Stars and Stamps Wednesday

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

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

365 Cards - Way behind!

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!

Getting in the way-back-machine 28-34

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!

Catching up on 365 Cards

There was a very noisy festival just opposite our house over the weekend, so we spent a lot of time out and about to get away from the noise... so I never got Sunday's challenge done till this morning! So here are three day's worth of cards for you instead of one!

Day 14 - Super Sketchy Sunday.
Use this sketch to make your card...

Which became this card very quickly, because I had a card base in my stash which fitted the basic shape! All I had to do was embellish it, and to figure out a way to incorporate the folded ribbon. I didn't feel like messing around with real ribbon today, so stamped it on some cardstock and folded the end.

Day 15 - Ad-inspired. The obvious thing to do with this ad is to make an Easter card... but the Easter deadline for Operation Write Home was two weeks ago! I'm done with Easter cards for the year already. So I decided to go with a spring theme and to use the beautifully delicate blue flowers as my inspiration and to play with my new 'Stretch Your Imagination' Cricut cartridge.

This cartridge was designed for making cards so it has shaped and matching frames sized to fit... but of course I mixed-and-matched to get the effect I want. I cut a 5-inch-tall square frame with scallops top-and-bottom and trimmed the outside edges off, then I used the strips to make an extra decorative feature. The center of the frame was flipped and glued back in to place, and I put the Easter basket and a bunch of silk flowers in the basket. BTW these were the ONLY light blue flowers I have, and they were just right for this... it needed a little something more, so I stamped a Studio G stamp across the base of the basket and set it aside for the glue to dry.

And lastly for today, Day 16 - Opposites Attract. (Use two opposing images  on your card eg. cat and dog, sun and moon...) I started with a 'sunny' and 'rainy background paper in the same colour family... I was going to use a single weather stamp with the sun peeping out behind the clouds...but I didn't like the way the sun came out when I embossed it, so I decided to just use the cloud. I stamped a bunch more on light blue cardstock, coloured them with markers, used a blending pen to try to make them look a bit more cloudy and embossed them with UTEE. Then I drew raindrops on the card and embossed them. And for the Sunny side I mounted a sticker on popdots and stamped a few butterflies between the printed flowers.

365 Cards Day 10 and 11

Yesterday's 'Wacky Colours' challenge was such a doozie that I had to wait to see how everyone else tackled it before I tried it myself. Orange, blue and purple is NOT a colour combination that it would ever occur to me to use together! I found a small piece of floral cardstock in those colours and added some vivid primaries. It had a dragon punched out of one side so that decided the main decoration. I stuck a piece of vivid orange behind the opening for my dragon. The card needed a little 'bling' to help seperate the layers, so I added some tiny scrap dots (from the inside of foil stickers) and I gave the dragon golden claws. It was fiddly getting those tiny little pieces into place, but I think they bring it to life... btw those two dark scalloped layers that look almost identical are actually purple and deep blue.

Today's challenge was much simpler - make a landscape/scenic card using patterned paper as the background. I love doing collages but I usually use cardstock, so using patterned paper instead took a little digging around... I'm very happy with how it came out.

Catching up on Stars and Stamps

I've been a bit distracted by 365 Cards this week! So here's a catch-up post for Stars and Stamps.

First, Colour Challenge #2 - make a card inspired by these beautiful spring flowers. I made a card for this challenge a few days ago but I was so pleased with the design that I saved it to submit for Sketch Sunday instead. That means I had to make another card for this... I decided I really wanted to use bright-coloured flowers on my card.

I stamped out some backgrounds a few days ago (if I go to the trouble of lining up the alphabet stamps on the acrylic block I stamp at least half a dozen images because they're such a hassle to position right!), and one of them was the vivid yellow of these flowers. I added some crumpled tissue paper to the card and then went to town with my prima and silk flowers.

Next we move on to Sunday Sketch #6. Make a card using this sketch. It reminds me of a Window and I thought briefly of making a cut-out-window card... but I'm trying to catch up here, not get complicated, so a simple scrap card it was! I save everything that's more than 2 inches square, so a card like this is a good way to use up some of the pieces.

I pulled out my blue scrap box to find some rectangles, and the first thing that caught my eye was a cute polar bear ready-to-use! I had to make him the center of the card... so Winter it was. I had plenty of Wintery scraps to finish the card and he can go into my Christmas Card box to await his time.

365 Cards Day 1 - Color Scheme

The first challenge for the year on 365 Cards is to use the following colour combination to make a card: red, white, chocolate, teal, and natural brown (the name of it has momentarily slipped my mind!)

I started digging in my scrap bins for pieces the right shades, and when I saw them together the first thing that came into my mind was 4th July... so that's what I went with! Besides, I had a brand new flag stamp to play with - I found a 4th July pack of Studio G stamps at the back of the stamp bin in Joanns, and it was so old that it wouldn't ring up! They had to ring up another stamp pack the same price to sell it to me (at least they DID sell it to me - Office Depot were real meanies about that - one time I had a whole stack of crafting supplies in my basket and they rang up as 'return to factory to destroy' and they wouldn't let me have them for any price!)

I used a large scrap triangle of deep red and another of deep blue for the base. I was going to use just ONE flag stamp in the bottom right-hand corner but it looked a bit silly, so I stamped some more and put a whole row of them down the middle of the card. I tried adding some punched chocolate stars in the right-hand corner but as soon as they were glued down I knew I hated the way they looked! It was too late to peel them off, so I covered that corner up with another triangle of chocolate brown cardstock, and I made that my sentiment block. The little stars are hand-drawn. Add a USA sticker in the top corner and voila... one patriotic card to stash away for my Summer shipment to Operation Write Home.

Want to give this challenge a go or see what everyone else has made? Follow this link to the 365 Cards blog to join in.

S&S Colour Challenge 1: Spring

Today's Challenge on Stars and Stamps is a simple one - make a card inspired by the beautiful springlike colours on this Easter dress. Isn't it lovely? I'm a big fan of aqua and sea-green, and I had some paper that seemed just right for the challenge.

My first card uses some embossed floral cardstock that was RAKed to me, two little embossed page corners that happen to be a perfect match, floral paper from the Rubber soul Meadow's Edge collection, and a vellum message from Colourbok's 'Growing in Faith' collection. It needed a little something extra and I hadn't used the white part of the challenge yet so I mounted a heart-shaped floral sticker on some white cardstock, trimmed it out, and put it on a popdot.

I hadn't used any rubber stamps yet... so for my second card I made a random background with one of my Heidi Grace floral stamps and a Serenade rainbow inkpad. I don't know if they sell these any more - I've had it for so long that it's disintegrating, but they had 'rainbow' pads for each colour family and I bought blue and green. I added a blue denim diecut with a sentiment from the same set, and put some white rub-on stitching along the long edges. The strip was JUST long enough to do them both. It still needed a little something so I used some stickers to finish it off.

Want to try this challenge (or any of the others posted?) Visit the Stars and Stamps blog and check them out.

Challenges from the Christian Paper Crafts website

I went exploring last week and found myself an interesting new craft group called Christian Paper Crafts. There used to be a paper magazine associated with it, but it seems that that has been discontinued (not surprising given the immense amount of time and money it takes to create on, and how little return people get on it in this economic climate. I used to know a couple who published a science fiction magazine in Australia, and it was a nightmare of a job!) Anyway, there's no magazine to see right now, so the front page of the site says 'page not found' but ignore that and click on the Community or the Galleries. They're both going strong. They have a different challenge each day of the week except Sunday, they post really thoughtful bible commentaries and studies regularly, and their design team are magnificent, so there's plenty of inspiration to be had! I've started tackling some of their challenges and here are the cards I've made for them this week.

WCD Challenge #1 - make an entirely red card

This one was a bit trickier than I anticipated... the rules say to use red and ONLY red. Not red background with a coloured pattern on it... it has to be red on red. I rummaged through my scrap box and found that I had more pieces of red paper than I thought I did... and in the end I came up with two very simple cards. Sometimes simple is the best.

My first card plays off the New Year theme - I have a nice big dragon punch in my punch drawer and I found a negative image I'd punched out for something else (the darkest cardstock is nice thick textured CS), which gave me the idea. Red is the traditional colour for good luck to the Chinese people, and you'll see a lot of red and gold around the Chinese New Year. I had to skip the gold here... but the card works anyway. I wanted to stamp on the tag, but I didn't have any ink that would show up effectively on the red cardstock - my red ink is too light and it just faded into the background, and darker colours just looked black or brown. Not to mention smeary because acrylic stamps work best with the quick-dry black ink! So I grabbed a red pen and hand-wrote my tag, and then I finished it with a couple of little red hearts for a touch of bling, and a tangle of shiny red fibers.