Happy Easter

A few little Easter treats for the family. Bits and pieces from the stash make for quick and easy spring-inspired tags.

WF Enveloper Stamps

Quick post this morning to share a recent birthday card created with Waffle Flower Enveloper stamps. Big fan of enveloper stamp sets; sophisticated, contemporary designs that are fun without being too cutesy. Lots of masking, ink blending and a bit of fussy cutting went into this card.

Blended Backgrounds

No surprise I'm more than ready for Spring, though I could have happily done without Sunday's spring forward. My body still is struggling to adjust to one less hour of sleep.

Few more blended cards. I'm not a huge fan of embossing. Despite following tips and tricks supplied by the best crafting has to offer, I still find granules of embossing powder everywhere. I think it's just the nature of embossing. On the upside, there is nothing quite like a beautiful stamp (background or other), white embossing and colorful blended inks. A relatively quick and straightforward process which always delivers stunning results. Another plus, if you're inclined to look on the bright side, all my equipment gets a good cleaning after embossing. Damn those granules.

These cards use the MFT Etched Flower background stamp. It's a large rubber stamp, big enough to cover a front panel of an A2 card, but since most of my cards are 5x7, I needed to stamp top and bottom. A great property of rubber is I always get a great first impression, so I rarely need to re-stamp an area to ensure coverage.

It's not noticeable on the photos, but I did add a little sparkle to parts of the card using a shimmer pen. Just enough to fancy it up a bit.

Color Blending Birth Yay!

The last couple of weeks have been a bit crazy, and to top it off, this is the week my computer monitor decided to take a permanent snooze. Ugh! There are some things I'm willing to go without for any period: cleaning, laundry, maybe if you really twist my arm...chocolate, but, access to a computer is not one of them. We're pretty teched-up in this household, but tablets and smartphones can only get you so far, especially with these old eyes. So now I'm positioned in front of a new monitor, a little poorer but much happier.

The cards I'm sharing today is Birth yay from My Favorite Things. This is one of the few sets I saw and immediately ordered. I didn't even wait for it to qualify for sale pricing; it's that adorably cute. I pulled out the Copics and inks for some destress time. Plus, my birthday card stash is woefully depleted, like I had to actually "purchase a card" depleted.

   
























Love how these turned out. Bright colors always make me happy. I made 4 cards total and have 9 birthdays this month. For the moment I'm done coloring rhinos, even cute ones. Time to hit the stamps.

No Line Coloring

I decided to try my hand at no line coloring with the Pretty Lovely stamp set from Mama Elephant. I used a light grey ink with very rough masking knowing that my coloring would cover any overlapping lines. The plan was to use Copic markers on the image but quickly evolved. I was testing a new paper I'd purchased, Strathmore Marker paper. I liked the bright whiteness and smoothness of the paper but wasn't happy with how it performed with copic.

The color was very muted, almost greyish when first applied, though the color did intensify as the area dried. Since I like to work quickly with marker and with nothing to lose, I decided to see how the paper performed with colored pencil. I quickly blocked in the remaining images with copic and then began working the image with colored pencil to add intensity and detail.

I was much happier with the results. This paper would probably not hold up to a lot of layering or scrubbing (not a good artist rendering paper for colored pencil) but for a card with light coloring it performed pretty well. More importantly, since I have 23 sheets remaining, I definitely will be using it again.

Hog Heaven Valentine

Mailed the last of my Valentine greetings yesterday. Cut it a bit close especially since I didn't have many to send, but the essential factor is they got shipped.

This one featuring MFT's Hog Heaven is one of my favorites. I know it will bring a happy smile to the recipient's face. How could it not? The pigs in this set are all adorable.

Valentines

Valentine's Day is right around the corner.  Typically I don't send many valentine cards. Most of my crafting around this holiday tends to center around treat bags or punny valentines for the kids. This year I agreed to assist our youth group with creating cards and gifts for our shut-ins. Still working to come up with some ideas. I'm finding it a bit more challenging as I'll be working with teenagers...punny valentines seem too young and most of the items I've pinned in the past, much too complicated for the time allotment.  I'm sure I'll get there.

In the meantime, here are a few cards I created to send. No stamping, just paper, dies (Concord & 9th, MFT, Mama Elephant) and shimmer pen. Not that you can see the shimmer very well in the images but trust me, it's there. I would not create a valentine without sparkle!

Simon Says Spring Flowers

Happy Monday!

If you're located in the Midwest, we're recovering from last week's arctic freeze with a big thaw. Thankfully everyone in my immediate family survived without any significant issues which can accompany such low temperatures. We hit -24 degrees, coupled with wind chill close to -45 degrees. But no broken pipes, dead car batteries or furnaces giving up. Extremely thankful. And just as grateful the kids are back to a regular schedule and routine. They spent 3 days home last week because of snow and temperatures. By their eagerness to go out to the bus stop this morning I think even they were happy to be going to school again. Or maybe it was just the warm-up. We're supposed to hit close to 50 degrees today...and then drop back down to the 20's. Mother nature in the Chicagoland area is cruel and heartless in February (and March, and April)!

With Spring in mind...I'm sharing a birthday card I created using SS Spring Flowers stamps. Sadly, it will be the only Spring I see for a while.

Flowers are fussy cut, and I used a medallion stamp with VersaMark for the background image. This one will probably be hand given as the wood tag adds some bulk.

Altenew Medallion Cover Dies

Happy Monday. We got snow this weekend which was a good enough excuse for me to spend some time in the craft room. I pulled out Altenew's Medallion cover dies and played for a while.

I spent a few hours positioning colors to create the elements. Embossed sentiments on vellum and then wrapped the design before mounting it onto the card base. Happy with the results and thinking if I can find the time during the next couple of weeks I may try a Valentine version.

Stash Busting

Another round of stash busting. We have our Great Agers program this week at the church. It's a monthly event hosted by our church, which brings together community members for lunch, social time and entertainment. I've been frequently asked to provide treat boxes/items for our guest. It's right up my alley. This year I'm partnering with a friend to plan and assemble the monthly treat items, a big bonus because over time the program has grown to include up to 40 guests.

This month's theme is winter...of course. Even though the temperatures have been fluctuating and have even hit close to 50 degrees we figured you can never go wrong with cookies, hot chocolate mix, and cute snowmen.

 The snowmen were print & cut from my Silhouette library as were the phrases. I only needed to add to the mix as I already had a lot of the items in my stash. Glitter snowflakes I bought from WalMart years ago. Colors for the treat boxes was dictated by what I had on hand...blue, teal, pink, red and green.

Copic Coloring / Get Well Kitties

Hooray...It's hump day! Which has nothing to do with this post other than Gieco has been running old commercials, I love the camel commercial, it's Wednesday and I'm grateful to be a little bit closer to the weekend. I don't own a camel stamp so kitties will have to do for this hump day.

Carrying over from my self imposed color challenge with the thank you cards, I bring to you get well kitties.

In addition to birthday and thank-you cards, I always need get well greetings, especially this time of year. Lots of cat lovers and owners in my circle of friends so MFT I Knead You set gets lots of use. I paired it with some stamps from MFT Merry Chistmoose.

On this card, I paired it with some washi tape..actually a double band. The teal design was too stark and red tone wasn't quite right so I layered the two using a bit of glue to secure the two layers together. Depending on the brand I find washi tape doesn't always want to stick over time. A little bit of glue prevents having to fuss with the card when I'm ready to send it.

Thank You

Happy Monday. 

Kicking off a new week and finally kickstarting the new year. It's a rough start. My niece is home sick so all my big goals for the day need to be modified to account for spending most of my day with her. Usually, I'm better organized and prepped. Full of energy and eagerness to set goals, clean out and very productive. Last week, not so much. Procrastion was my first, middle and last name. We did manage to get all the Christmas decorations put away. And I did get to spend some time in the craft room building a stash of Thank-You cards for the coming year. I'll require many more but it's a good beginning and I'm counting it as a win in an otherwise pretty lazy, laid-back start to the year. 

This was really more of a color challenge for me. I've had the turquoise cardstock from Paper Source for a number of years. I believe it is called Pool. Decided it was time to put it to better use than sitting on a shelf. Why I don't use this color combination more often is a mystery to me...I really like to cool greens and blues complimented by the warm brown. And it's not like this combo hasn't been everywhere during the past couple of years. Figures I'm picking it up just as it's going out. 

Stamps and dies are from Altenew, Concord & 9th, Mama Elephant, MFT and I might even have one from Simon Says in there. 

This first one uses the C&9 double cut alphabet dies. This is still one of my all-time favorite alphabet dies. And, yes, I'm still hoping they'll release some phrases because lining up the individual dies, even with a temple, is still a major pain. The fact that I do it is just an indication of how much I love the results. I've paired it with Altenew's Leaf Canopy stamp set. Another new favorite. 

This card uses a free little stamp set Altenew sent to their customers. It was such a wonderful year-end surprise in the mail. Though I'm pretty sure this meant I spent way too much money with them last year.  No matter, my loyaty is easily bought with kindness and great customer service. 

The sentiment is from Mama Elephant. The set contains the word thanks in several languages. Love that!

The final card is using the remaining die cuts and MFT Distressed Patterns stamp. Of all the stamps I purchased last year this one is definitely in the top 10 favorites. I predict it will get a healthy workout in the coming year. 

Happy 2019

Happy New Year! We're not quite ready to give up on the holiday season, meaning the Christmas decor is still up and it's not coming down until the weekend. But the urge to clean and purge did arrive promptly with the new year. My desk is clean and everything that had contributed to the craft room looking as if a cyclone has hit, back in the proper place. Just in time because I'm out of birthday, get well and thank-you cards. I can work in messy but not in a disaster zone. Feels good to be in the land of organized again.

The card I'm sharing today is using the Simon Says Thanks border die and MFT You Gnome Me stamp set. I'd been eyeing this stamp set for a long while and finally purchased it this Fall. The images are adorable. We have a running joke in the family about garden gnomes...so I have no idea why it took so long to become part of my stamp collection.

Just a real simple thank you card. Now I need to make about 40 more to get me through the first half of the year.