded in black velvet tapestries that hung all over the ceiling and down the walls, falling in heavy folds upon a carpet of the same material and hue. But in this chamber only, the color of the windows failed to correspond with the decorations. The panes here were scarlet -- a deep blood color.

That description is what inspired my card. Well, that, and a card I made in My Digital Studio while I was working on my certification this week. I actually made that card before I made this one, but I kept returning to that idea as I was thinking about this challenge and ended up with some of the same elements. I'll show that card a little later in the post. Now back to the challenge...

I started my card with the red damask print from the Christmas Cocoa specialty paper in the mini catalog. I used it as the background and also stamped the ornaments from Tree Trimmings onto the paper with black craft ink and embossed with clear EP. After I cut the ornaments out, I adhered them to whisper white cardstock with dimensionals and added the hanging strings.

Black velvet cardstock would have been really cool on this card, but since I didn't have any, I made some faux suede cardstock instead. (This was the technique challenge on SCS a couple weeks ago.) I did have some red velvet ribbon that's been in my stash for a while. The sentiment (from Christmas Punch) was also embossed and then layered on a die-cut from Lots of Tags, which I saw on this lovely card from Andrea Walford. My final touches are a wooden glittery snowflake that came in a pack I picked up on clearance last year at Cost Plus World Market. I thought they might come in handy someday! I added a Stampendous sticker to the center of the snowflake and used the Scribbles Swirl die to further embellish it.

So there you have it - my Poe-inspired Christmas card! How's that for crazy? ;) I hope you'll take on this challenge - have fun with it and just go wherever it takes you! And be sure you stop by the OCC to check out the samples from the rest of our awesome team!

Now, if you're still with me, here's the card I created in MDS. I used the same colors and the same Tree Trimmings ornaments. The sentiment is from the "stamp" set Wishes & Greetings (these are actually rub-ons in the catalog) and the rest should be pretty self-explanatory! I'm having a lot of fun learning more about this program as I go through certification. I even sent this card off to be printed, and I'll be so excited to get some copies of it to mail off this Christmas!

I think I might be hooked

I'm home from the regionals in Portland yesterday - which was so fun! - and I'm a little under the weather. Since it was a rainy day and I wasn't feeling up to doing much, I decided to crack open the My Digital Studio software that arrived last week. I'm going to get certified, and I'm sure I have a lot more to learn, but I wanted to share the very first scrapbook page I made with the program.

I started out by watching some of the training webinars SU has made for demos. Well, it wasn't very long before I had the program open and was playing around with it myself. I started out with a template page from the Happy Birthday scrappin' kit, but then I changed the background and took out a whole bunch of the elements that were there and added my own. Obviously there is lots of room to add more, but I decided not to go crazy my first time out. And I'm liking a cleaner and simpler look more and more these days anyway.

This was so fun, and really easy. I have to stress, I have never done digital scrapbooking before. Heck, I've hardly done traditional scrapbooking. But this was very simple to do, and I love the result! Stay tuned as I learn more about what this program can do. So far, I am really impressed!