Randomly hopping the bloghop

If you are looking for my OWH bloghop entry, please scroll down one entry to see my card.

I've been looking through the many beautiful cards in the Operation Write Home bloghop, and there are so many ideas that I couldn't possibly remember them all! So I took a tip from another blogger and plugged the blogs into random.org. It gave me a number from 1-132 and I used the card in that blog for inspiration to make my own. And since it's Memorial Day today, I'm trying to stick to the red-white-blue theme.

The first number random.org produced was 93 - the Fiskateers blog. Now that's a good place for me to start! Border punches and shaped scissors are two of my favourite tools, and their simple patriotic card used both (I decided to just use scissors on mine.) I mounted a patriotic sticker onto white cardstock, trimmed it down with my favourite pair of edging scissors and added a touch of red and blue ink. The rosette is raised off the card with some scrap cardstock behind it (popdots are really too thick) and my card was done.

The next cab off the rank is #12 - Lisa's blog Stuff-n-such.  She probably won't recognise her card as my inspiration because she used a Cricut cartridge and a bunch of bling... but I took her basic design and transformed it into a patriotic card. I played around in my supplies and transformed her design into something that would work for my self-challenge. The paisley became a starry patterned paper, and I used a cuttlebug border die to make the 'ribbon'. I wanted to use this heart sticker but it was too small and it looked a bit silly on the card by itself, so I backed it with a scattering of metallic heart stickers and that made it much more of a focal point. Finally, the card needed a little something more, so I dug out my tiny lettering stamps and added an extra sentiment. The biggest challenge with those tiny stamps is getting the wretched things to stick to the acrylic block. They keep sliding around and falling off!

I'd love to do another few cards but I have a shoulder injury and it's telling me that I've been reaching and lifting quite enough for now. I'll come back to this later on.

It's bloghop time! OWH Memorial Day Bloghop

Time for another blog hop... I almost had to miss out on this one - we were supposed to be out of town, but we had to cancel at the last minute. So here I am to wish you a happy memorial day weekend on behalf of Operation Write Home. If you're following along in order, you should have come from Jennifer's blog - Ink n Scrap Habits. If not, click on the image above to go back to the beginning, or follow along from here.

The theme for this weekend is Missing You cards. I used a pre-printed card base, but covered all but a tiny border with my own cardstock (the back has a 'shadow' pattern printed on it so if they flip the card over it's decorated too.) I used my three favourite techniques for decorating - an reverse-inked embossed sheet for the background using bright cheery orange and golden yellow ink, punch art flowers, and I finished with a few carefully chosen metallic stickers for some bling. (the centers of the flowers are tiny stickers, and the butterfly is metallic orange.) The sentiment is stamped directly onto the cardstock in basic black.

Off to your next blog now - Patty has something for you at her blog Psmitty Papercrafts. But before you go here's your little surprise. Take careful note of it!

PS. People have been asking how to do the reverse embossing. It's simple. Just run your cardstock through the embossing machine, and then flip it over and ink up the BACK of the sheet instead of the front. The ink will go onto the flat parts of the cardstock and stay out of the holes.

More brown cards

I know it's not Autumn yet, but I love the browny vintage colours, even if I never make fussy lacy cards!

Martha Stewart border punch $4 at Ross! Butterfly is a metal charm, and sentiments are from a printed sheet.

Trying out my texture plates. Top card uses a diecut.

And just so you know that I don't ALWAYS make brown cards here's a couple of oddments with my new border punch.

Cards... at last!

We were both sick for three weeks so I didn't make any cards for a long time. This week I got a surprise package of rubber stamps, and I had a play with them. I've never used large background stamps before and I didn't have any luck in stamping them. I was about to give up in despair when I thought of using the Bigshot to compress them. They didn't fit in with the white backing, but I have a felt piercing mat that was just the right thickness to make up a sandwich - I used the clear mats on the outside, the black embossing mat and black plastic pad, and my felt piercing mat with the stamp and cardstock in the middle and when you added them altogether I got a perfect image! I tried it with a few other stamps and it didn't work so well - they were too thin still. But it worked great with the full-sized background stamps that I was just given.

Here are the cards I made... I finished them with some gorgeous diecuts I got on clearance at Michaels last month. They're so cute that I wish I'd bought more packets! The 'brown' is actually gorgeous metallic copper on acetate and it makes wonderful cards. I love metallics! The flowers have glitter on them but that's okay - I just can't send them to Operation Write Home. I want to make some cards for church and that's a start. There are two skills I have that are of value to other people - cooking/baking, and making stuff... I need to stop worrying about what other people might thing and use them.