Celebrate In Style

Yesterday, just before dinner, I was sitting in my living room browsing through an old House & Home magazine, when a small hand drawn sketch caught my eye.  I was struck by the vivid blocks of colour used by the artist and knew immediately I had to adopt this idea for a card.  I love it when inspiration hits me over the head!

I used the exact same colours and block layout as in the sketch and then added the stamped image of the polka dot woman as the focal image.  She is one of the lovely ladies from the CTMH Fashionista stamp set.

I knew I wanted a black ribbon as a contrast to the bright colours and I just happened to have this fun black and white polka dot ribbon (thanks Kim!).  I love how it matches the polka dots on the lady’s outfit!  The sentiment is from a Gina K stamp set I bought a while ago and have used on a number of occasions but I really felt it was perfect for this card.

There’s really not much more to tell so it’s a short one today.  I hope inspiration finds you this easily.  Happy crafting!

Movie Party Invitation

Hi everyone.  I hope you are all having a good week!  My son will be turning seven in a week and a half so I decided to share his birthday party invitations with you.  He wanted to invite some friends to a party at the movies so I came up with this…

As you can see I started with a black card base and ticket punched the corners.  I used a piece of Colonial White card stock for the image piece and ticket punched the corners on that as well.  The stamp sets that were used for this are Take A Picture, A Little Reminder and Limited Edition, which are both retired.

I divided the white card stock into three sections using a black marker and then filled each section with something relating to the movies.  I cut the red and grey stars out with my Cricut and stamped the You’re Invited on the red star.  The inside of the invitation has all the details of the party printed out on a movie clapper.  I did that in Word and printed it out onto regular printer paper which I was then able to cut and glue to the inside of the card – super easy!

And lastly, I thought I’d show you the birthday cake I spent all day yesterday making for my mother’s 70th birthday.  I used a tube of black icing gel for the writing and am not happy with it.  It was too goopy and hard to work with so I may end up redoing it but I am happy with the flowers!

This is a huge cake by my standards.  It measures 18×14 inches by 6 inches high and weighs about 10lbs!  Now I have to drive it 800km without messing it up – wish me luck! LOL!

Have a great day and happy crafting!

Dreams Mini Album

Happy Friday everyone!  A great big THANK YOU to My Time Made Easy for choosing my Dotty Happy Birthday card as the challenge winner over on their blog this week!  Yeah!  Incidentally I also entered it into the Out of a Hat Challenge last week which leads me to today’s creation.  This week’s challenge is to make a mini album no larger than 3×3.  Well ladies, I just realized my mini album is 3.5×2.5 so I hope you’ll overlook that little blunder!

The front and back cover are actually playing cards.  We always seem to have incomplete decks of cards lying around from the kids so I took two cards and covered them with designer paper from the CTMH Florentine paper pack.  I stamped a few images and distressed the edges with Desert Sand ink, added a pearl brad and some ribbon to tie it closed.

The inside pages are made up of two strips of Bamboo card stock which were cut to 12×3 inches and scored at 2 1/4 inch intervals.  I glued two of the ends together to make one long piece of paper and then accordion folded it on the score lines.  The adjacent backs of the folds were glued together to form the pages of the book.  There were some left over tabs on each end which I used to glue the pages to the cover of the album.

The pages of the book were a blank canvas so I pulled out all my stamps and went to work trying to create a distressed, shabby look.  As I was stamping the backgrounds I got the idea to make this a little album of affirmations – just a little something for the reader to ponder!

This was really fun and therapeutic.  I got to use quite a few stamp sets and blend them all together.

The shades of ink used throughout the book complement the Florentine paper; Bamboo, Desert Sand, Twilight, Creme Brulee,  Sunset, Garden Green, Chocolate and Cocoa.

So that is my attempt at a mini album.  It’s a great way to use some of those stamps you haven’t gotten around to using yet!  Next time I think I would take it a step further and add some flowers and embellishments.  Have a great weekend and happy crafting!

You Are Positively Cool!

Wowee, it’s a hot one today; 32 degrees C but feels like 42 with the humidity!  A great day to stay indoors and make stuff!  This weekend my son has a birthday party to go to so I went ahead and made a masculine card for the occasion.

The colours were inspired by the My Time Made Easy Pretty Palette Challenge this week – ivory, light blue, rust and mustard.  Great boy colours!

I used my CTMH You Are… stamp set which has a lot of masculine looking stamps to choose from.  I started off by stamping blue stripes onto a piece of ivory card stock for the background and then thought it would look cool to have the reverse at the bottom of the card.  This really reminds me of wainscoting you might find in a boys room.  I achieved the white stripes by scoring the blue card stock every 1/8 inch and then sanding the embossed lines with sand paper.  CTMH card stock has a white core so it is great for distressing.

I used the rust coloured card stock as a matte for the entire card as well as an accent strip across the middle.  A sunrise pattern was stamped across the top using Goldrush ink.  The mustard yellow accent strip was stamped with Sunflower ink.  I cut out the stars using my Cricut and Art Philosophy cartridge.

The sentiment sign was stamped, cut out, assembled and popped up using dimensional foam.  I also added the yellow star brad to the centre of the largest star.  That’s it!  One more thing checked off the list – yay!  Have a great day and stay cool!

 

Embossed Thanks Window Card

Hi everyone!  Wow, what a busy time of year.  The kids only have seven days of school left and then summer holidays begin.  They are so excited and I’m looking forward to a slower pace for a few months.  But in the meantime, there’s a lot to do!  Teacher gifts, end of year parties, plus I’m organizing a 70th birthday party for my dear mother on June 30th, out of town for 50 people!  Yikes! Nevertheless, with all that’s going on, I managed to sneak down to my craft room this morning and make a simple thank you card.

I’m still stoked about the heat embossing on the overhead transparency thing so I tried this beautiful Thanks stamp.  The stamp, I feel, is really the star of the show, so I kept the rest of the card fairly simple.  I started with a white card base and cut out a window with my Cricut.  I also cut the same window out of a piece of Juniper card stock and trimmed it down to fit the card base.

I stamped the leaf pattern in Juniper ink on the Juniper card stock and inked the inside edge of the window, as well as, the edges of the card base.  I added the purple designer paper from Gina K’s Parisian Garden DP Pack to the inside of the card.  The Thanks stamp was stamped onto the transparency with Versamark and covered with CTMH’s black embossing powder.  After heating it with the heat tool I taped it to the inside of the card.  The last thing I added was the purple ribbon.

OK, back to baking!!  Hope you’re having a great day.  Happy crafting!

Polka Dot Birthday

TGIF everyone!  Just a quick post today showcasing this birthday card which I will be entering into the Out of a Hat Challenge.  The requirements are anything with buttons so this one qualifies!

Excuse me if I sound jumbled today.  I was up half the night with a sick child so I’m a bit bleary-eyed this morning!  Anyway, I started by choosing the colours.  I love the green and pink together.  The polka dot paper is from the CTMH Dotty For You paper pack.  For the rest of the card I matched the card stock colours as closely as possible from my stash.  This wasn’t too hard since it’s all Close To My Heart paper!

The little green frames were stamped and cut out using the Spring Up stamp set.  I also cut out the little square centres from the pink dotty paper and stuck them on.  I chose three different buttons from the CTMH Pink Assortment package and used the Smoothie baker’s twine from the Baker’s Twine Paradise Assortment for the bows.  The only thing left is the Happy Birthday which I cut out using my Cricut and the Life Is A Party cartridge.

So that’s all.  Off to make myself one of many more teas I’m sure I’ll be consuming today!  Have a great weekend everyone.  Hope it’s crafty!

Seed of Friendship

Good day to you!  The other day I was checking out a sneak peak for Papertrey Ink and was inspired to create this friendship card.  The PI card had a clear window in the centre with a square piece of stamped card stock stuck in the middle of it so it looked like it was floating.  That got me to thinking about trying to create a window with a heat embossed image on it.  So I tried it and it worked!

Wow!  I thought the results would be some serious melting and maybe a fire but I am so thrilled with the outcome!  I will definitely be trying other cards and things using this technique.  Anyway, down to business…

I cut the card shape with the fancy tag cutout in the middle using my Cricut and the CTMH Art Philosophy Cartridge.  The paper is from the Pemberley Paper Pack.

Next I took an 8.5×11 transparency sheet (remember those old overhead projectors?) and cut it down to a size slightly bigger than my window cutout.  Using one of the frames and silhouettes from the Sweet Moments stamp set I stamped the image onto the transparency with Versamark, being careful not to smudge it.  As you can see in the photo I did not push hard enough on the bottom of the stamp so the ink didn’t transfer totally – oops!  Nevertheless, I went ahead and covered it with black embossing powder and heated it using my heat tool.  This worked great.  The plastic didn’t even curl or pucker like I thought it might.

I taped the the image to the inside of the card using double sided tape.  I also glued a piece of Vanilla Cream card stock to the inside back of the card.  This helps show off the image a bit better than the pattern that was on the back side of the DP I used for the card.  I cut out a black frame and glued it on around the window and stuck a few prefab flowers up in the corner.  This signifies the bouquet mentioned in the sentiment, which leads me to the last step.  I cut out a tag with the Cricut and stamped the sentiment using Indian Corn Blue ink.  The edges were also inked with the same Indian Corn Blue as well as Creme Brulee.  I popped it up using foam tape and added the cream ribbon.

Voila!  I love it and I hope you do too!  Happy day and happy crafting!

What a Beeautiful Day!

Hi friends.  Hope you had a great weekend and are enjoying some lovely summer weather wherever you are!  Today I am sharing a card I made last night which contains hexagons.  If you read Paper Crafts Magazine like I do then you know that hexagons are all the rage right now.

I actually had to pull out my CTMH Wicked Halloween stamp set for the hexagons!  I stamped a strip of them right across the front of the card in Goldrush ink.  This was pretty risky for me since I’m a pretty messy crafter and usually end up smudging the ink or stamping it slightly off kilter.  But thankfully it worked out good enough!! (Don’t look too closely LOL!).

Last month CTMH’s stamp of the month set had all these lovely sunflower images so I set about stamping and colouring one of them for this card.  I used Cocoa ink for the stamped image and then coloured it in using a blender pen and Creme Brulee, Sunflower and Goldrush inks.  The centre was coloured with Chocolate and Desert Sand.  I also added a bit of gold glitter gel pen to the darker yellow areas near the centre which is hard to see in the photo.

The little bee is from one of the CTMH Petite Perks sets and ties in the flower, sentiment and hexagons nicely.  The sentiment is from Trees & Things but I ended up masking part of it and dropping in ‘bee’ using letters from the Classmate Alphabet.  I framed it in Cocoa card stock and popped it up on the card.  The sunflower was also cut out and popped up over the hexagon strip.

That’s it for today.  Off to enjoy the hot outdoors with a cold cup of iced tea.  See you next time.  Happy crafting everyone!

Easy Floral Card Set

Hi gang!  Today’s post was inspired by a Stamp TV video I was watching this morning on how to make an easy floral card.  Well it was so fun and easy I ended up making a six card set!  What a great gift this would be for a teacher or to have as a backup card stash when something unexpected comes up.

The trick here was to use matching ink and card stocks.  For example, the Thinking of You card with the sunflower was stamped with Creme Brulee ink which matched the Creme Brulee background matte border.  I also used a matte in between the focal image and the Creme Brulee matte in a coordinating colour; in this case Juniper green.

I just happened to have a note card set that I picked up a while ago at Michaels for $1.50.  I used those as the card bases so I didn’t even have to cut my own cards!  The stamp sets I used were Say It In Style, Enjoy Every Moment (retired), Friendship Bouquet and A Tree.

I hope this inspires you to try your own easy floral set.  Go have some fun!  Happy crafting!

Garden Party Invitation

Hello there!  With summer and nice weather upon us I started thinking about backyard parties and BBQ’s with friends.  What is more enchanting than being under twinkling lights in a beautiful garden while enjoying good food and friends?  So today’s card is a CAS party invitation that can be used for a garden party, BBQ or any other outdoor celebration.

I love clean and simple cards.  I don’t make them often but I am always impressed with how much they say without filling up a lot of space.  This particular invitation took me about 15 minutes total including sitting there and thinking about what it was going to look like.  So you can see that making several of these to send to friends would not take much time at all.  They look terrific and your friends would surely be impressed because you sent them a real, handmade invitation!  LOL!

My colour inspiration is from My Time Made Easy’s Pretty Palette Challenge – white, light pink and grey.  I used the Trees & Things stamp set for the patio lanterns and A Little Reminder stamp set (retired) for the sentiment.  That’s it!

And does anyone remember the welcome sign I made a while back?  Here it is hanging in my planter of King Coleus. 

Until next time… happy crafting!