Thinking of You

I feel like I start every post with an apology - my life is just too crazy right now. So I'm going to stop apologizing - I know I'm not going to have time to stamp as much as I want to for the next few weeks, which I hate, but that's the way it is right now... Anyway, here's my card for this week's challenge at Our Creative Corner. Our host this week is Kristin Tierney and she has a 1-2-3-4 challenge for us: one piece of patterned paper, two layers (not counting the base), three stamps and four embellishments. This was a tough one - but I enjoy a good challenge!

I wanted to pick a stamp that could mostly stand on its own, so this flower from Thoughts and Prayers came to mind. I colored the leaves with Wild Wasabi marker (so the color would be softer) then stamped the whole image with Rich Razzleberry and cut out the flowers. Yep, kind of insane even for me! The sentiment comes from the same set. The border strips are a MS punch that I trimmed and adhered to the back of the stamped panel - that way it's still one layer, LOL. My DP is wasabi, which I stamped with the swirl from Baroque Motifs. Once I had all that, I didn't have much room left for embellishments so I stuck with four little razzleberry buttons threaded with embroidery floss.

I hope you'll take on the challenge - I promise you it'll teach you a thing or two! ;) Be sure you go look at the rest of the team's creations, which are always gorgeous. Thanks for stopping by!

The Twelve Days of Christmas (Cards) - Day 4

This was a toughie today... I had a hard time finding a challenge that was suitable and not a whole lot of time! Finally I happened on the Viva la Verve sketch challenge and I decided I could make that work. It was also a limited supply challenge, and it wasn't easy, but I did it! The limits were one (type of) embellishment, two cardstock colors (plus a neutral), and three stamps.

I'd seen a swap card at the Portland regional that used the five petal punch to make a poinsettia. I've since seen the idea elsewhere, so I think it's caught on! I decided to try it on today's card. I punched two real red flowers and two garden green flowers, then on the red ones I scored each petal, folded them in half a little for dimension, and sponged real red ink on the edges. I put the red flowers together with a very vanilla 5/16" brad and then added the "leaf" flowers behind them.

The largest circle is made with Stampin' Up! products - but not what you might think. The large scallop circle comes from the scallop circle #2 die; the inside circle is traced from a chipboard circle and cut out. Inside the vanilla circle I stamped the snowflake from Delightful Decorations several times with chocolate chip. The sentiment is from the large block stamp in Season of Joy, and for my third stamp I used the French Filigree background with garden green ink and cardstock. The designer paper is from Merry Moments.

Gotta run... I'm just in time for the bus dropoff! Whew, I'm glad that came together quickly! Thanks for visiting, and don't forget to leave a comment so you can enter to win the surprise Christmas blog candy that I'll give to one person who commented sometime during my Twelve Days of Christmas challenge!

Hoppy Thoughts

I'm on a roll... I've made a card each day for three days. How long do you think I can keep it up? :)

Here is today's, for the limited supply challenge. The challenge was to use either your high school colors or your wedding colors. Well, no offense to my high school, but I never liked the colors of gold and black. So I went with my wedding colors, which were navy and yellow. I added white, which we definitely had a lot of, and green, which was certainly there in the leaves of the flowers, at least!

I decided to use the latest Cupcake Challenge from Taylor (welcome back, Taylor!) for my layout. I was still kind of in a Copic mood, so I chose one of the images from A Flower from All Seasons that I thought would work with these colors. I used Y21 lightened with Y000 to approximate barely banana; B37 and B39, with a bit of shading with B21, for night of navy; YG97 and YG99 for the stems, leaf, and frog, to go with old olive; and E74 and E77 for the flower centers. Then I added a bit of a shadow at the bottom and blended it with the colorless blender, maybe too much because I'm not sure you can even see it! The frame was made with Nestabilities and mounted over the image with dimensionals. The LSC also required us to use some "vintage" hardware - I chose this spiral clip and a bit of olive ribbon.

For the rest of the card, I stamped a banana card base with the canvas BG in banana ink. I added a strip of retired olive DP and a sentiment from Teeny Tiny Wishes. To tie in the copper hardware I put three brads along the embossed line of the white circle, then I adhered the sentiment circle to the frame and adhered the whole thing with dimensionals.

That's it - sticking with a cleaner and simpler look today. Thanks for visiting!

June stamp club

I had my most recent club meeting this past weekend - the final one of this session. We'll start back up in September with a four-month club to coincide with the holiday mini catalog. We had some really fun projects for this meeting and I wanted to share them.

For our 3-D project we made this fun Top Note purse. This was the SCS demo challenge project from last Friday and it's so cute! It would fit some 3x3 cards or some kind of small favor. We used the Top Note and scallop circle dies, Parisian Breeze specialty paper, chocolate chip ribbon, pewter jumbo eyelets, and a flower made from the scallop punch and a corduroy button. The design was greatly inspired by another purse that was made by zipperc98.

I really love this card. We did the background with the rolling marble technique and used one of the new hostess sets from the upcoming catalog called Wings of Friendship. The bird and flower stamp was partially inked with baja breeze and kiwi kiss, then the scrolls were colored with basic gray marker. This card also qualifies for last Friday's limited supply challenge - it was tough to work in brads so I had the idea of putting one of the larger brads through the bow. What do you think?

The last project was the flower pot pocket card that everyone has been making. We had a bit of a challenge with cutting the flower pots, so if anyone has a tutorial that shows cutting this with the tabletop cutter, please share! I used riding hood red, tangerine tango, so saffron, kiwi kiss, and chocolate chip cardstock and papers for the flowers, punched with the five petal punch. I wheeled the base of the flower pot with Lots of Dots, but one of my gals did her pot with the polka-dot paper and that was even cuter!

I'll be back posting club projects in the fall, but I hope to start showing you new catalog preview projects very soon - it's always exciting when the new catalog is coming and I can't wait to show you some of my favorites!

Another crazy week

I'm sorry that once again I've gone through most of the week without posting. I would love it if my schedule would just calm down a little... I am wrapping up an editing project over the weekend and I hope all that is on the horizon is more time to stamp!

Today I managed to squeeze in a challenge card. The limited supply challenge was to make a card with Soft Subtles colors and a spring flower. I decided to use blush blossom and sage shadow, and the Live Your Dream flower that I still love so much. But I did cheat a little - isn't everything better with chocolate? Chocolate chip, that is. It just needed something dark to ground the soft colors.

I started out by inking the flowers with the blush blossom pad and then wiping the ink off the stems with a baby wipe. I tried using the blush marker but it was just too pale. The chocolate chip covers the centers so you don't have to worry about that, and by the time you are ready to ink the stems they are dry. I used the side of the chocolate chip marker's brush tip to edge the flower petals. Then I stamped on very vanilla and cut and embossed with long rectangle Nestabilities. I decided to use textured cardstock on this card and layered the flowers on chocolate chip. (All the edges are sponged with chocolate chip on this card.)

The background is made up of a panel from the Cosmo Cricket Everafter collection - (have you seen these? Truly to die for. And they match SU colors quite well - this paper looks nice with sage shadow.) and a blush blossom cardstock panel embossed with the pretty pattern Cuttlebug folder. I covered the join with chocolate chip taffeta ribbon and then layered it onto chocolate chip cardstock and a top-folded vanilla card base. For another embellishment I had to use the vanilla half pearls from the Pretties Kit. I've been hoarding them a little but they seemed perfect here. The sentiment is from the new mini catalog set Ovals All, which works so well with the new scallop oval punch. To be able to layer the large oval punch makes me blissfully happy!

I hope I'll be back soon with another card to show you. Hope you have a great weekend!

What a week!

I am so happy to have something to post today! I worked like a maniac and got my freelance project out the door on time, and I finished a custom order that needed to go out yesterday. So I decided I would give myself this morning off to stamp. (And it's also my birthday... so that's my present to myself, LOL.)

My mom asked me to make a card for her aunt and uncle's 65th wedding anniversary. Wow, 65 years - isn't that inspiring? I also played the SCS limited supply challenge to make a card in 30 minutes or less and Sharon's Stamp Simply challenge to use heat embossing.

I was inspired to use night of navy based on the only information I could find about the traditional gift for the 65th anniversary - the star sapphire is apparently the gemstone for this anniversary. My mom wanted the numbers on the card so I took some chipboard numbers from Timeless Type, covered them with navy craft ink, and embossed with clear EP. This is so quick and easy, and the chipboard looks so great embossed.

I also embossed the flower image from Thoughts and Prayers, but this time I used Ranger cobalt Antiquities EP. The stamped and embossed image was just not intense enough in color for me otherwise. The cobalt is not quite the same color, but it doesn't seem to matter - it just fills out the color of the ink. For cutting out I used a large Nestabilities oval.

For the background I used a panel of navy cardstock dry embossed with the swirl SU texture plate. I chose to use soft sky as an accent color for the large panel and the scallop border on the Nestabilities oval. Then I added a sentiment from Hugs & Wishes, attached the oval with dimensionals and added the soft sky ribbon and bow, and glued the numbers onto the oval.

OK, my morning is flying by - I'm off to see if I can finish anything else before school pickup this morning. Have a wonderful day and weekend - I'm so glad you visited today!

How do I love thee?

That's the theme of this card, which I made for today's limited supply challenge and also to give to Todd for Valentine's Day. The challenge was to stretch ourselves and do things we don't normally do. So here are what I consider to be my "stretches" for this card:

The card size. It fits in a #10 envelope. I needed to make a card this size to fit Todd's Valentine's Day gift of some concert tickets, and since I've never made a tall and skinny card, that fit today's challenge perfectly!

Very little stamping. My initial idea was to cover the white rectangle with the word "love" over and over with the same set of rub-ons. But then I had the thought to use all the different rub-ons that I had, to fit with the Elizabeth Barrett Browning poem. I used three sets of American Crafts alphabet rub-ons, one set of American Crafts stickers, and the word "love" and more alphabet rub-ons from as many retired SU packs as I could lay my hands on. It still looked a bit sparse, though, so I filled in the spaces with more "love" words from any stamps I could find that had it on somewhere. I count six that are stamped. I just colored only that word with a basic black marker and stamped it where I wanted it to go. The two hearts are from the Always set, stamped in basic black and riding hood red.

Limited layers and a quite simple layout. I used the long rectangle Nestabilities and that's really it! I was surprised how much I struggled with placing the elements on the card - I couldn't believe how hard it was.

Finally, colored brads - I've had these American Crafts brads, which are a great match for riding hood red, for a very long time and I'd never cracked them open. I guess I just prefer metallic or neutral brads, but I should use these more often! (FYI, American Crafts also makes some that look great with baja breeze.)

I'll finish my card by putting the first two lines of the poem on the inside. I know Todd loves Romantic poetry and the Brownings, so I hope this will be a hit with him.

Oldies but goodies

That's the name of the limited supplies challenge today. It was supposed to be stamps that haven't been used in a while. Well, since I'm only two months old as a stamper, I decided that for me that would mean "stamps I bought off eBay that I haven't used yet." We were also supposed to use an old sketch challenge, an old color challenge, and one or two embellishments we've been hoarding.


I actually had a card from last week that qualifies - I just finished it today because I didn't have enough of the red rub-on dots to go all the way around and had to order some more. I think this is the wildest card I have ever made, so I'm curious to hear what folks think of it. Too over the top? I cut the red card first, and then realized that I'd really given myself a challenge - I don't own any truly red ink and none of the coloring tools I had were cutting it. I hope the red layer under the sentiment is enough to pull the color into the main part of the card. The other inks are Color Box ice jade and turquoise. The stamps are from Stampin' Up's Perfect Party, except for the Anita's sentiment. All the panels in the center are cut with deckle-edge scissors. I decided to add the silver star brads for fun - they started out only on the two A's in the sentiment, but it didn't seem like enough. Maybe now there are too many! The present is mounted on foam tape.


Now here's the new one - it's another card for Rachel. (She is going to have lots to choose from!) I chose the layout first, and then the stamp, which is from SU's Greetings Galore. It seemed to dictate a fall color scheme, so that led me to this combination of SU sage shadow, Vivid! coffee bean, and Color Box dune (subs for SU chocolate chip and sahara sand). The layout called for using a tag, and this is also something I've been hoarding and have never used. I distressed the tag and stamped the sentiment and then did a color wash with my sage ink. I used another leaf from SU's Year-Round Fun II as the background stamp. The mulberry paper was actually a recent gift from Rachel, so I thought she would enjoy seeing some of it on one of her cards. And the dot ribbon is something I've had for a while but had never cracked open. Hope you like it as much as I do!


Finally, in family news - our house is painted at last! It was actually finished on Wednesday but I just now had time to get some photos of it (before all those Midwest storms make their way out here). Here are some shots of the outside - it's a very similar color to what we had before, although the deck is a lighter gray now. It looks so nice and clean and fresh now, and the painters did an excellent job.