How did I go two whole weeks without making an entry? I made a bunch of cards but they never made it as far as my blog... last week I was making cards for our local cat rescue group 'Beyond Nine'. I sent them a package of 55 assorted greeting cards to use for fund-raising. Here are some of the ones I made for them. Most of these use recycled images from gift books or advertising materials.

Stars and Stamps Wednesday

This week Stars and Stamps has a floral inspiration... and it just so happens that I made three cards that fit the bill perfectly - without ever having seen the inspiration photo! I helped with a children's scrapbooking workshop at the library and the children's librarian had all sorts of goodies to play with - including a bunch of lovely tropical Stampin' Up images. And at the end of the afternoon she told me to take my pick! (She got them at the thrift store for three bucks a set and I told her how very lucky she was...) I didn't want to be greedy so I took a selection of masculine 'sports' stamps for manly cards, and half of the lovely tropical flowers for my flower-loving girly heart. I didn't really NEED any more flowers or leaves, but they were too pretty to resist...

The first card is a thank you card for Jo, and the other two are for OWH.

Berry Special

Our internet kept going down today... so I played with Make the Cut instead of messing around online. I spent all afternoon working on a card with strawberries. The first card uses the cut file and the second uses the negative image - I just printed out another 'berry' and drew in the centers of the letters. I'd share the file with you, but I don't know how... Make the Cut is pretty easy to use, but it has a steep learning curve for making your own images from scratch. I keep trying to use it like photoshop but it's not a drawing program. You have to import stuff to it or use 'basic shapes' to make your stuff. The clipart berry I used only had one stem - the other was hollow. I filled it in, and then I copied the green stem, flipped it, and stretched it to shape. I spent AGES trying to get the 'fit' right on the background layer.Then I decided I didn't need the background after all and deleted it. I'd love to share the file with you since the whole card took four hours to design... but I'm afraid I don't know how to get it out of the program or into my blog.

Playing with Make The Cut

John bought me the Make The Cut software for my Cricut and I've been figuring out how to use it... I downloaded a bunch of dingbat fonts so I'd have some graphics to play with, and away I went.

Here's my first MTC card, with a butterfly from a dingbat font. The pink paper is shimmery metallic and I chalked the butterfly. This purple is actually magenta but it scans in a funny shade.

And here's something I'm very proud of - my very first made-from-scratch project. I drew up the tag shape myself and figured out how to cut out the decoration... then I made a 'shadow' layer to go underneath it. It might not be very big or elaborate, but there's a steep learning curve represented here!

You can do a LOT with this little program and a USB cable... if you have a cricut I'd highly recommend it, because it lets you use ANY TrueType Font to cut. And you can also make your own graphics, as you see, and you can import drawings from Illustrator and turn colouring pages into graphics when you know what you're doing.  You can find out more about Make the Cut here.

Pure Stamping

I've been playing with my stamps this week and I've made a bunch of cards that are ONLY stamped as part of the Stamphaven Summerhaven celebration (there was a challenge to do pure stamping and one to make blue birthday cards and one to make a card about staying cool in the summer... The first trio of cards also happens to fit into the Stars and Stamps midweek challenge for this week - Something Tasty. :)