Last cards for the weekend!

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

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

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

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

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...

More 4th July Challenges

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

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

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.

I hope you enjoyed the blog skip

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

S&S Sketch Challenge #52

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

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...

Pure Stamping

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

My Summerhaven Card Recipe Challenge

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. :)

May RSC Sketch Challenge

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

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!