One More for St. Patrick, and Inspiration Challenge

First, housekeeping.  I figured out how I am going to take care of the backlog.  I have made some extra cards the last few days, and also am going to show a few older ones that I made earlier but haven't shown yet.  Not quite in the spirit of the original challenge, but at least I will have a card I made to show for every day so far this year when I finish catching up.  I am going to catch up by including 3-4 cards per post instead of 1-2, so that by the end of the month at the latest I should be back on track.

For March 17th, one more St. Patrick's Day card:

Just love this little girl!  She is another digital stamp from Pink Cat Studio (image copyright Pink Cat Studio).  I really like their style, simple images with bold lines that are easy to work with.  For this card I layered a piece of Honeycomb designer paper (Paper Adventures) onto an ivory card base, rounding the corners of both.  I printed the image (her official title is Lucky Betty, but I mentally think of her as Fiona because she reminds me of my niece!) onto green paper and again on white cardstock.   I colored the white image using the Prismacolors with Gamsol technique and glitter glued the three shamrocks.  Then I fussy-cut the image out, skipping the "antennae" and the pigtails, and used mounting tape to pop the colored image up over the green image.  I cut the headband shamrocks out and mounted them separately.  The parts of the original green image that show through then complete the picture.  I rounded the corners of the green paper and attached it to the card.  Finally I added a shamrock bubble sticker, an ancient item from my stash, to finish off this simple card.

Onto this weekend's Inspiration Challenge!  This week the inspiration was a German website, Johnny Tapete, which specializes in vintage wallpaper and other decor items from the 50s through the 70s.  If you like the bold prints from the 70s, this site is a visual feast!  I found inspiration for two different cards.

The first was inspired by this wallpaper:

The design immediately reminded me of a paper pad I recently found on clearance at Michael's, along with some coordinating stickers and die-cuts.  Using this image from a sketch challenge I missed two weeks ago,

I came up with this card:

All the papers, and the dimensional butterfly sticker, are from the K&Company Edamame line.  The construction of the card is pretty self explanatory, just a lot of cutting and trimming, and resizing and cussing, and a slight tweak to the challenge sketch to make it all fit, and then sticking everything in place.  The cool thing is that the coordinating papers, the woodgrain one and the green one, also have a very 70s feel and actually also match up to similar wallpapers at the website!  I am very happy with this card because I don't do a lot with big bold patterns and coordinating patterned papers with other patterned papers, and this turned out really well.  Using items from a coordinating line really helped me take a bigger risk than I might have otherwise.

Finally, I did a second card in a similar way.  Another wallpaper pattern jumped out at me:

It reminded me of another set of coordinating papers and stickers I had bought several years ago, right before my long crafting hiatus, and had never really used much.  I used another challenge sketch as the basis for a card:

And made this card:

The papers are all from S.E.I.'s Madera Island line.  The tree paper is the connection to the inspiration piece, as are the overall 70s feel of this color combo.  I changed up this sketch a little more, leaving out the circle element (though the round tree tops kind of suggest it) because no matter what I tried it was just too cluttered.  I also shrunk the oval down to a sticker that is meant to suggest a photo turn.  My usual impulse would have been to use brads in all 4 corners, so the sketch helped me stretch a little and try something different. I really like the way it turned out.  The stamp, which I have been using a LOT, comes from the Michael's $1 bin so I am definitely getting my money's worth out of it!

Thanks for looking, and have a great Sunday!

St. Patrick's Day Cards!

Made a few more St. Patrick's Day cards, one of which was sold to the same neighbor who commissioned the birthday card.  Here we go!

Two different variations on the same card.  My leprechaun digital stamp from Pink Cat Studio (still copyright Pink Cat Studio!) got some more use, and I again experimented with different shades of Prismacolor pencils, blended using Gamsol.  The background paper is from MemoriesComplete and the paper strips are Deja Views.  The buttons on the top card are from Queen & Co.  The dimensional stickers on the second card are Hallmark.

Thanks for looking, have a great weekend, and Happy St. Patrick's Day!

February Christmas cards

I think I have mentioned before that I am taking part in a challenge to make Christmas/Chanukah/holiday cards all year long so that I am not scrambling in December.  My goal is 8 cards per month.  I had already completed four cards in February and used an example in Cards magazine to inspire the second design.  While I love how it turned out, it was a labor-intensive card (and heavy!  hand delivery only!) and making four of them was pretty tedious.  So even though before when I have made several of the same (easy) design I have counted it for only one day, this time I am counting all four cards as separate days, because dang, it felt like four days' worth!  Anyway, here's the card:

The chipboard squares were recycled from cardboard packaging.  I might buy pre-made chipboard in fancy shapes (at least until I get my own die cutting machine) but I refuse to buy squares!  Though I do now have to buy a new blade for my paper cutter!

The designer papers all came from a DCWV paper pad in my stash, as did the fiber, ribbon and button.  The metal tree is from Making Memories.  I got the alphabet stamps in a box lot of used cling mount stamps, so I don't know the company there.

The other card for today is a custom request, my first one!  It is for someone whose husband's birthday is on St. Patrick's Day and she wanted a combo birthday/St. Pat's card with leprechauns.  Oh, and the card is for a guy so no ribbons or flowers or other floofy stuff.   I have no leprechaun stamps so this is my first foray into digistamp purchase and use:

The digistamp is from Pink Cat Studio, an online store that sells both actual and digital stamps.  I'm not a big fan of cute, but I really like their stuff.  For a digital novice, the site was easy to navigate, shop, pay, and download my images.  (Disclosure:  this is purely my opinion, not receiving anything from TCP to promote them! Image is copyright Pink Cat Studio.)  Digital stamps are a great way to quickly obtain an image when you don't have an actual stamp, and are much easier to store!  I think I will be doing more digitals in the future.

I printed out the leprechaun and used my high-tech circle cutters (AKA lids of assorted plastic containers) to cut it out along with a slightly larger circle to mat the image.  I colored the image with Prismacolor pencils and made my first attempt at using Gamsol as a blending tool.  I really loved how it turned out and enjoy the process of coloring immensely.  I see more of that in my future too.

Finally I layered the image onto a light brown woody looking background paper that was layered onto the card itself.  I distressed the edges a bit with some dark brown ink.  I added the shamrock buttons (unknown source) and stamped the sentiment (Stampendous).  I had printed out an Irish blessing for the inside of the card and added one more shamrock button there as well.  Finally, thinking it needed just a little something more, I used green glitter glue to cover the shamrock on the leprechaun's hat.   I am pleased with  the end result and hope the purchaser and recipient are too.

Thanks for looking, and have a great day!

Back!

Wow, it's been three weeks--21 days--since I posted here.  I didn't plan to take a hiatus but several factors conspired against me in the rest of my life.  I successfully fought off a cold that took my partner down for over a week, but I was feeling crappy and exhausted the whole time.  And work has been kind of nuts.  Not only was I not blogging, but I was making very few cards as well.  I would sit down at my table, move some things around, look for inspiration, and not find anything.  I wasn't happy with the few things I forced myself through making.

I want to ultimately catch back up but I have quite a backlog of days so I'm not quite sure how to go about it.  I guess I was overly optimistic to think that I would be able to keep going all year without periods like this, but I am not giving up my project.  Just going to have to move forward and see how it goes.

So, onto some cards!

Yesterday's weekly "Clean And Simple" challenge on Splitcoaststampers was to make a card using white and shades of blue.  I had in the back of my mind an idea from an Inspiration challenge from a few weeks back, and was able to join it with the CAS challenge.

The inspiration site was Galleria Arts and Crafts, a site for a Calgary, Canada store that sells locally crafted items.  Among the items were these collaged paper brooches:

My version:

As always, focusing on blue sent me into a nautical frame of mind and I was thinking about oceans and seas while making the little collage pieces.  To make them, I started with pieces of watercolor paper and sponged them with a variety of shades of blue ink.  Then I spread some superglue on the bottoms of the pieces and dipped them into a baggie full of tiny gold beads.   I wrapped some blue and blue green eyelash fiber around the middles, and added a few more items to each.  I used foam tape to mount the collages on a background of handmade paper.

The handmade paper is a long-hoarded stash item that I am glad I am finally making myself use!  Years and years ago, when I was first getting into paper crafting, I took a day-long course on handmade paper at Georgia Tech's Institute of Paper Science and Technology, and in the hands-on portion of the class we made several kinds of paper ourselves.  The background piece is one of the ones I made using shredded denim fibers mixed with paper linter.

I made one more card for the CAS challenge:

This was super quick and easy, and kept with the shades of blue theme.  I started by sponging the edges of the card with a variety of blue shades of ink.  The background paper is another piece of handmade paper, this one was one I received in a swap long ago.  There is a smooth side to the paper that you can write or draw on, but for background paper, I like the rough side, that retains the texture of the paper towels the maker used to help squish the water out of the paper when she was making it.  I added an Anna Griffin sticker and stamped the Stampin' Up sentiment in denim ink.

More soon, I promise!  Thanks for looking, and have a great day!