Creating with Kajikit

More cards for sale

2011-12-04T07:47:00.002-05:00

Last week I sold all of the gift boxes and 10 general greeting cards, and I made $50 for the church because the guy who bought all the envelopes was so generous he gave me $40 and wouldn't take change... and I have four people who told me that they will definitely be buying some today. So I sat down and made some more (after I went out and spent $10 buying some more glue! The ATG tape runner made 50 cards and expired.) I also bought a new Christian sentiment stamp on sale for four bucks. I think I'll get a lot of use out of it, especially if I keep on selling cards at the church. Right now I'm thinking that I'll repeat the card sales for each holiday that comes up and see how it goes.

In other news, I've ordered my christmas present online - I really wanted to get a $400 Zing cutting machine... but somebody put the Cricut Cake machines on sale for $50 each with two cartridges included, and I'm assured by people who have already bought one that yes, you can use it for paper if you change out the cutting blade for a 'paper' one instead and buy a sticky mat (the frosting mat is nonstick). Even with the extra cost of the mats and blade, it's less than $100 for a machine that can cut 12x24 (the one I've got now only does 5.5x11.5) I'm so excited!

Christmas Cards for sale

2011-11-27T08:12:00.000-05:00

Don't die of shock. I crafted! I've made 50 Christmas cards and 14 card-sized gift boxes to sell for a fund-raiser for my church. The gift boxes are easy once you figure out where to make the score lines... Want to buy any? Cards are $1 each, and if you buy 10 I'll throw in a free gift box.

We were challenged to use only $3 each for supplies for whatever we made/bought/came up with as our fund-raiser. I had $6 to play with because John gave me his. Cardstock is regularly going on sale at Joanns for $2 a pack, and the tape runner I use on my cards costs $3 each. I cut a few decorations with my Cricut, but most of them are punched or stamped. Miss Jo over at the library gave me a whole box of beautiful big Christmas stamps a few months ago, and they were a huge blessing for this project! I didn't use any bought papers - they were all either things people had given me, or I pulled them out of my scrap drawers. It was a real challenge to get into the swing of making cards with stamps and paper rather than all the fancy stickers and embellishments I reach for when cost is not an issue! But I'm very pleased with how they came out when I look at them together.
PS. If you're wondering where the envys came from (they're the most expensive part of a lot of cards), I got a huge stack of Hallmark envelopes for $2 at the thrift store last year. I probably got 500 envys for my $2. That makes them how much each? About 1/4 of a cent! lol These cards haven't even started to make a dent in the pile.


A mixed bag. Cards at the top are cut with my Cricut.


Poinsettias - this was a stamp that I cut out, with punched leaves behind it. I love the way it comes out.


Some traditional holly


Angels/Christian cards


Florida snowmen?

Gift Boxes

Monogrammed notelets and a quick tutorial

2011-08-14T08:23:00.000-04:00

One of the ladies at church wanted me to make her a set of monogrammed notelets, so I took the challenge on with my Cricut. I showed her a few samples last week and she chose the background and floral border punch, and asked me to put a relatively simple monogram in the center.

I wanted to do a classic oval monogram with her last initial in the middle and larger, but I couldn't make it work out the way I wanted it to, so I switched to the more modern rectangular format. But that was too plain, so I made a floral accent for the frame to spiff it up a bit. If she likes these, I have another dozen card bases prepped and waiting for their monogram. The hardest part of the challenge was finding an appropriate alphabet for the lettering. I wanted it to be curly and to SEEM ornate, but if the lines are too delicate or intricate the Cricut won't cut it without tearing the paper. The vine on the frame is really as fine as the Cricut can go. But I was very happy with it in the end, and I hope that Judy is too!

PS. Want to make the simple folder? It's dead easy - just take a regular sheet of cardstock and a scoring tool (I used a bone folder and a metal ruler.) Score the cardstock about two inches from the bottom, then score vertically in the center - but don't forget to do TWO lines so that your little folder will have a spine. Fold the bottom up and fasten the two ends of the flap into a pocket (I just used green staples), and use a hole punch to make small holes further up the cardstock on either side of the spine and on the outside of the card.

Thread a ribbon through the holes and it will serve to hold the contents in place and to fasten the folder closed at the same time. This folder will hold a dozen flat cards and envelopes if you use an 8-1/2x11 base. If you want make your folder thicker, you'll need to use a larger sheet of cardstock and trim it down to the height you need.

Kiddy cards

2011-07-27T21:54:00.000-04:00

Last year I bought a couple of 'sporty' paper packs and some diecuts... and I decided it was time to finally use some of them up and make some kid cards. Not at all my usual style, but fun once I decided what to do with them. I started making them before the challenge was posted, but these match last week's 'Cards for Kids' challenge on the Stars and Stamps blog.

Last cards for the weekend!

2011-07-04T23:41:00.001-04:00

We went out to watch the fireworks tonight, and here are some cards I whipped up after we got home. I didn't quite get all the challenges done - in the end I missed the photo inspiration challenge, because I don't have a colour printer to print out the (lovely) photo and I drew a blank when I tried to think about what to do on my own... but it's nearly midnight over here in Florida and I'm about to drop in my tracks, so that will do. My final tally for the weekend is 15 out of the 16 challenges, and 26 cards completed (plus a few false-starts). And my scrap basket looks like it's in imminent danger of avalanche because there's so much stuff piled on top of it. I'll have to clean all that mess up in the morning.

CHALLENGE 9 - EASY AS 1, 2, 3.

Maybe it's just me, but I didn't find this challenge easy! I usually use a bunch of patterned paper on my cards, and not many stamped images. For this challenge I had to set that aside and use ONE paper, TWO different stamped images, and at least THREE words in my sentiment. It took me a couple of attempts to make a card that would match all three criteria at once. I guess that's what happens when you're hurrying to try to finish something off so late at night! I made another card for this challenge but when I came to scan it, it had mysteriously acquired a big black mark in the middle of the printed sentiment, so I had to put it aside and start again. I got this paper at Joanns and I just love it. I stamped 'for me' with individual lettering stamps to finish the sentiment (it's not quite even but I hope that adds to the charm!), and I layered two seperate cats on top of each other. I love the way they came out, and I'll probably make more of this card when I'm not so tired.

CHALLENGE 12 - HAVE A FRUITY OR FOODIE 4TH

I found some diecuts that I assembled earlier, which would make perfect cards for this challenge, and my 'Nana's Nursery' cardstock pad had a cute strawberry sheet, so it didn't take long to whip these up.

CHALLENGE 13 - COLOUR ME CRAZY

This was going to be for the 1, 2, 3 challenge, but I realised the sentiment only had two words, so I brought in an orange cow to finish it off... I think it's cute.

Something fishy this way comes

2011-07-04T18:05:00.000-04:00

These two cards fit two challenges - Challenge 15 and Challenge 16. The first challenge was to make a card with a pun in the sentiment... the second was to use animals as your theme. That makes this pair a twofer... (and yes, that's yet more of the camo sheet transformed into waterweed. The card base went down crooked and I had to cover the bottom corner up so you wouldn't see the white underneath!

Mooning around yet again

2011-07-04T14:10:00.000-04:00

I literally dreamed this card up last night... I almost got up to make it at 3am, but I decided that it would keep till morning. At last, my train border punch gets put to good use. (You could also count this for the camo challenge, because I cut up one of the 'camo'-style sheets to get the dark moonlit green...)

4th July Weekend - Sunday

2011-07-04T08:13:00.000-04:00

Here are the last of the cards I made yesterday... I'm still way behind!

CHALLENGE 10 - TWIN CARDS

Sandy challenged us to make a matching pair of cards using the same paper/images, but reflecting different seasons. I was inspired by a sheet of double-sided paper in my collection. One side is spring green leaves and branches, and on the back it's transformed into a wintery blue. I had a matched pair of gingham ribbons and sparklies that sealed the deal!

CHALLENGE 11 - PINWHEEL CARD

Kate demonstrated yet another variety of pinwheel for her challenge - this one uses double-sided paper, and if you can get enough glue in the center to hold it firmly, it's super-simple. Since I already had some double-sided cardstock out from the last challenge, I whipped up a pair of pinwheels and made my cards. (the paper is white, but because the pinwheels are folded they pushed the rest of the card far enough off the scanner to add a big shadow.

CHALLENGE 13 - HEARTS AND/OR BEARS

How could I go past this one? One sheet of absolutely gorgeous printed paper, a few cuts, some distress ink for the edges, and a sentiment stamp, and I had three almost-instant Wintery cards to start off my box for the next challenge.

4th July Weekend - backing up to yesterday

2011-07-03T21:00:00.000-04:00

I didn't get any of today's challenges done yet because I had church all morning, and some errands to take care of in the afternoon. We also spent some time out by the pool with friends, even though it was very grey today - at least it wasn't raining! But I did make time to back up and do some more of the ones I missed out on yesterday.

Challenge 1 - Camouflage

I bought some camo paper at Joanns specially for making this card... and I used part of a sheet of military paper from the scrapbook shop. It needed something cute to finish it off, so I paper-pieced the little turtle stamp (boy that was fiddly!) and put it on the brown part of the camo paper for contrast.The browny paper is old gold metallic.

I also did Challenge 6 - Howl at the Moon.

I wondered how to get a moon on my card when I didn't have any stamps to use... but then I remembered this cute baby sticker, so I made a sweet little card for somebody's sweet little girl. The cloud paper is a scrap that's been sitting around in my 'pink' box for years waiting for its purpose in life, and it finally found it...

Vintage before and after

2011-07-03T13:45:00.000-04:00


BEFORE


AFTER

I really wasn't quite happy with how this card came out yesterday... I had a brainwave today, so I modified it slightly. I'm much happier with it now! The colours are much more unified, and the punched piece is no longer 'floating' in mid-air... and the butterfly serves more purpose too, because I carefully tucked the new sentiment block underneath the wing.

More 4th July Challenges

2011-07-02T23:15:00.000-04:00

It's getting mighty late so I'm just going to put these in one post, so I can get to bed. I didn't get all the challenges today, but I made a bunch of cards... I didn't get to the first challenge, to number 6, or the last challenge for the day, so I'll try to fit them in tomorrow. I'd like to get ALL the challenges done if I can!

Challenge 4 - What does freedom mean to you (Americana)

Make a patriotic card. Easy enough! This card was so easy it feels like cheating. Somebody gave me this country-style flag image a long time ago, so I coloured it in with markers and coloured pencils, and the card was basically done! I didn't like the blue swirly thing in the center of the star, so I covered it with a star-shaped button that adds a little extra interest to the card.

Challenge 5 - Vintage cards.
I wasn't quite happy with how my first card came out. I like the stamped background, but the sentiment bar is just kind of floating there and it doesn't tie in very well to the rest of the card...

Then I remembered that I had some lovely vintage diecuts, and I made a second card that came out much better.The diecut is basically olive green with a VERY pale image, so I used a fine tipped marker to lightly trace over the edges of the bird and vine, and I added a little pale pink colour to the flowers. Then I rubbed some distress ink over the top to pull it back into line with the rest of the card.

Challenge 7 - Subway Art.

Nobody was really quite sure what we were meant to do for this challenge, but the gist of it is to use different fonts and colours and to make a block of text the centerpiece of your card. At least that's what I got from it! I don't have a working printer atm, so I used a Thankyou stamp, and coloured in some of the lettering. The little hearts are punched out to add a bit more interest, and I tied a skinny red ribbon around the mat just to finish it off.

4th July Challenge 3

2011-07-02T20:43:00.001-04:00

Challenge Three is brought to us by Tanya... she's challenged us to Tie a Yellow Ribbon around this colour combination.

When I saw these lovely rich colours, I leaped to grab my coppery-orange metallic cardstock and a sheet of glittery yellow from DCWV (yes, it has glitter on it, but it's thoroughly embedded in plastic, so it's OWH-safe... how do you tell? - scratch a fingernail over the card as hard as you can and not a fleck comes off.)

My first card uses the now-familiar starburst design that was demonstrated on the Stars and Stamps blog a few weeks ago. I hope everyone isn't tired of it yet - it's a wonderful way to show off a bunch of different patterned papers in one card without it's seeming overcrowded and messy.I kept things super-simple so the papers could sing, and I love how it came out.

After I made my first card, I saw that everyone else was using an actual yellow ribbon on their cards... oops! Luckily I had another sheet of the dark brown cardstock, and after much fiddling around with the offcuts of the other sheets, I came up with a second design. (You'll see more of the dark brown and yellow in another challenge - I tried a few things before I was satisfied with my design.) This card features a baby-sized yellow bow. Believe me it was challenging to get it tied that small, but a big one was just too much of a good thing. I punched two holes in the paper and threaded the ribbon through, then tied a bow on the front. And it wasn't intended to have the skinny stripes on it - I was going to leave a white space between each paper and put some more of the yellow ribbon in, but the gap was uneven and it looked silly, so I covered it up with the offcuts, and fortunately THAT worked out okay.

Challenge 2

2011-07-02T13:38:00.001-04:00

Challenge 2 comes to us from the 2 Paw Prints blog. Sheila has challenged us to make a fishbowl card. I thought I had a sheet of patterned paper with a fishy pattern on it, but I couldn't find it, so I dug out my Cricut and I made one from scratch. A fishbowl is basically a circle with the top and bottom cut off, so it wasn't hard. I cut one out of cardstock to check that it would work, and then I made one with patterned paper. They both worked out fine, so I made two cards. The top card uses some cut-up vellum leaves for water-weed, and the bottom is cut from a scrap of patterned paper, and they both use stickers for the fish and shells.

4th July Weekend Party

2011-07-02T10:58:00.000-04:00

Operation Write Home is hosting a Challenge Party this weekend to celebrate the 4th July. They'll be linking to a new challenge every two hours today and tomorrow... and I'm going to see how many I can get done! See the Stars and Stamps blog for links to all the challenges as they go live.

Oh yes, and there are prizes!

Randomly hopping the bloghop

2011-05-30T12:25:00.001-04:00

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

2011-05-28T00:04:00.003-04:00

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

2011-05-21T08:58:00.000-04:00

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!

2011-05-17T21:07:00.000-04:00

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.

My new toy

2011-04-27T23:46:00.000-04:00

This is what came in the mail on Friday...

My first embossing templates arrived today... and I played with one this afternoon to see what it could do.


My first card. Simple embossed strips. The black and purple are punched but not embossed. Butterfly was a RAK. It would work out better if the card front was assembled and THEN embossed so that the pattern is continuous, but this looked okay with the other stuff on top of it.

I embossed a cardstock shield, then flipped the embossing over and inked up the reverse. I think I like it better this way than with the lines coloured! It needed a see-through sentiment that wouldn't distract from the embossing, so I used clear lettering stickers.

Embossed directly on a card base with a coloured outside and white inside, then sanded. I had to trim the edges down to neaten it, but the sanding hides the face that the embossing doesn't quite go all the way to the inside edge.

I made some cards this week

2011-04-25T20:18:00.000-04:00

My shoulder is finally better for real and I've been able to start making cards again. I designed a simple MOM card for the kids to make at the library and I spread the lettering out on the sheet so that I could use the negative space for myself. I've got another 18 in various colours still waiting to be used! If you're wondering about the butterfly, it's a lovely metallic sticker. I finangled some scrap cardstock into little hinges for the wings, and then I rubbed cornstarch on the back so that the sticker wouldn't stick to the card in the mailing box. The other cards are playing with simple punched shapes and scrap cardstock.

365 cards again

2011-04-05T08:26:00.001-04:00

My shoulder's better now, so I was going to do a catch-up and get all last week's cards done in one go, but they've changed Mr Linky and they're only keeping posts open for a week instead of a month like they used to. I guess I'll just start from Sunday and skip last week altogether, but my perfectionist streak is shouting at me about incompleteness. :( Cards coming today!

***
On the other hand, not. I thought I was up to cardmaking but I got one done and I was trying to do a second and my shoulder started screeching at me, and the card didn't even work out! This is soooo frustrating!

So much for trying to do 365 cards!

2011-04-01T19:38:00.000-04:00

Last year I was just getting started when I had to stop because I'd messed up my wrist/thumb and I had to take three months off crafting entirely so it could heal. This year I was going great... and last Saturday night I rolled over in bed and trashed my shoulder. So I can't make cards because I can't manage all the lifting and reaching it requires. I took this week off and it's halfway healed. I really hope that another week will be enough to fix it entirely, or I'll have to give up AGAIN!

365 Cards - Alphabet Week cont.

2011-03-27T10:02:00.002-04:00

Day 24 - Marker, Number, Orange
Day 25 - Polka dots, Quilting, Red

This isn't really as red as it looks... the frame is actually burgandy. I'm not entirely happy with how it came out. It looks like it needs something... but i have no idea what.

Day 26 - Stitching, Toile, White
The white paper is kind of toile, and of course entirely white. I adore this paper, and it's always hard to find a good way to feature it. I was going to use a toile-print ribbon but it clashed with the stitching colour, so I used a strip of toile paper and a skinny blue ribbon instead. It's not as elegant as I had in mind, but it's acceptable.

365 Cards, Week 4 - Alphabet Week

2011-03-23T18:27:00.002-04:00

For Alphabet week you get three things each day - use at least one on your card.

Day 21 - Alphabet stickers, Blue, Circle

I went simple on this card. The green and purple circle was a RAK - it was a bit TOO plain so I added the silver decoration around the outside. Then I outlined the lettering with the same pen. It kind of worked out the way I wanted... it'll do anyway!

Day 22 - Distressed, Envelope, Fringe

This card is pretty far outside my comfort zone, but I'm pleased with how it came out. I was going to add a purple vellum envelope, but it was just too much of a good thing, so I used punched stars instead.
I tied the eyelash fiber (fringe) around the card, but it looked a little plain so I knotted a pearl buckle into place. Then I added some tiny mother-of-pearl charms knotted onto the ends of the fibers. I put a tiny gluedot behind each star charm to hold them in place and keep them from rattling around in the envelope. btw, I don't know why the star scanned in brown - it's BLACK! And the swirls are metallic silver.

Day 23 - Grossgrain, heart, ink

If you think you've seen this card before it's because you have! When I scanned in my trio of minicards last week I realised that I glued the heart on upside down. Rather than cutting the card apart and remounting it, I turned it into a pocket and stuck a tag in it. The tag was cut freehand from a strip of cardstock and stamped pretty simply.
This card's a three-for. We have polkadot grossgrain ribbon, hearts galore, and plenty of ink on the tag.

365 Cards, Week 4 Sketchy Sunday

2011-03-23T14:50:00.001-04:00

Day 20 - Super Sketchy Sunday

I was going to use a printed card someone gave me for this challenge but it's too big to fit on the card base... have to think again!

And here we are. The sentiment was a RAK and I used some nice metallic cardstock and a punch to finish it off. The buttons came off an old tshirt that I just put in the rag bag.The white sticker strip is actually the scrap from another sheet, and the yellow flowers were punched from a piece of scrap cardstock, so this is a heavily recycled card!

365 Cards, Week 3 - day 18/19

2011-03-21T14:14:00.000-04:00

I thought I was done for the week but when I looked more closely at the challenge list I forgot to do number 19... oops!

Day 18 is 3x3x3 - make a set of three mini-cards that are 3-inches square.
And Day 19 is 'Crush'. Make a card with a romantic theme. I combined them both together to make this little trio of notelets. The embossed hearts were a RAK from a friend and they're red, not orange. Silly scanner!

365 Cards, Week 3 cont.

2011-03-21T08:36:00.009-04:00

I had a very busy week and didn't get these uploaded yet... (and my internet connection is being a BEAR today so I have to do this in very small bites.)

DAY 14 - Fresh-baked Goodness. You get a double-header for this one. These are both made from recycled images... I made a smudge when I stamped the brown, so I added a bunch of light distressing and it covered it all up perfectly. I love how it came out!

DAY 15 - Colour Scheme.

The card I made is much darker than it looks on the scan. It's not really brown, honest! It was a bit too dark and gloomy when I was done so I added a vellum sticker. I don't really like the way it came out, but the sticker isn't movable so I'm stuck with it! The green is inked, not dirty...

DAY 16 - Abstract Art

I had hoped to have the time to sit down and make a stained-glass window card for this challenge... but I didn't have nearly enough free time! So I went with one of my favourite techniques - the abstract/random background. Just press or drag your card on a multi-coloured ink pad and keep on going until you like the way it looks. The best thing about it is that it will never come out exactly the same way twice.

DAY 17 - AD INSPIRED (green all the way)

The general idea was to make a St Patty's card today but I didn't have any need for one. So I made a lovely spring green card instead. The caterpillar is cut with my Cricut 'Stretch Your Imagination' cartridge.

'Going Dotty'

2011-03-15T20:01:00.000-04:00

Stars and Stamps midweek challenge last week was to use polka-dots on your card. Here's one I did for the challenge... the mat is actually metallic pink lips so it's got a bit more zing to it than it looks like here.

365 Cards, Week 3

2011-03-14T22:09:00.005-04:00

Oops. I assumed that Sunday was the last day of the week because that's how I think of it... but I just discovered that the 365 Cards calendar counts Sunday as the FIRST day of the week. So I've messed up my card order already. Oh well. I'll do it right from now on. This means that I've already started week 3, and here's the first card.

Day 13 - Super Sketchy Sunday.

And here we are... this is way different from my usual style! I had the diagonal background already done, so I trimmed the corners and added an assortment of stuff that I also had already done. Then I grunged everything up except the butterfly, so I could tie everything together and still keep a strong contrast in the card. btw, the butterfly and flower were cut with my Cricut and the Make the Cut program.

Day 14 - Fresh baked goodness.

365 Cards, Week 2

2011-03-14T17:39:00.006-04:00

Okay, week one was completed in an afternoon... now for week 2.

Day 6 - Sketchy Sunday.
(I thought this was Week 1, but I had the weeks messed up so I've moved it to the right spot.

My card looks very simple but it was a LOT more hassle than it looks to get the lace and ribbon lined up properly. The background cardstocks are both textured and glimmery.

Day 7 - Feeling Fierce. I dug out my Safari paper pad for this one, used my pawprint border punch, and a crocodile image that somebody RAKed me. The colours IRL are NOT the same as the scan. It's much more harmonious than it looks here. I decided not to put a sentiment on this one - I'm making more plain cards for OWH than I used to, because I'm not very good at meeting their holiday deadlines.

Day 8 - Arch Card. Use the Arch shape to make whatever card you wish. I cut the card with my colluzzle. It's not really flat on top, the scanner chopped it off.

Day 9 - Do that Decade - the 90s. Make a card that reflects some trend from the 90s. I was almost stumped by this one... everything I could think of was already taken! But then I remembered something. I was a teacher in the late 90s, and one day I walked into a classroom and there was a book sitting on the windowsill. Their teacher was reading it to them and the kids said it was absolutely FANTASTIC. The name? Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone! Yep. The Harry Potter saga entered the world in 1997, and it won't really leave until the final movie comes out.

Day 10 - Trendy. Make a card using an item or technique that seems to be particularly trendy just now.
Honestly, I was lost on this one. I don't buy magazines, enter contest, or pay attention to trade shows, so I have NO IDEA what's popular. But everyone else says that pearls and swirls and lace never go out of fashion, so that's what I used. I made the lacy heart frame all by myself using my Make the Cut software. I was going to incorporate some real lace too but it would have been overkill. This card is way busier than anything I usually make already! BTW the embossed heart was a RAK somebody gave me.

Day 11 - Repurposed. Use paper designed for one holiday to make a card for another. This one was easy - I used a sheet of Christmas paper and made a pair of birthday cards with a strip of it.

Day 12 - Keep it Simple. Cover a card with patterned paper (using one or more designs), add ONE sentiment and ONE embellishment. I made this at the same time as the one for Day 7... can you tell? lol One sheet of patterned paper from the Safari pack, my pawprint border punch, a stamped sentiment, and for my embellishment I decided to do something I NEVER do and use eyelash fiber tied right around the card. It blends into the green much better IRL than in the scan.

365 Cards, Week 1

2011-03-14T17:24:00.001-04:00

I know I'm late starting... but the 365 card challenge blog just rolled around to the start of a new year, and I've decided to give it another go. Can I make a card a day, every day??? I went back to the first week and started playing catch-up.

DAY 1 - White Space. This is a pretty simple challenge - you have to keep the decoration on your card within the bounds of the sketch, in this case a strip down one edge and a rectangle right at the other. I really don't like a rectangle sticking off the edge of my card, so I adapted it and used a half-circle instead.

DAY 2 - Pick 5. Use the following items on your card:
Your favourite colour - pink
Favourite design technique - embossing (and border stickers)
Your favourite embellishment - flowers
Least favourite colour for cards - black (unless it's combined with pink or red!)
Favourite card size - standard 5-1/4 s 4-1/2

DAY 3 - Fun with Fabric. Use a piece of fabric to apply ink or paint to your card. I rolled up a scrap of an old tshirt so that the seam was on the outside and used a pastel rainbow pigment ink so it would be nice and juicy. I love how it turned out!

DAY 4 - 'One of a kind'. Pretty straightforward. I printed the sentiment out, and used stamps to demonstrate it.

DAY 5 - Winter and Summer collide. Use both summer and winter on your card. This one puzzled me a bit, but then I remembered a cute stamp I just bought, and I combined it with a bright summery pre-printed card and some tiny snowflake stickers.

Graphics by Fran, card by printer...

2011-03-04T08:55:00.000-05:00

There's a very special post on the Stars and Stamps blog today - beautiful art cards by a very special lady. Fran doesn't use stamps or clipart or patterned papers - she draws and colours every one of her cards by hand, and they're amazing! And because she's so special, she gave us some digital art to play with, as long as we're using it for OWH. There are four different clips, so if you don't like the fishy, there are plenty of other choices.

Anyone who's read my blog knows I'm not fond of colouring. Sandy's examples are totally awesome, but I couldn't possibly do justice to Fran's designs if I tried to colour them in myself (you really don't want to see what I did to the poor fishy I tried to draw scales on by hand...) Luckily I don't have to try. I cheated! lol There's another solution that works really well for simple designs with fairly large pieces - I paper-pieced them! NOTE - paper-piecing wouldn't work well on Fran's other images because they're too detailed and you'd go barmy trying to cut and reassemble all those fiddly little bits, so I chose the fishy by default. Besides, he's CUTE!

So how do you do paper-piece a piece of clipart? Easy peasy! I printed the art out on four different coloured sheets of paper, and then I cut out the bits I wanted and assembled them on top of the blue background. I had to cut the yellow fish right out of the sheet to get the fins and lips, so I used the other parts on a second card - this time I just glued the yellow on top of the white sheet and coloured in the background with a pale blue marker. There's still enough bits left to do a purple fish with lavender lettering, but two was enough to give you the idea.

Blog candy is in the mail

2011-02-24T09:02:00.000-05:00

Sorry it took me a little while to get to it... I mailed the blog candy packets yesterday at the same time as sending in my Spring cards for the challenge (I made 14 Easter cards and 14 general cards). I'll upload the cards this afternoon. Right now I've got to run off to church to help with their Thursday lunch for the homeless.

AND THE WINNERS ARE...

2011-02-14T13:23:00.000-05:00

Drumroll... I went to Random.org and it drew out (rolled up) comments number 18, 4 and 40. Now I'll have to go back to the comments and see who that is.
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Opening up the comments window at the side of the screen...
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Counting...
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Comment number 4 belongs to Lisa, who was kind enough to include her email address in her comment.

Comment Number 18 was deleted by the author! Oh dear. Must have been a booboo. I'll draw another number in a minute.

And comment Number 40 came from Karen Y who also included her email in her comment.

Now to replace the comment-that-wasn't. Random.org decided to make things easy for me and it selected comment Number 48, belonging to Ann K.

Thank you everyone. I'll get emails off to these three lucky ladies and get addresses to send the pressies to.

I hope you enjoyed the blog skip

2011-02-14T08:39:00.000-05:00

I hope you enjoyed the first OWH blog skip on the weekend. I had great fun making my cards and seeing what I could do with the supplies I was given. There'll be another one soon, so keep your eyes peeled for it. I'll draw my three winners a bit later today just in case anyone's running late, but this morning I have 48 comments to choose from.

In the meantime, here are some cards I made over the weekend. The Stamphaven group were holding a spring-themed Challenge week last week and I made some time to play. (Interested? The board is free, and you can go check out the challenges and posts any time to get some inspiration.) I hosted a challenge on one of my favourite topics - punched flowers. The hardest one was the 'raid your stash' challenge - not because you had to dip into old supplies, but because you had to incorporate a rubber stamp that you owned and had never used for a card! I really don't do a lot of stamping and I made plenty of cards that qualified on the stash front, but without a stamp.

Colour challenge - red/orange; and punched flowers

Colour challenge - red/orange and punched flowers (flower was made with a circle punch and a tree punch)

Black and white challenge

Black and white challenge again, made with scrap cardstock and a Martha Stewart border punch

'Clear the Clutter' challenge - using stuff you had lying around on your desk and in your stash)

3D challenge (the bird is done in four layers with cardstock scraps inbetween to raise them more subtly than popdots)

Fruity card challenge

OWH Blog Skip Number One

2011-02-11T23:12:00.001-05:00

Welcome to the first Stars and Stamps/Operation Write Home Blog Skip. I'm a little early posting this, but I wanted to make sure that I got it done in time, and I'm in the Florida timezone rather than on the West Coast. If this is the first entry you're seeing, please go back to the Stars and Stamps blog to visit the rest. Here are the rest of the blogs in the skip.

Our challenge was simple - each participant was given a card pack with some patterned paper squares and a cute bunny stamp, and asked to make a card using these supplies and whatever else we felt like adding. There were two bunnies in the pack (one to practice on) but I don't do a lot of colouring, so I was able to use both. In other words, you get two cards for the price of one! (note - my scanner has a peculiar quirk - everything I scan comes out MUCH more contrasty than it is IRL. That is not blue ink around the edges of the shield, it's violet almost the same shade as the ribbon!)

The first thing I did was to make this card base with three of the patterned papers. I used my heart border punch to add a little interest. Then I set it aside and started cutting shapes on my Cricut to find the ideal shape for the bunny. I had wanted to use an oval or a heart but it didn't fit the image - the shield fit the stamp on perfectly. I cut a larger shadow layer out of the last paper, and I planned to use it on this card base... but when it was done it was just too busy. So I set the shield aside and used the plain white bunny stamp in a simple square. (If an image doesn't quite fit nicely on the page, tilting it an angle can make a big difference - I could trim a little off two corners without losing any of the image or making it seem too squashed.) It covers up a lot of the center circled panel but that's okay - I like the floral and leaves much better! Lastly I cut the sentiment with my Cricut. It didn't quite 'pop' enough, so I added a very thin black shadow layer beneath it. I fiddled around a bit to find a good placement for the sentiment. I was going to put it straight down the right-hand edge of the card but I wasn't entirely happy about it - then I laid the card down on my desk and the sentiment slid sideways and lo and behold, it fit PERFECTLY on the diagonal! It just goes to show - don't be in such a hurry to glue everything down. It might pay to take your card pieces and play with them awhile to try different arrangements and see what happens.

On to the second card... as I said, I cut this shield to use on the first card but it was too busy - it needed a plain background to make it really stand out. I don't really like colouring, but it was too plain for this background, so I compromised and just coloured in the flower and ladybug with kiddy markers. I lightly inked a plain cream cardbase with one of those fingertip inkers. It's mostly green but I added just a touch of purple to echo the paper colours. I usually cut the decorative band from paper, but I was running out of pieces and I had a purple ribbon exactly the same shade. It already had the lace sewn onto it... All I had to do was to glue it down with my ATG, and use some glue dots to add the punched flowers.

And there's my two-for-one special. Are you inspired by these cards? Want to share some of your own? We hope so! There will be more blog skips through the year, so many of you will get a chance to show your stuff. But why wait? OWH is hosting a full-blown bloghop in March, and signups are open now. You have until March 2 to put your name in. We'd love to see what you can do... In the meantime, enjoy the rest of the skip. Your next stop is Marianne...

But before you go I have one final treat for you - blog candy! I'm a premium bargain-hunter when it comes to Craft supplies, and the good folks at Target put a bunch of stamps on clearance in time for me to grab some. Three lucky people will get one of these stamps and a handmade card from me. Interested? Leave me a comment on this entry and make sure that I have some way to get in touch with you by email or through your blog. Then check back on Monday to see if you are a lucky winner. Good luck!

S&S Saturday Seminar #1 - take 2

2011-02-02T14:49:00.000-05:00

For my first card I redesigned this butterfly card and made it into something entirely different. But I decided to see what I could do with the original pieces, since I wasn't attached to the card. I cut the sentiment out and inked it to give it more dimension and colour, and I mounted it on an inked pink card instead of stamping those rather messy butterflies. I brought the perching butterfly down to the corner of the card, and then I started moving the others around on top of a light ribbon that reminds me of a trellis.(I had to replace the pointy butterfly because it was too damaged to reuse, and two butterflies the same shape works better than three entirely different ones.)

All three butterflies and flower. Nice enough, but it entirely covers up the rose buds on the lace and I wanted them to show.

With the flower removed, the pink embroidery takes center stage.

Swap the two butterflies so that they overlap the sentiment. Which do you like better? This card or the one above? They've both passable, but I know which gets my vote. In this one the butterflies are flying AWAY from the flower, in the one above they're moving TOWARDS it.

S&S Saturday Seminar #1 - Focal Point

2011-02-02T13:46:00.000-05:00

OWH is running a series of bi-monthly design seminars on the Stars and Stamps blog. The first one was posted on the weekend, and it focuses on creating a focal point for your card. You can see the seminar post (and download a printable pdf for your files) here.

The idea is very simple - often when our cards look like they don't quite work out the way we wanted, it's because they don't have a good strong focal point to pull your eye in and tell you where to look first. We were asked to look through our files or collections and find some older cards that we weren't quite happy with, and to try to remake them with the seminar in mind. If I say so myself, I've got a pretty good eye for colour and design and I when I look at a card I can usually tell if it's a success or not. If I don't like it, it doesn't go anywhere except the trash can, and I certainly don't record it for posterity! lol But I had a pretty good example sitting on my shelf - last year I made birthday cards for our church and the one that came back to me when it was my turn was one that really didn't quite make it.

Here it is in all its unfocused glory. The elements are pretty enough, but it's a jumbled mess and nothing really stands out as the 'important' part of the card. I had some cute stickers and I had a cute butterfly punch and I had a RAKed frame... and I threw them together and called it a card.

I happened to have another copy of the image, this one in red, so I contemplated it for awhile and then made this card instead. I left a skinny white frame around the outside to help make it stand out, and coloured in very selectively. I used a very fine marker instead of wishy-washy coloured pencil, and I put a tiny little diamente in the center of the baby-sized flower.
I was very happy with the design, but alas, I made a big booboo. I stamped some 'shadow' butterflies onto the cardstock (actually looking at it, it would have been better off without them, but I was trying to echo the original card!) and after it was assembled I decided it needed just one more, and of course I managed to get ink on the white frame! With such a simple design that's enough to ruin it for good, unless I can think of a way to salvage it. :(

Okay, some quick thinking. If a card is messed up on the edge, what can you do? Recolour it (which would have been a distraction to the eye) or trim it off and remount it! I got my favourite deckle-edged scissors and made an edge, and remounted the card onto a darker cardstock that echoes the colour of the marker. I had a red-checked ribbon I was going to run down the side of the card, but it was too much of a distraction and the colour wasn't quite right, so I used a border punch instead. It echoes the red-and-white of the image and draws your eye down to that corner of the card. I was going to put a butterfly on the corner of the card overlapping the punch and image, but it was just too much of a distraction. When it comes to clean-and-simple, LESS IS MORE!!!!!!!!!!

Simplified flowerpot cards

2011-01-27T08:26:00.000-05:00

Here are my samples for the card class I'm teaching at the library next week. I simplified the design so that the kids can do it, and I'll teach it in small groups while the rest of them play with my scraps and basic supplies. Decorating the pots should take them a little while. I punched the outsides of the flowers with a large punch, the rest is all done with the Cricut and Make the Cut software.

S&S Sketch Challenge #52

2011-01-22T10:10:00.003-05:00

Last Sunday, the OWH Stars and Stamps blog celebrated one year of sketch challenges with Sketch Challenge #52. It really doesn't seem like a whole year... but then I've hardly done any of the sketches! I just had to do this one in honour of the anniversary, so here are two cards I made today.
First, the sketch...nice and simple and good for the 'clean and simple' cards I prefer. I'm trying to work on making my cards as 'clean' as I can - since I don't like complicated designs, everything on the card needs to be perfect. Any little imperfection stands out like a sore thumb. 'Simple' is easy - perfect is something I'm still working on!

I bought this stamp a few weeks ago. The set has three different circles, and a dozen different sentiments all nicely sized to fit in them, which makes it perfect for OWH. The paper is various scraps that went together nicely. I carefully placed the strip so that 'family' was showing. It needed a little something more, so I added the yellow butterfly even though it's not part of the sketch.

I cut these flowers last night when I was fiddling around trying to make my flowerpot card. They were way too big for that, but the two largest ones were perfect for a card of their own, with a couple of others from my collection to finish them off.

A Flower-pot card

2011-01-22T08:33:00.002-05:00

I CASEd this card from a lady on the Christian PaperCrafts board... and it turns out that she got the idea from Split Coast Stampers and there's a tutorial right there! I didn't use the tutorial, I figured out how to make it from her photo, but the basic design of mine came out pretty much the same as the original except I glued the sides of my flowerpot pocket, and I left the back of the pot sticking up to give the tag and flowers more support, because they seemed a bit heavy. You can see the tutorial HERE. I can't link to Anita's version because the board is members-only so nobody can see it, but hers looks pretty much the same as mine only with a tag on it.

I cut the flowerpot by hand. Fold a sheet of cardstock lengthways instead of the way you fold a regular card, and then cut it in half. Fold the top inch or so down to make the flap, and use a border punch on the top edge. Unfold it again, and trim a very small edge to make the flowerpot pot-shaped. Slide a card-front into the card and measure the edges, then trim it off so that it will fit into the pocket.

Wrap a ribbon around the flap and tie it off in a bow or a knot. Use a gluedot in the center of the flap so that the ribbon can't slide off the card. If you want to add a charm or a punched tag, make sure that you put it on BEFORE you knot the ribbon! Glue the top edges of the pocket to hold the card together.
Alternatively, wrap the ribbon around the entire card and tie it off. People will 'open' the card by sliding the ribbon off.

Punch or cut your flowers and leaves and glue them so that they fit into the pot without the backing card showing through. (Put glue on the bottom half of the top flower/s, and the top half of the bottom ones! Leave the other half unglued so that the bottoms of the flowers hang over the edge of the pot like a real plant.)

I cut my flowers with the Cricut and the 'Make The Cut' software - the flowers came from their free online gallery... but you could use any large hand punch, or any flower shape. The Don Juan cartridge that came with my Cricut has a flower that would work just as well. They're cut from plain cream cardstock and chalked for a more delicate colouring than ink or markers...

Cards I made this week

2011-01-20T16:31:00.000-05:00

I usually make two or three cards at a time using the same basic materials... that way I can play with my idea and not waste cardstock/paper. Here's some I made this week.

Olive green pre-folded cards, heart corner punch, Martha Stewart leafy border punch. Punch each corner of a 2-inch square and fold them in to make a medallion.

Pink embossing done with my Fiskars Scrapboss. The pink is not this lurid btw - the scanner made it much brighter! Red was scraps of Christmas paper.

The idea for these cards came from the Stars and Stripes blog, but I adapted it to my own use with ribbon.Sentiments are stickers and so is the flag (it's metallic silver...)

Scrap bookmarks

2011-01-05T13:42:00.000-05:00

When you cut a sheet of 8-1/2 wide cardstock down to six inches wide so it will fit in the Cricut, you're left with a two-and-a-half inch wide strip... after using the Cricut for awhile, you've got a LOT of them! lol I'm making some of them into bookmarkers for the Friends of Gilda. They're very quick and easy to make - you just find some scraps that look nice together and add a few stickers or vertical stamps, and sandwich some pretty ribbon in between them. No lumpy embellishments because they're made to go in a book and they need to be flat! If you're wondering what size they are, they're 7 to 7-1/2 inches long and 2-2/12 inches wide depending on the scraps. The one with punched edges are a little smaller because the border punches trim 1/8 inch off the paper.

Cricut Valentines

2010-12-30T07:31:00.001-05:00

Lauren asked if I could make some Valentines for the Gilda's Club Arts Day... so I got out my Cricut and started designing. They've upgraded the Make the Cut software and added some extra features that make it even more versatile, and it cuts super-fast now, so I'm going to be using it a LOT more.The last one isn't actually 'cricut' - border punches are still quicker and easier than designing whole cards, at least for me! I got some lovely border stickers at the LSS and made them the centerpiece of some cards. I've still got a ton left too.

Cards for Cancer

2010-12-30T07:24:00.001-05:00

I offered to make cards for the Friends of Gilda to sell at a fund-raising Arts Festival... so I've been making cards like a maniac whenever I could spare a few minutes this month. Here are some of my results. My cards tend to be of the 'clean and simple' persuasion, and I've used my Cricut to cut some of the sentiments. The multi-coloured ones are stickers I picked up at Ross. I also used stamping and my favourite technique - direct inking. I got an ATG for Christmas and it makes card assembly much less messy than the liquid glue. Of course I still have to use that for doing all the fiddly bits but the backgrounds and strips are all taped.


Sticker Cards with stamped decoration

Deco squares and Tags

2010-10-12T17:41:00.000-04:00

I made these both for a swap... the fall tags were cut with my cricut. It made it super-easy to make layered tags and to cut tiny leaves! The Christmas tags are diecuts.

A sad note for OWH cardmakers

2010-10-04T10:15:00.000-04:00

Somebody happened to get a card from Operation Write Home and they recognised the photo and knew the photographer, and they mentioned it to Sandy. They weren't mad it was one of those co-incidences (what are the odds?!) but it got Sandy into a flap about copyright. She decided that cardmakers are not allowed to use any recognisable source material for their cards. No photographs unless you took them yourself, and even then they're discouraged. No recycled images from books, cards, magazines, or any other printed material you may find, pick up, or get in the mail. And she didn't mention it but this is even more important so far as I'm concerned - NO RANDOMLY DOWNLOADED IMAGES FROM THE INTERNET.

If you put something onto a card you have to have made it yourself, photographed it yourself, drawn or painted it yourself... been specifically granted the copyright by the person who did, or made it using materials that were specifically sold for crafting purposes.

This has upset a lot of cardmakers who like to make recycled cards... It upset me too. If you glance back over my posted cards you'll see a lot of them use images that are recycled from those cute little gift books that turn up in the thrift store looking brand new five years after somebody gave them to you. Nobody ever really wants to buy them - if you're going to give someone one of those gifts you'll want it to be new - so I'd snap them up, cut them up, and make them into cards. They were great because they were almost always the right size for the cards and they have lots of sweet sentiments on them, and you got a lot more bang for your buck than buying specific crafting stuff. I've got a box of cut-up gift books that I won't be able to use now. I also pulled photos from tourist/travel brochures, junk mail, and christmas catalogs if the paper was thick enough to withstand gluing without disintegrating. Most of my christmas cards are made by recycling old ones because they're too nice to throw away, and they're free. I'd only made a few so far but I was gearing up to pull out last years' christmas box and start recycling cards... and now they're all useless.:(

So what CAN you use aside from stamps (which not everyone has skill with, and which can be very expensive to purchase...) I use stamps sometimes. But I'm lousy at colouring and I don't have the money for the ubiquitous copics, so I'm reverting back to my old standby for adding instant colour to cards - stickers. And I'll probably be using my punches more... I've got yards of patterned paper to play with. I got a stack of photo stickers from Ross yesterday. And I'm not going to force myself to make christmas cards that I don't want to make... I'm using my new photo stickers to make birthday cards instead. I almost never make them because I'm rushing from holiday to holiday trying to meet the mailing deadlines. Valentines Day is coming up next... and of course there are my punches and my Cricut. I just have to get motivated enough to remember to pull them out and use them.

Halloween Box for OWH

2010-10-04T09:40:00.002-04:00

I'm good at making cards... not so good at getting them online! lol Here are the cards I sent in for Halloween. I sent another 75 for Thanksgiving last week but guess what? Under the pressure of making the mailing deadline I forgot to photograph most of them!

Cricut Ghosts

Pumpkins

Cricut pumpkins and cats

Assorted Fall

My new border/corner punches

Simple Thanksgiving cards (stickers from Michaels)

Cricut Leaves

More Cricut cards

General cards

An attempt at masked stamping...

OWH card box - second half of images

2010-08-31T09:23:00.000-04:00

Here's the rest of the cards I made for this box... I sorted them by type before I photographed them to make life simpler. Scanning 175 cards individually would take up WAY too much time and space!

Thinking of You cards

Miss You cards

Friendship cards, part 1

Friendship cards, part 2

Miscellaneous cards - OWH doesn't need a lot of these, but sometimes you have the perfect image!

I mailed my box of cards! - 1/2 half of the images

2010-08-31T09:20:00.002-04:00

I used a middle-sized flat rate box and I tucked the cards into envelopes before I put them in - I fit 175 cards lengthways down the box, with cardboard dividers between the categories. I typed up a nice Any Hero letter and printed out a bunch of copies and rolled them up and slid them into the gap at the side of the box, and added half a dozen Any Hero cards. I hope they got there in one piece!

Hello/Just a Note

Love/Romance

Thank you

Birthday cards

Blank notecards - the dogs are recycled from a small giftbook.

Now it's on to Fall/Halloween cards... two weeks to get the box FINISHED, and I have 100 pumpkin-orange envelopes to fill.
PS. I LOVE that they've fixed it so you can add a caption to your images without having to mess with your layout to do it! It makes life SOOOO much simpler.

Assorted cards for Operation Write Home

2010-08-02T11:35:00.001-04:00

I'm trying to fill another box... and also to use up some of the bazillion scraps and bits-and-pieces lying around my craftroom. Here's some cards I made over the weekend.

I found some pre-stamped backgrounds and half-finished cards in my scrap box, so I tried to finish them all off. I was also trying to be more masculine and avoid the pretty-pretty-little-girly cards I tend to make when left to my own devices.

Stamped background cards

2010-08-01T23:55:00.000-04:00

I was making cards for OWH this week and I used my 'thinking of you' and 'missing you' stamps to make backgrounds... I need to get more use out of them since I went out and bought them with real money!

2010-07-24T17:30:00.000-04:00

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

2010-07-09T22:34:00.000-04:00

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

2010-07-09T20:57:00.000-04:00

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

2010-07-06T21:14:00.002-04:00

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

2010-07-01T16:23:00.000-04:00

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. :)

Alphabet Soup

2010-06-27T07:12:00.001-04:00

I picked up the DCWV 'Alphabet Mat Stack' at TJ Maxx and I decided to make all the 'mongram' pages into a set of simple notecards for Operation Write Home. I used plain white cardstock and decorated envelopes to match. Hopefully people will be able to use the cards to write simple notes in. :) I just trimmed the pages down slightly smaller than that cards and glued them on.

When I was done I had a whole pile of small offcuts from the edges of the stack. I didn't want to throw them out but they're a lot smaller than any of the scraps I usually keep... so I made up a simple design that would show them off to advantage and I made a second set of notecards! I put the lighter-coloured paper onto dark cardstock so it would show up, and I lined the dark cards with a simple white liner. It's not often that I can get 50 cards made in three hours!

My Summerhaven Card Recipe Challenge

2010-06-24T15:24:00.000-04:00

The Stamphaven board is having a celebration of Summer and cardmaking called 'Summerhaven'. I'm hosting a number of challenges, but the largest is to follow a card recipe and make a set of four cards celebrating the four seasons.

Here's the recipe I have assigned for the challenge:
I've given you two weeks to do this challenge because you have to make more than one card to complete it. The theme of this recipe challenge is The Four Seasons.

1) Choose a stamp set or three/four individual stamps that you would like to use. You will use these same stamps for ALL the cards.
2) Choose a colour combination for each card - black/white plus TWO other colours. Do not repeat colours between cards except for black/white. (ie. one card might be pink/blue, one might be yellow/red etc.)
3) Choose ONE patterned paper to use on each card. Again, do not repeat.
4) Choose TWO embellishments that you would like to use to finish your cards. (eg. brads and ribbon, lace and buttons etc.) Use these same embellishments on all four cards (but they don't have to be EXACTLY the same - they need to reflect your colour combos.)
5) Now make four cards that reflect the four seasons - Spring, Summer, Autumn/Fall, and Winter.

Upload your completed card set to the gallery with the tag SH10 recipe, and post links to your cards in this thread.

And here are my four sample cards. As you can see we have Spring - red/green, Summer - yellow/pink, Winter - blue/purple, and Fall - orange/brown. And my two embellishments are buttons and bling. Oh dear - I just noticed that the blue button slid off-center before it dried. I'll fix that, but you get the idea. :)

Sign, sign, everybody needs a sign

2010-06-10T20:30:00.000-04:00

No, I haven't run away from home... we went away for the weekend so I didn't do any crafts from Thursday through Monday because of getting ready, going, and coming back. Actually that's not quite true. I took my Cricut into the library on Monday because the children's librarian had asked to see how it works, and I cut a whole bunch of cute things for her then. But I didn't make any cards.

It took so long to cut out the lettering on the Cricut that I offered to make up the signs at home myself during the week. The Children's Program kicks off on Tuesday night, so I have to have them done by the end of this week.
I made six signs yesterday... and I've got seven more to go! I used a sheet of 12" cardstock as the base, cut out lots of lettering with my Cricut, and added assorted decorations to finish the posters off. Thomas is a kiddy colouring page I cut out. I made the paper plate for the cookout sign myself... and the alligator and heron are cute clipart I found online.

And lastly, here's a photo of all the cards I sent in to Sandy last week for OWH... No Any Hero cards this time, but I sent in 50 assorted blank cards for her to play with, and before I packaged them all up I spread them out on the dining table and took a photo.

Thank you for stopping by on the Bloghop! Winners announced!

2010-06-01T07:32:00.002-04:00

I'm glad I could share with you on the weekend... I hope everyone saved my free graphics and poems and you're inspired to make some cards with them, as simple or complicated as you like. It doesn't take a lot of skill to make a beginner card - at the most basic level simply print out the sheet and cut it into for and glue it onto some folded cardstock! Or else you can print out the frame and glue it on and write/draw in the center... Or getting more complicated you can add stickers/embellishments of your own. Either way, you'll have given someone a blessing!

Now to draw my random winners. I usually get DH to pull a number out of the hat but he had to run off to work already, so I'll let random.org do it for me. I have two prizes to give away... my first prize goes to somebody who left a comment on my Memorial Day blog entry - there are 69 of you! And the lucky winner is...

Comment number 59!

Wendy said...: I've been making cards for OWH since I discovered them during the blog hop last year! Thanks for the inspiration!
May 31, 2010 6:53 PM

WENDY, you don't have an email or profile on your blog page, so I hope you can get in touch with me to claim your surprise. I've got an envy of goodies to send you.

My second prize was for somebody who Followed my blog either during the weekend or earlier. I have 41 followers now, and the winner is...

Follower Number 5! I'll count from the top of the list simply because it's easier to get to. That would make it BETTY! I didn't realise that you can't get from the little pictures under 'follow me' to the person's blog, but Betty was kind enough to leave an email addy in her comment so it's not a problem. (That's not why I chose her, Random.org picked the number, but she made it easy for me!) Congratulations Betty. I just need me a message with your address to claim your prize.

And lastly, there were a few people who left comments that said something along the lines of 'I'm a beginner/new crafter and I've been inspired to make cards by the hop' - I've been crafting for ten years, and I've got more supplies than you can shake a stick at and I love to share. :) So please, if you would like a beginner's package of goodies, get in touch with me and I'd be more than happy to send you some stuff with no strings attached.

Pansy cards

2010-05-31T22:57:00.000-04:00

These pansies are based on a tutorial that was posted to the Stars and Stamps blog this week. They're actually really easy to make - you need five punched petals and you trim two of them in half to make the smaller petals. The tutorial used a large butterfly punch and I don't have one, but I figured out how to get a similar result using a small seashell punch. My flowers are a lot smaller and fiddlier than hers (because of the size) but I love how they came out. I guess mine are violas. One nice thing about flowers - no two of them are ever exactly the same, so it adds to the verisimilitude to use different colours and slightly different petal shapes. :P You can see the tutorial here.

May RSC Sketch Challenge

2010-05-31T18:10:00.001-04:00

When I looked at the sketch for this month's card contest on the Rubber Stamp Chat site, it reminded me of one of the templates I have for my Fiskars scrapboss... so I sat down and made myself a 3-dimensional layered card. Btw the paper behind the butterfly is white, not grey... but the butterfly is 3D and it raised the card up enough that it didn't scan very well.

I started with my oval wreath template - I embossed it, then I turned the template over and put the card back underneath it and I coloured in the flowers and leaves with my chalks using tiny bits of tissue as a brush. I haven't ever tried this technique before - I have chalks but I virtually never use them! But I wanted the colours to be softer than ink would have produced. A bit of green got where I didn't want it to be, but it was easily rubbed off with my sticky eraser.

Once the wreath was coloured to my satisfaction I took it out of the template and put my Colluzzle Oval into the center to cut out the middle. Then I inked the edges and the sides lightly with a couple of shades of green ink, stamped my corner designs and sentiment, and put a plain white card inside. Lastly I stuck down my butterfly (a 3D sticker) and my card was finished. And now I'm done, I'm going for a swim!

365 Cards - Ippity Week

2010-05-30T21:51:00.001-04:00

I just wasn't in the card-making mood this week... so today I had a whole week's worth of cards to do! Good thing I've been inspired by the Operation Write Home Memorial Day Bloghop... I was originally going to make all my cards red, white and blue in honour of the weekend, but that didn't really work out, so I settled for making them all Thinking of You/Miss You cards. OWH always needs these and I don't make enough of them!

Day 84 - Sketchy Sunday
I kept it very simple and used scraps of paper for the rays... I wish I hadn't drawn those stars in around the stamped sentiment because they didn't turn out at all the way I'd pictured them, but what's done is done! It wasn't horrible enough to need to cover it up.

Day 85 - Flora and Fauna. Use a plant/flower and some kind of wildlife on your card.
This is where the red, white and blue theme broke down... because the first thing I thought of was some wild animal stamped images that I was RAKed, and that went with my gorgeous Safari paper pack.

Day 86 - Keep it Simple. Use ONE stamped image, ONE stamped sentiment, and ONE embellishment. No patterned paper allowed.
I've had this printed image for donkey's years...

Day 87 - All Natural. Incorporate something natural (flower, leaf etc.) into your card.
I tried making a leafy card with skeleton leaves... but they looked horrible when I glued them down so I trashed that one and went with something a bit more cooperative - some genuine pau shell :) I just adore those colours...

Day 88 - Insect Frenzy. Use three different kinds of bug on your card, with at least ten bugs in total.
There are about 25 dragonflies on this card alone... I stamped the background with a stampin' up leafy stamp and layered the dragonflies on top.

Day 89 - Courage and Strength
A very simple card. The sentiment and embellishment were both RAKs.

Day 90 - Card Recipe.

5x5 Card
3 stamps (including the sentiment)
String, fiber or twine
2 patterned papers
4 blossoms

This is the only card from this week that's HARD! I'm still working on it. I've never made a card quite like this before... but that's what's great about the challenges - they really stretch my imagination!

And that's the end of Ippity Week!

Memorial Day Bloghop Goody List

2010-05-29T13:18:00.006-04:00

(Go back one entry for my bloghop proper.)

The lesson I learned last time is never try to REMEMBER where the goodies are when there are more than a dozen blogs involved! After forgetting where everything was I went back and revisited the blogs and made a list, and it worked great for me and everyone else... so I'm doing it again. As I go through the 150+ blogs on the list, I'll be noting down any that have giveaways or that I need to revisit for future inspiration.

Starting with mine and moving down.

Creating with Kajikit - free Any Hero poems, coloured digital frame and ready-to-print cards. Patriotic blog candy to win.
Splashes of Joy - email for a free Missing You patriotic digit set with a puppydog theme.
Carolyn has blog candy and three cards so gorgeous I couldn't pick a favourite if you held me at gunpoint.
Anita has blog candy if you sign up to follow her blog, and instructions for making sweet little pinwheel cards.
Kathy has promised to make a card for OWH for every comment she recieves, so make sure you leave her some fodder! She also has cute blog candy.
Joanne has made a card with a very unusual spiral popup, and she gives you instructions on how to make it yourself. She also has a link to a perfect digital freebie for OWH.
Sherrie at Impressionable Art has blog candy in return for spreading the word about OWH.
Sbartist has blog candy, and she shares a cute flag card I might have to borrow.
Claudia shares a link to a free downloadable spidey digi.
Debby shares some unusual vintage-style cards and tribute to a fallen airman... and if you follow her blog she has candy too.
The Midnight Crafter shows us how to many many different cards from one simple background design.
Lindsey has some blog candy to give away, and a simple sketch to try.
Lastly, the OWH blog has some gorgeous digital freebies to download and some bumper boxes of cardstock to give away.
(I sense a trend here! Not a lot of tutorials etc to link to, but LOTS of candy to win! It's time for a break. I'll be back later with more from the first half of the blog.)

Back to the start of the Hop... (I started from my own blog, 2/3 of the way through the list.)

You get some yummy blog candy and a freebie to get you started on the Stars and Stamps blog
Kate has a questionare on blog tutorials... and blog candy for answering it.

And it looks as if every second person has blog candy so I'm not going to list them all... this is getting repetitive! Let's see if anyone has anything else to note. :) (nothing against the candy, but if almost everyone has it then it defeats the purpose of trying to make a checklist. I'm going to just note things OTHER than your basic candy or I'm going to wear my fingers out typing.

Pat's card is very simple... but I'm bookmarking it for exactly that reason. It takes a deft touch to make such a clean and simple card look good... and I want to borrow her design for OWH. I need some quick-and-easy card designs to help fill my next box!
Caryl has a challenge for us! Make a card using the simple sketch she's included in her blog entry, and you could win a genuine set of SU stamps.
Paula has a sweet little patriotic chick for us to download.
You can't go past Sandy's blog - she's made us a whole sheet of digital images to use, AND she has a tutorial on making backgrounds with waxed paper AND as if that's not enough, she has a challenge for us to make a card this weekend using her image/s to win another prize.
WinkWinkInk is giving us a free patriotic teddybear to play with...
Don't worry be Scrappi has free digital graphics featuring Oscar the Camel... and if you make a card featuring Oscar you could win a yummy stack of blog candy.
Create with me has a little video tutorial on masking

There are too many to list everyone... everyone is so generous with their stashes this year! I'm not even halfway through the list and it's time for bed.

It's bloghop time!

2010-05-29T10:31:00.005-04:00

Happy Memorial Day Weekend to you all...

This entry is part of the Operation Write Home Memorial Day Weekend Bloghop. If you are following the hop in order you should have come to this blog from Christy's 'Wonderfully Complex Designs'. If you've come from some place else, you're welcome to join the hop - there are well over 100 blogs signed up, so there's plenty of beautiful cards to admire, ideas to be gained, and blog candy to be won. The official start of the hop it at http://www.owhstarsandstamps.org but it's a big circle so you can pick it up from here and not miss out on anything.

Speaking of blog candy... Last time we had a blog-hop I asked people to do a challenge - but I didn't realise that when you have 100+ blogs to get through in a weekend you really don't have the time to follow up on them all! My challenge was too complicated for the time-frame available, and my blog candy was unclaimed. So this time I'll make it easy for you. I have not one but two small patriotic grab bags of goodies to give away, so there are two things you can do to win - 1) Follow my blog. And 2) Leave me a comment on this entry. Don't forget to include your blog/website/email etc so I can get in touch with you some way if you're a winner.
If you do both you get two shots. On Tuesday I'll draw some lucky numbers from a hat and two people get an envy. Now that's not too hard, is it? :)

Your prize will contain various goodies to make beautiful patriotic cards, and they'd make great Any Hero Cards for Operation Write Home. OWH always needs notes and cards of encouragement to include in the shipping boxes... The message doesn't have to be fancy and complicated - just from the heart like these little ditties I created (feel free to borrow/adapt them to your needs).

Dear Hero

this I pray

God bless you

every day

(OR God keep you

Safe today)

*****

To our Heroes

Thank you for your courage

Thank you for your dedication

Thank you for your willingness to serve

Thank you for your strength

Thank you from America

My other gift to you is is a sheet that I created to print patriotic cards. I made the frames from scratch in photoshop and added free graphics I found online. It was made to print on a standard sheet of paper. Just print it out, cut it into four and mount the images on a plain card and voila.

And in case you don't like the whole sheet, here's a single frame with a blank center you can use to make your own card from scratch.

When you're done with my entry, your next stop on the hop is Katlyn's 'Splashing with Joy. She's new to OWH so make her feel welcome - and she has a lovely free graphic to share.

Stars and Stamps Wednesday

2010-05-23T17:32:00.000-04:00

This week's challenge is to make a card with stars on it... which fits right into my push to make some 4th July cards before the deadline! 4th July cards have to arrive at a mailer by June 1st, which means this is your very last week to get them done. If you think you'll be too late to get your cards to a mailer, don't put 'July 4th' or 'Independence Day' on them, make them general cards in red/white/blue etc and they can still be used afterwards.

If you're still in the mood for red/white/blue cards, Operation Write Home is having a big bloghop next weekend for Memorial Day. There are approximately 130 blogs signed up and it's not too late to join in! Click here. I know what I'll be doing next weekend...

365 Cards - Day 81/82/83

2010-05-22T11:56:00.002-04:00

Day 81- Setting the Scene (make a picnic card)
The ant and cutlery are diecuts somebody gave me... I've had them for ages and I didn't have a clue what they'd come in handy for - it just goes to show you'll find a use for ANYTHING eventually! I made my own paper plate - I cut a half-circle with the colluzzle and used my Fiskars Scrapboss to create the rim.

Day 82 - Substitution Please (use a number in your sentiment instead of a word)
This was a lot harder than it sounds... In the end I came up with a very simple card that has a lot of hand-writing on it. Inside the card is a fancy swirly 'congratulations' stamp because it's obviously for a wedding or an engagement.

Day 83 - 4-wheel drive
I hope some little boy will like this monster truck card!

365 Cards - Still catching up

2010-05-21T07:48:00.004-04:00

Day 80 - Keep it to yourself: Friendship (friendship card without a sentiment)
This little guy was too cute not to use. I made the background with a teardrop stamp.

Day 79 - Color Scheme

These colours just screamed 'patriotic' to me... and besides it's the last week to make July 4th cards to send to Operation Write Home... so I pulled out my patriotic stickers and made some cards. The second card also fits the Stars and Stamps midweek challenge this week - simply make a card incorporating star/s! I'll be making some more starry cards this weekend and giving them their own entry later on.

Day 78 - Imagine this money
This challenge is not to make a card including money... but to make a card INSPIRED by money. Money is not something I've ever had much of... so I give you two simple cards - I've SAVED money on these two cards because they're both recycled from a tourist brochure. We live in the Sunshine State... but all we can do is dream of enjoying the luxuries of the rich, like the gentleman enjoying himself on the left! If the good fairies ever blessed us with wealth, we'd have a house of our own.

Day 77 - Sketchy Sunday

365 Cards - Way behind!

2010-05-20T21:41:00.003-04:00

I'm so far behind I'm not sure I can catch up... but here goes nothing. I've made a few of the cards already and I haven't got around to uploading them.

Day 76 - Crisscross Applesauce (card with a criss-cross pattern)

Day 75 - Card Recipe. Use ONLY these ingredients:

4.25 x 5.5 card

2 patterned papers

stripes

1 piece of ribbon

stamped image (digi counts!)

stamped sentiment

Day 74 - Buttons and Bows. Use 4 buttons AND 4 bows on your card.
This SOUNDS easy enough.. but I can't be trusted to tie more than one bow on a card without ruining it... so I rummaged and dug until I found some bow punchies I could use instead. The buttons are real though. (and the cardstock is an orange that almost matches the clown's outfit - I'm not sure why it scanned in as tan!

Day 73 -Tricoloured. Use ONLY three colours plus black and white on your card, with a stamped or digital image. My colours are red, blue, silver and of course black and white. The card is decorated inside and out. The black things inside are actually silver sequins with red and blue graduation caps but they don't scan.

And that catches me up. Whew!

I have wallart - for Five Dollars Total!

2010-05-14T12:44:00.002-04:00

I've had a simple wallart saying above the window for the last few years, but I've always wanted to decorate the door wall as well. When I was shopping at Ross yesterday, I found a pale pastel flowering vine set of wall stickers that looked like it would do the job perfectly. The pink and brown stickers are from Ross, and the others are wall stickers from the Dollar Tree. I think I'm happy with the end result. It's not too 'little girly', but it definitely reflects my personality. And I've still got a whole sheet of the pink flowers left over (no more vines, but lots of flowers) in case I change my mind about the decoration and want to add something else. But the best thing is that they're easily-removable stickers so if I get tired of them I can take them down without trashing my nice yellow paint, and the landlord can't get cross with me for decorating the walls. Actually, he wouldn't mind, he's a great landlord... but removable is ALWAYS good! I've used the Dollar Tree removable stickers before to add colour to our bathroom and kitchen, and once they're pulled off you'll never know they were ever there. I wish they still sold the nice ones, but they've gone out of fashion or something. The Dollar Tree mostly focuses on selling food and toiletries and holiday junk nowadays, and they have hardly any art and craft supplies. :( I get what I can at Ross, but the Dollar Tree was cheaper!

PS. You can also see my wardrobe card display (every time I get a card in the mail for a swap or whatever, I put it onto my wall and leave it there till the slats are too full to fit any more!), and my beautiful curtains. I'm proud of both! Nobody can see into our windows on that side (we're upstairs and there's an empty factory opposite us, and the palm tree outside our apartment has grown enough that it covers 50% of the window anyway) so I don't need to worry about blocking the view from the outside, I just needed to prettify the window and to distract the eye a little from side empty factory.

Stars and Stamps Wednesday

2010-05-13T10:01:00.001-04:00

Stars and Stamps is having a competition this week with a prize of three gorgeous digital images courtesy of Wink Wink Ink. Just use the free teddybear to make a card and link it back to the blog.
I used the pre-coloured teddy (they also have a black-and-white version for people who are better artists than me!), and he looked like he needed some cheering up, so I made my own sentiment in Publisher. A few scraps and stickers later, and I was done. You can download the teddy bear and enter the competition here. Have fun!

On another note, I've made a new blog to host some of my travel, scenic and nature photos. I'll be posting a new photo every day, so please check it out!
http://kajikittravel.blogspot.com/

365 Cards - Day 71, 72

2010-05-12T16:50:00.001-04:00

Day 71 - Do that Decade: Roaring Twenties
It doesn't often take me two days to make a card... but I was a bit stuck on this one! Almost everyone else did a 'flapper' card and I wanted to be different! The 1920s was the era of Art Deco, so I made an Art-deco inspired stained glass window card. The stained glass is made with gold peely stickers on vellum and I coloured the back with markers. Then I mounted it in a window and put a white insert behind it.
(PS. Reading the challenge again it seems I could have picked ANY decade! Oh well... it's done now. Everyone needs a challenge now and then.)

Day 72 - It needs something
Today's challenge (okay, yesterday's) was to take a stamped or printed image and add something to it. I found this cute little boy stamp in my basket, and I added some stickers and a rubon baseball bat to transform him into a junior sportsman. The hat and shoes are a bit big, but I think they're cute! I had a sticker bat but it was way too big for him. The sentiment is a rubon too... I was going to put 'congratulations' but that rubon broke when I was trying to attach it. I hate rubons for that very reason!

Super Sketchy Sunday

2010-05-09T23:50:00.002-04:00

I said I'd post these cards later... it's just a tad later than I planned! Church took three hours today (yes, a full three! At the end of the service when they give the Altar Call and we pray, the leader decided to push people a bit about making their commitments instead of just thinking about them, and they got five takers - two baptisms and three new memberships. The pastor asked us to wait while they filled the baptistry and he dunked them on the spot. I think too many people have second and third thoughts if he makes them wait a week.) Anyway, I didn't get to the cards till tonight.

Here's last Sunday's sketch (365 Cards Day 63). The swirl said 'stamp' to me, so I made a stamped card. At first I stuck strictly to the design, but it was too plain, so I added the flowers... and a little bling to finish it off.

And here's todays (365 Cards, Day 70). I was stumped by what to use for the triangles... but I saw another card where they'd used leaves very effectively, and I had pretty sheet of vellum stickers waiting to be used. I didn't have a ribbon that went with them, so I made one from scraps of cardstock.

Three letter challenges

2010-05-09T09:46:00.005-04:00

I didn't have a lot of time to make cards this week, so I've done these yesterday and today... posting them quickly before I go to church. I'll add more descriptions when I get back - I'm late already!

Day 65 - Anniversary, Arc, Alpabet Stickers
I'm playing with 5x6 cards atm, so I'm using up embellishments etc that are just a little too big for a standard A2 card. The tag is printed with part of the wedding vows, and it seemed appropriate to use for this. The ribbon has been hoarded for far too long, and the strips on either side of the tag are cut from cardstock.

Day 66 - White, White space, Wings
I kept it very simple. A pretty punched border, white embossed cardstock, and some gorgeous 3D butterfly stickers.

Day 67 - Love, Lace, Leaves
More hoarded lace... it has leaves in the design but I also drew some around the stamped image. The sentiment strip is printed on the computer.

Day 68 - Circle, Cross-stitch, Cream (outside and inside front - since I had to line it to cover up the cross-stitch, I stamped on the liner.) This one took me awhile! When I was done with the stitching I couldn't feel my fingers any more, but it was worth it. I used variegated thread and it's long enough to change colours nicely. The blob on the inside is on the scanner ,not the card.

Day 69 - Triangle, Tree, Twine
I hate working with twine! But a challenge is a challenge... I dyed this with ink and wrapped it around brads to fasten it onto the card. The image was stamped on white cardstock and I inked it up with the same ink to age it. The background is a beautiful metallic print, and I used some metallic scraps for the triangles.

And that's your lot for the morning. It was fun to do these challenges...

Recycled Cards and OWH

2010-05-06T07:41:00.001-04:00

I packaged up my 'Any Time' cards for OWH and got them off in the mail on Tuesday, which was pretty much the last day to get them there before the contest closes on the tenth! I thought I'd made tons but when I started counting them there were only 36... It's not worth sending a priority envelope unless there are at least 50 cards in there, so I sat down and whipped up a dozen quick notecards using recycled images to fill up the envelope. The photo ones came from a Florida tourist brochure that had full-page colour photos on one side of the pages, and the art ones are made from a 'friendship' gift book I bought to use for card-making. The sentiments were all pre-stamped because John was building my new computer and I couldn't use the desk OR the dining room table - I sat on the bed surrounded by supplies and glued up the cards there!

365 Cards Day 64 - the Three Fs

2010-05-03T20:44:00.000-04:00

Today you had to make a card using the three Fs:
Favourite colour - pink of course
Fringe
Fairy Tale
I actually made two cards for today because I was doing the 'Princess' card and I found a 'happily ever after' rubon in my sentiments collection.

365 Cards Day 62 - Look Whos Talking

2010-05-02T23:07:00.000-04:00

I just snuck in under the wire with this one... here's yesterday's challenge to use a speech balloon on your card. I dug one out of my diecut box, and a cute little teddybear to go along with it. It's too late to do today's card now (11pm and I'm tired after my weekend away!) but I'll get to it tomorrow.

365 Cards Day 61

2010-04-30T12:11:00.000-04:00

We're heading out of town for the weekend so I'll have to do the weekend cards when we get back... but I whipped up today's card this morning. Good thing it was a fairly simple challenge. :)
Today's Challenge is to use circles (at least) three ways... my card has six!
A lot of people made a circular card today but I didn't have time to mess around with templates so I made a regular card and used the following:

printed card with circles
Punched border with a circular pattern in it (and more printed circles but they don't count seperately)
Fabric sentiment
Ribbon with circles on it
Jumbo circle brads
and lastly, tiny circular diamantes.

Don't forget to get your cards in for the Operation Write Home 'Make Someone's Day' Challenge - the deadline is May 10, so there's not much time left... they have five great prizes to give away, and of course the cards are for a great cause. Just follow the link for directions and the all-important mailing addresses.

365 Cards Days 57/58/60

2010-04-29T23:57:00.003-04:00

I posted day 59 yesterday, so here are the other challenges...

Day 57 - Ad-inspired

Make a card inspired by this adorable baby quilt/s... I didn't really want to make another baby card because I just made one of them yesterday, but I've got a cute turtle on my Cricut Stretch Your Imagination cartridge, so I made a romantic card with that. The little bow was on the cartridge as well, I just had to figure out what size to make it... and I cut the mini bow tie by hand.

Day 58 - Crazy Eights. Make a card with at least three multiples of eight on it .
My card has eight colours striped on the background (there were seven colours on the printed paper and I added a strip of yellow to make eight), eight petals on the flower, and eight golden gems in the center of the flower. I didn't want to over-complicate the design with that many colours in it, so I kept the flower very simple.

Day 60 - All that Glitters. It's another glitter challenge - use three colours of glitter on your card. I can't use loose glitter for Operation Write Home, so rather than skip this challenge I've fallen back on paper with the glitter safely embedded in acrylic where it can't flake off and be a danger to anyone.

My card was inspired by the gorgeous glittery giraffe in the 'Nana's Nursery' Baby Boy stack. It had blue glitter and creamy-coloured glitter, so I added a sheet of orangey-yellow glitter cardstock, and then to make sure I had enough glitter, I finished it with a little silver sticker flower with glitter embedded right in the foil. Isn't the giraffe sweet? This card does double duty - it also fits the Wednesday Challenge over on Stars and Stamps - do the Wild Thing... and so for that matter does my kissing turtles card above!

Speaking of Challenges, Operation Write Home is holding a 'Make Someone's Day Challenge' and they have five prizes to give away... simply send in an envelope of general purpose cards (love you, miss you, thinking of you etc.) and include two Any Hero cards with a brief note of encouragement in them. The deadline for this challenge is May 10th, so if you're interested, get hopping! There's no minimum number of cards to send... so anything over four would count. :) I'm going to Orlando for the weekend, and I've got a bunch of cards made... hopefully I'll be able to make it to the post office tomorrow.

365 Cards Day 59 - Moving Parts

2010-04-28T23:53:00.001-04:00

Today's challenge was to make a card with moving parts on it... that was a bit of a doozy for me! I don't have any stamps suitable for moving arms or legs... I rummaged through my sticker collection and came up with a baby buggy. I punched new wheels for it from cardstock and mounted them on little stubs of folded up cardstock with brads. You'll have to take my word for it becuase they look the same both ways up, but the wheels turn if you push them. I have another idea I want to try involving a flag, string, and a flagpole, but it's way too late at night to attempt that just now.

365 Cards Day 55/56

2010-04-25T22:55:00.002-04:00

Day 55 - On Pins and Needles.
Incorporate a decorative pin/s and use a needle to stitch on your card. I used a sewing notion of some kind for my pin (I have no idea what it's meant for but it's been lurking in my sewing box for years and it's cute!) and I emboidered the flower stem for my silk daisy. I also used an embroidered ribbon to finish the card.

Day 56 - Super Sketchy Sunday

Sunday already? Yep! And for once I'm doing Sunday's card actually ON Sunday. I used some bits and pieces from my diecut box, and a recycled picture from an old art book.

Way-back-machine Week 2

2010-04-25T09:34:00.006-04:00

Day 35 - Super Sketchy Sunday (Easter Sunday)

Day 36 - I quilt sketch challenge
The middle part of this design reminded me of an envelope... so that's what I used! I finished it with stickers...

Day 37 - Terrific Taggies (ribbon tags)

When you have lots of ribbon the card doesn't really need much else... I may add something else to the border.

Day 38 - Acrostic poem

Day 39 - Totally Transferred (rubon card)

I actually made this one at the correct time but never got it uploaded. I don't use rubons much because I always have troubles getting them to stick! The flower rubons were a pleasant exception. They stuck like a charm. Everything on the card except the patterned paper is a rubon.

Day 40 - Friday Five.
Use the following ingredients:

5 colours (pink, purple, green, yellow, white)
5 buttons
5 patterned papers
5 stamps (4 leaves and 1 sentiment)
5 blossoms

Day 41 - DIY glittered blossoms/Day 42 - Super Sketchy Sunday
You're not allowed to use loose glitter on cards for Operation Write Home because it's a safety hazard, so I cut my blossoms from glittery cardstock instead. There's plenty of glimmer, but it's safely embedded under acrylic. I combined this challenge with the next day's sketch.

365 Cards Days 53-54

2010-04-24T23:52:00.002-04:00

Scroll down for a one-week catch-up entry. Another one is coming because I've got another whole week to catch up! But now here's the last few days' cards.

Day 53 - Front, Back and everything inbetween
I don't usually decorate the inside of my cards, so I had to think hard about this one! I kept it simple and used a recurring jigsaw piece theme on the pages....

Day 54 - Fancy Folds

The example for this was a square card... but I cut the design down to size and used a regular-sized card to make a mini-version. I used a nice printed card for the front and cut a panel off the front, and I folded a 4x6 cardstock mat in half to make the inside panel (I folded it backwards so I'd have the white front to decorate and you can see the printing when you open the card, but it's still light enough to write on with a black pen. I echoed the printed flowers with a 3D flower to hold the front panel closed.

Getting in the way-back-machine 28-34

2010-04-23T23:18:00.006-04:00

I missed out on two weeks of 365 Cards because of my hand (Days 28-41)... and I want to try to catch up and do some of them if I possibly can, even if just in a very simple form. I'd love to be able to look back at the end of the year and say 'I did ALL the challenges'!

Day 28 - Super Sketchy Sunday

The tag and 'ribbon' are from a page kit. Flower stamp is Heidi Grace, Ink is Circus Rainbow.

Day 29 - A certain sentiment. 'Hang in there'. I used a pre-printed card base, sticker lettering, and a recycled image from a children's picture book. I crumped and inked the background paper.

Day 30 - In Pieces - Use an image on the front of your card and then in a different form on the inside. This is actually an old tissue box... finished with punched butterflies and a little pen. The smudge is on the scanner, not the card.

Day 31 - All Mixed Up. Take an image (digi, stamp, etc.) and break it down into thirds - 1/3 no color, 1/3 patterned paper, 1/3 hand colored (markers, colored pencils, chalks, paint, etc.). I used an Inkadinkadoo stamp for this - I stamped it on patterned paper then twice on plain white. I coloured in the central heart on one image and layered all three...

Day 32 - Recipe Card (pocket card to put a recipe in) Another cute Disney card... the honey seemed appropriate for a recipe card, and I made a 'brick wall' pocket on the inside to hold a sheet of paper to write on.

Day 33 - Whip Stitch It - sew around three sides of your card.

I used a wallpaper diecut somebody gave me and turned it into a pocket card... with a tag that slides out. The pocket embellishment was from a swap.

Day 34 - Colour scheme. I used a combo of stamps... an unmounted rubber vine, Heidi Grace daisies, and a Basic Grey butterfly.

And that's the first week I missed!

365 Cards 49-52

2010-04-21T12:14:00.002-04:00

Last night I was so tired I went to bed at ten o'clock... which of course led to my being wide awake at three in the morning. After staring at the ceiling for awhile, I got up and started work on the cards.

Day 49 - Super Sketchy Sunday.

I made a straightforward flower card to use up some of the silk flowers in my stash. There's a wide ribbon in there but you can't see much of it! The card background was gently direct-inked on a large stamp pad.

Day 50 - Digging Deep.
Find three things in your stash -
1) An item that is more than a year old
2) Something that you were given that you have never used - this could be from a swap or a gift, but it has to have come from someone else.
3) Something you forgot you had.

I rummaged through my 'miscellaneous' embellishment box to make this card. I bought the red box about four years ago at the Dollar Tree. The mini playing card was given to me so long ago I'd forgotten it was there... and the cherry brads were a gift last year. (the bank notes came from Party City...)
I was going to make the sentiment something about 'never gambling on love' or love being a 'sure bet' but I wasn't thinking quite clearly enough at 3am to finalise it.

Day 51- Tuesday's Trio.
Use at least one of each of the following 3 items:
Alpha Sticker - Stamp - Red
This one was very straightforward. I shadow-stamped the background (ink the stamp and stamp on plain paper before stamping the card, and repeat...) A pretty floral ribbon (I'm trying to use some of my stash now it's out where I can see it!), a rubon, and assorted stickers. I've got tons of lettering but it's all random letters at this point, so it's a good thing I like the 'ransom note' look.

Day 52 - Save the Date

There is very little (I'd pretty much say NO) demand for Save the Date cards for Operation Write Home and I don't need any myself... so I stretched the terms a little and made a card that COULD be 'save the date' or it could be for a more general announcement. The picture is recycled from a gift book and I handwrote the sentiment.

My Craftroom - before cleaning!

2010-04-19T23:32:00.001-04:00

I thought I'd share my craftroom with you. Sometimes it's very tidy... but inevitably the piles of stuff encroach on the working space until I'm left with about one square foot of desk and all the rest is piles 'o crap. Add in the large grey furry cat who insists on keepind me company, and there's nowhere to work at all! Such is the state today, and I've vowed to redeem it tomorrow. But first, the honest before photos, taken just a few minutes ago.

1. A view of the desk area, taken from as far back as I could manage to get. As you can see, right now there's more junk than space. Immediately after I took this photo a cat wandered across the desk, sniffed in disgust, and went away to find a flat surface with enough clear space to sit!

2. The pile-o-junk stuffed in the corner of the room, with my paper cabinet and junk collection. You can see the edge of my card display on your left. As swaps and cards come in I hang them over the slats of my closest door. It's about time to cull the ranks and to make room for more - my door is full!

3. The top half of my bakers' rack and paper storage area. The scrap paper, ribbon basket and card storage rack are the only part of the room I'm really pleased with atm!

4. The bottom half of my baker's rack, and my filing cabinet. The bottom drawer holds personal files, and the top has my papercrafting magazines/books and my postcard collection, for want of any better place to store it.

5. My Iris cart and paper tray, and some boxes-o-junk under the desk. Also some more of my card storage rack tucked in beside them. The cane basket has old paperwork which is probably mostly trash by now.

6. I almost forgot the last corner of the room. I have various supplies in the chest of drawers. The pink thing in the back corner is our hurricane cart (which sorely needs a complete redo before July), and the stuff on the floor is household paperwork. The brown chair is for guests to sit on when John works on their computer, and for the cats to use as a step up to my desk if they don't feel like jumping that high. Scouty tends to 'miss' her jumps when the desk is crowded, and if she's fallen to the floor once she doesn't want to try again that day! If you turn to your right you can just see the corner of John's desk. Right now his working space is MUCH cleaner and tidier than mine and he's putting me to shame.

So there you have it... the before photos. And as I get it tidied, I'll take the 'afters'...

Catching Up again

2010-04-18T09:03:00.002-04:00

These two cards are about as far from my usual style as you can get... I picked up a couple of 'scrap packs' and paper stacks at the discount store yesterday. I tend to buy this stuff and stash it away and never actually use it, so I decided to use one of the packs for today's challenges. Teenage boys and young men need cards too, and I need to try to think outside my 'pretty-pretty' box! Everything on these two cards is from the kit except the bling.

The first card is for S&S Sketch Challenge #12 - last weekend's Stars and Stamps sketch. I'm too late to get it into the slideshow, but not too late to post it! Here's the sketch.

And here's my take on it. I took a few liberties with the sketch because the game ticket just seemed to belong there. I need a new paper-trimmer - it tends to make ragged edges instead of nice smooth cuts and I have to trim everything down again with scissors if I want it to be neat, but for this card I think that's an advantage.

My second card is for 365 Cards last white-space challenge, Day 48. It's been fun, but very challenging, to do all these white-space cards. I don't usually use a lot of negative space, and it's hard to think SIMPLE instead of complex! But I love the end results, so it's been a great week.

The embellishment on the base of my card came pre-made in the kit, and I kept the top part pretty simple and used some blingy stars to echo it. It still looks like it needs something on the top arrow to me, but I'm not sure what!

365 Cards - more white space sketches

2010-04-17T11:21:00.000-04:00

Day 46

I used my Cricut and my Stretch Your Imagination cartridge to make both of these cards.

I need some tiny googly eyes for the caterpillar because the eyes the Cricut cut don't show up (and googly eyes are cute), but aside from that this card is finished. I hand-wrote the sentiment because I wanted it to curve along the caterpillar's feet.

Day 47 - another very straight-forward sketch.I used the other half of the flowers I cut with the Cricut and stamped a small greeting to mount in the center. Instead of more circles, I used some pretty gold page corners and the card was done. Sometimes simple is the best way to play...

I'm still trying to figure out what to do for today's sketch and then I've got to go back and do last Sunday's sketch, but I'm getting back on track!

365 Cards - Day 45 again

2010-04-14T18:31:00.001-04:00

I had another go at this white-space challenge. I'm still not entirely happy with it - something is missing! But I like the gathered ribbon, and it used up a beautiful piece of ribbon and a buckle that had been languishing in my stash for far too long.

365 Cards - White Space Week

2010-04-14T13:48:00.004-04:00

his week 365 cards is posting a new 'white space' design every day. You have to follow the template and keep your embellishments and decoration in the black part of the card, leaving the rest plain and simple in some way. Here are my first three.

Day 43
My version is very simple. I used a simple pale lavender window card and mounted floral vellum in the oval, glueing a dove grey insert behind it so you can write in the card without its showing through.I stamped my sentiment straight onto one decorative strip and used a narrow ribbon for the second. Add a fabric flower with a blingy brad heart, and I was done.

Day 44
This card combines the 365 cards challenge with Technique Tuesday from the Stars and Stamps blog.- making a recipe card. Which ironically was directly inspired by 365 Cards 'recipe card' challenge a few weeks ago and adapted for OWH. A pocket card is a good thing for OWH because the person who gets it can write a nice long letter to send home to their family. I made the sentiment in Photoshop and the rest is pretty self-evident.

Day 45

I made a booboo when I made today's card. I completely glitched on the white space at the bottom of the card and divided mine into quarters. I'll have to have another go at it. :( But I love the cards I made so I'll post them anyway. I made two today - I took a piece of fancy printed paper the size of my card front and carefully cut it on the diagonal, using the pieces to make a pair of cards. These are also pocket cards. This card design is also doing double-duty for Stars and Stamps - today's Midweek challenge is to make a masculine and feminine version of an 'Anytime card'.

Here is my feminine pocket card with cute little flowers... I cut up a punched vine to get leaves small enough.

And here is a more manly version.

New cards from old (books)

2010-04-14T07:40:00.001-04:00

I picked up a couple of cute little 'gift' books on the weekend at a second-hand book sale - you know the kind... little books about the size of a greeting card with pretty pictures and sentiments in them. They're intended for you to give somebody instead of a greeting card, but if you cut them apart the individual pages make lovely cards. All they need is a little selective trimming and a bit of embellishment and you've got a stack of beautiful cards with very little work required.

The hardest part of making them is deciding which side of the page is more appropriate to use, because you can only use 50% of the contents - the other side of the page is glued down!
Last night I sat down and made some of them up into simple, colourful, cheerful cards for Operation Write Home. I hope they make the recipients smile as much as I did making them.

I made some cards!

2010-04-13T07:52:00.002-04:00

Whenever I make cards I have a little pink basket on the desk next to me, and I put all my sraps in there. It keeps them contained until I can get around to putting them away again, and sometimes it gives me food for a new card or two just by going through it. Last night my fingers were just ITCHING to create some cards, but I've tweaked my back so I couldn't keep getting up and down and moving around to find supplies, so I started pulling stuff out of the scrap basket. The only things that DIDN'T come out of the basket were a few stamps and a few extra embellishments which were in arm's reach of my chair.

These were the first two cards and they use the same paper. The paper with the curvy lines is actually a blue metallic cardstock which was leftover when I cut some balloons with the cricut. I trimmed it up as neatly as I could but the finished card was decidedly crooked, so I added another balloon to cover the most off-kilter corner. The second card is entirely scrap, but I added some corner decorations with one of my new Scrollworks stamps.

I was more into the swing of things with this card and I'm very happy with how it came out. Again, it's entirely scrap except for the green punchy leaves.

My last card is entirely different to my usual pretty-pretty style... but it was dictated by the shape of the scraps, and I like it in a modernistic way. I didn't want to make it too fancy and to overwhelm the beautiful blue paper. The little blue foil sticker says 'you and me' and I rubbed it with my fingers to take some of the blue off the lettering. Lastly I added some bling and it was done.

Bad news, good news...

2010-04-02T09:23:00.001-04:00

First the bad news. I've been struggling with de quervain's syndrome (thumb tendinitis) in my left hand all year long, and while it's a lot better than it was at first (in January I couldn't even get a spoon or fork into my mouth because my wrist wouldn't bend!) I keep aggravating it. I can't pick up a pen to write, hold a pair of nail scissors (or the cat clippers), or play my flute, and I've realised that if I don't look after it properly it might not get better! Then I wouldn't be able to make cards at all and I'd be TRULY frustrated... I'm taking two weeks off all the activities that put a strain on my hand and that are avoidable to give it a better chance of healing. So no volunteering at the library (shelving books), no lifting, and no crafting. No matter how much my fingers itch to create a new card, I'm not going to do it unless I really have to. Please don't forget about me - I'll be back as soon as I can.

But there's also good news - I posted a card I made for a card contest on the Rubber Stamp Chat site - and I won first prize from Scrolls Work Stamps! I can't wait to spend my gift certificate on some more stamping goodies from their store ... I can't afford to buy stamps for myself unless they're in the bargain bin, so this is a great chance to fill in some of the gaps in my collection. I just HAVE to have this stamp for my OWH cards. :)

I was also lucky enough to win some beautiful blog candy during the Operation Write Home blog hop a few weeks ago... Lori sent me some lovely ribbons, stickers and bling. Check out her blog - Lori's Purple Giraffes. Thank you so very much Lori... your gift will allow me to make that many more cards for charity, as soon as my hand will allow me to do the work!

All the cards I make are for ministry - either for Operation Write Home, for card ministry through my own or other churches, or direct gifts to thank/cheer/uplift people through the mail. If/when my hand heals enough to manage it, my next 'order' is to make a bunch of cards for our local cat rescue group to help them raise funds to look after the furbabies. (I offered to do it in January and they said they'd love to get some cards, but I haven't been able to manage it yet. :( )
I don't have the money to buy a lot of supplies (I spend more than I should just on postage and cardstock!), so the occasional things that people give me are received with huge thanks. I would never sell or discard an item that was given to me, or attempt to profit from it myself. If I have too much of something or I really can't use it, I'll find another crafter who CAN use it and give it to them. So thank you, thank you, thank you, THANK YOU!!!!! I couldn't do it without you.

My new Ribbon Storage System

2010-04-01T14:14:00.003-04:00

I used to have my ribbons in four different places - I had rolls of plain ribbon in a plastic ribbon storage box, short bits of ribbon wound around themselves in a plastic embellishment box, and odds and ends in shoeboxes mixed in with my fibers and lace etc. It was hard to know where to look to find anything and the mini-rolls kept getting lost in the clutter...
I was thinking of getting a wire mesh basket to put my ribbons in and threading them through the sides so I could pull bits out as needed, and I've looked in Ross a few times to try to get my hands on a suitable container, but I saw a better idea on the Crafty Storage Blog - a few days ago they featured someone who put all their spools of ribbon into a woven basket and threaded them through the back... that sounded perfect to me - baskets are MUCH cheaper than those expensive plastic boxes or metal tins, and you could fit a heck of a lot of ribbon into the right-sized basket.

Yesterday I went to Ross and I found the perfect Ribbon Basket - it's woven from seagrass so it's very flexible and easy to poke the ribbons through wherever I want them, and the spaces between the spokes are large enough for a ribbon up to an inch wide. The only thing it doesn't have is a top to keep the dust (and cats) out, but a piece of cardboard will fix that.

I put the larger ribbons towards the bottom so they wouldn't cover up the narrow ones, and arranged them in a kind of rainbow all around the basket. The only ribbons that I did NOT put into the basket are my very narrowest spools of plain ribbon - since I already have an expensive ribbon box for them, I left them alone.The basket is up on top of my paper storage drawers (out of cat-reach) and sitting on a lazy susan so I can swing it around and access all four sides easily.

Total Cost -
Seagrass basket from Ross - $6.99
Lazy Susan from Ikea - $7.99 (I think, I bought it some time ago)
Time taken to sort and thread all my ribbons - a couple of hours
Having my ribbons stored where I can actually see them all at the same time - priceless

A Card for a Contest

2010-03-29T21:55:00.004-04:00

This is the first time I've ever made a card specifically for a contest... I've been lurking on the Rubberstampchat website for a few months now and they have a monthly contest sponsored by a different stamping company each time - often it says that you MUST use stamps by that particular company to enter, but this month it's open (although they have an extra prize for somebody who uses ALL Scrollworks stamps) so I gave it a go.
The theme of the contest is Spring and you had to use this sketch for your card.

I stuck pretty closely to the sketch, but since my central stamp already had a sentiment on it, I substituted a pair of embroidered flowers instead. The patterned paper comes from the Meadow's Edge collection, my background stamp and page corners are from Heidi Grace (I just LOVE those stamps - they're acrylic but they produce a nice clean stamp with coloured ink...) and my centerpiece stamp is from Inkadinkadoo.
I stamped the bird image three times - the base is on patterned paper, then I layered the picture onto cream glimmer paper and added a touch of deep green to the leaves, and lastly I stamped the bird onto a tiny scrap of blue paper from my stash and moulded it over a cut-up 3D gluedot so that it would be rounded instead of flat. The whole central panel is floating - I fastened it diagonally in the center and left the top and bottom corners loose so that it would have more dimension, only of course the scanner squished it flat.
Lastly I stamped the page corners with another Heidi Grace stamp and mounted them, and I added some teensy tiny yellow rhinestones for a touch of bling. Somehow the scanner makes the card look less cohesive than it does IRL... but never mind. I'm happy with it, and I'm sure whoever receives it will be too! Good luck to everyone else who entered the contest - this was my first attempt but it won't be my last. :)

And with some of the leftover scraps from working out that card (and some other stuff in my scrap basket) I made this one. I need to clear out my scrap basket tomorrow - it's full now!

Catching up on 365 Cards

2010-03-28T15:02:00.001-04:00

I went back and did the two days I missed out on...

Day 24 - 'Terrific Ten'. Use at least ten different patterned papers on your card. I used a large heart cut out of a catalog, inked a small border, and used ten different scraps of red paper to punch out hearts for a border. I decided it needed a little more, so I went back and glued a tiny pearl bead in between each heart.

Day 25 - Do It Yourself - make your own glittered brad or pearl. Okay, I cheated and used my failed card from yesterday's challenge for this. I'd made a fake bow with a brad in the center and I added glitter embossing powder to it (some got onto the bow too...)

365 Cards Day 27 - I'm touched

2010-03-27T10:22:00.001-04:00

This one was a lot harder than it sounds! Make a card using at least eight different elements, and each element has to be touching at least two others. My first thought was a bunch of flowers... I made this card and then I realised that while the bottom half of the card fit the requirements perfectly, the sentiment at the top wasn't touching anything! So I added some flowers... and then I had to add some leaves to meet the 'three' requirement because I put the flowers in the wrong place to fit. After that it was such a busy card that while it fit the challenge I decided to cut my losses (and the card) and to split it in twain.

I cut the decorated part off the card and placed it on its own base with a fake bow. And I attached some pretty paper to the top part to make it into a useable card too.

And then I made a fresh card for the challenge...

365 Cards Day 26

2010-03-26T11:04:00.002-04:00

(I had to take a few days off crafting to rest my hands... I'll try to get back to Days 24/25 when I can.)

Today's challenge is to use a 'recipe' to make your card. You have to use the following elements AND NO EXTRAS:

5x5 card
3 circles
2 squares
ribbon
sentiment of your choice

I never make square cards because they need special envelopes and take up too much room in the OWH mailing boxes, so this is a first. A friend lost her husband to brain cancer last weekend, so I decided to make her the card nobody ever wants to have to make... my challenge was to follow the recipe and to make a card as beautiful as I could in tribute to Rob.
The recipe said you had to use ribbon but it didn't say what you had to do with it, so I tried my hand at ribbon embroidery. I've never done this before but I found a tutorial on basic ribbon embroidery stitches which makes it all very simple, and it really wasn't as hard as it looks. I used the narrowest ribbon for the flowers and a wider one for the leaves because I didn't have the right colour green in the skinny one. The wider ribbon looks good but it was MUCH harder to get it through the cardstock. If you want to try this, use a tiny hole punch to make the holes in the center of the flowers (I used my cropodile) and make sure you're using sturdy cardstock because it's going to get pretty beat-up before you're finished.

DH has a blog

2010-03-25T13:45:00.001-04:00

Want to see a bit more of our daily life? DH has decided that he wants to get into this blog thing... and not being a crafter, he's writing about our cats and his techy stuff. And he uses photos. There's even a couple of me in there. :P Click the link to go see what he's been up to.

Tails Of...

PS. No new cards today... my wrists are complaining vigorously that I've been overdoing the fine motor activity and I have to give them a rest so I don't have a real issue with them. I took yesterday off computing entirely and went shopping instead! I've packaged up my mother's day cards to send off to OWH and also packaged a couple of swaps, and that's it for my crafting activity for a few days.