Just because

Hi friends! Hope you enjoyed your weekend. I was looking back through the handful of posts I've written so far and I noticed that all my cards have been fairly intense with color, so for the Viva la Verve Week 2 challenge, I went with a more subdued vintage/shabby/grunge card. Actually, I'm not sure how to categorize it. Help me out, if you can.

Heads-up here--this gets a little sentimental.

When I think of vintage, I always think of my great-grandmother, Laura Bell (Ninny, to us kids). Not because she was a delicate, prim and proper lady, although I do remember her as a tiny thing. No, I think of her as timeless, strong, adventurous, artistic, and, well...cool. You know--vintage. You would have liked her. She would have been 113 years old next month. This card is a sort of snapshot of my Ninny:

For her femininity: the blue flower print paper and cotton lace
For her tough spirit: the brown and white plaid paper
For her humor and playfulness: the Swiss dot embossing
For her natural artistic talent: the embossed leaves on the blue panel
For her inner beauty: the flower and pearls
For the way I remember always seeing her--smiling and happy: the "smile" brad
For the hardships she endured: the dark ink spots
For the dignity and strength with which she wore every single wrinkle and scar: the grunge look
For her positive attitude: the sentiment

She's been gone from this earth for 38 years, and she's still missed.

Thanks for your visit. Come back soon!

 
Stamps: Sweet Treats (Verve)
Paper: Watercolor Bouquet (K&Co); Sweet Threads (Basic Grey); Recollections; Darice
Ink: Tim Holtz Distress Ink
Accessories: Swiss Dots & Leafy Branch embossing folders (Cuttlebug); Classy Label Die (Verve); lace; Mini Rose (Recollections); pin; beads; pearls; metal brad (Studio K); Perfect Pearls Mist; dimensionals
Size: A2 (4.25" x 5.5")

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Thanks a bunch

Happy Friday! I hope you've had a great week. Ours was fairly uneventful, if you don't count the bull that roamed the neighborhood for a couple of days. I never actually saw it, but a neighbor said she saw it grazing in our backyard Wednesday morning. We've lived in a rural area for about three years now, and are used to seeing livestock, but usually they are in a pasture...fenced in. This one was wearing a collar. I haven't heard of any more sightings for today, so I hope his owner found him and he's okay

Now, on to cards. I combined two challenges: Flourishes Farm Fresh Challenge and My Favorite Things Wednesday Stamp Club #27. After my "issues" with coloring with Copics on my last card, I wasn't too sure I wanted to do the Flourishes challenge because it was to use fruit or veggies as a focus which meant coloring. I recently bought Flourishes Garden Fresh stamp set, which I love when I see what someone else has done with it, but I still hadn't tried it out yet. So, I decided to be fearless today. I stamped the carrots onto cardstock and pretended I knew what I was doing when I colored them. Instead of coloring the background, I just outlined the image lightly in a pale yellow. Then, low and behold, I was finished and I liked the result very much. I love it when I surprise my inner critic. I used the sentiment "Thanks a bunch," from Flourishes Zinnias set.

The MFT Challenge sketch was fun to work with. I like the offset rectangles and the oval that's high and to the right of center. It always seems more challenging to design things asymmetrically. This sketch has a butterfly (which I think means an embellishment) in the lower right corner of the card. When I had everything else put together, that was the only thing I was lacking. I didn't have much room to work with because I didn't want to cover up all my coloring :)  The bows I tried seemed too big or just not right for this particular card, and a butterfly wasn't too relevant to a bunch of carrots. I don't have a whole lot in the way of embellishments so I usually end up using buttons, bows, or flowers. I almost gave up on putting anything else on the card. Then, I remembered that I had some household twine. I wound up some, wrapped it in the middle with some Honeydew twine from the Twinery, and hot glued it to the picture. Perfect. (You can't tell in the photograph, but the base cardstock is actually a very dark eggplant color--not black or brown. It's very pretty in real life)

On a sidenote, my daughter made two cards today. One was a thank you card for her aunt and uncle, and the other was for a friend who's having a birthday party tomorrow. I do any cutting that needs to be done on the paper cutter and I handle the glue gun, but other than that (and a little encouraging advice) she did these both by herself. I tried to get her to paper piece the balloons, but she wasn't having any of that. Her attention span is just a tiny bit shorter than mine ;)

Thanks for stopping by! Enjoy the weekend!

~Hugs,

 

Stamps: Garden Fresh, Zinnias (Flourishes)

Paper: Sweet Threads (Basic Grey); Fairy Flora (Prima); Bazzill Basics; Recollections

Ink: Distress Ink; Colorbox 

Accessories: Copics; Classic Oval Lg die (Spellbinders); Garden Trellis edger punch (Martha Stewart); Clear Embossing Pwdr (Zing); brads; mini round gems (Recollections); twine (Twinery & household); dimensionals; sewing

Size: A2 (4/25" x 5.5")

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Friends are special treasures

Hello friends! My daughter got a ton of Sizzix dies (people and clothes) for her birthday this week (she likes to make cards, too) and we're heading out to look for something to store her things in. Her craft area is starting to look as messy as mine! One day soon I'll post a picture or two of our craft room. It's a nice room that was originally set up for knitting, but I'm packing all that stuff up to sell and trying to transform it into a papercrafting room, so right now it's a disaster. I'll show you a "before" photo when I've got a nice "after" photo to go along with it ;) In the meantime, I'll make this brief.

I almost always forget that I can usually combine challenges, so I miss out on a lot of them for lack time, but today I remembered. Today's card is for for three different challenges: Flourishes Timeless Tuesday, The Cat's Pajamas TCP Tuesday, and Taylored Expressions Sketch Challenge. Taylored Expressions provided the sketch, The Cat's Pajamas had 3 photos to use as inspiration, so I went with color--pink, brown, ivory, blue, and "waffle cone," and Flourishes had "friends" as the theme--the word "friend" had to be in the sentiment.

I used a Flourishes stamp from the Zinnia set and colored it with Copics. As with most everything else I do in cardmaking, I am far from an expert, and Copics are one of my biggest challenges. One of these days I need to take a class or buy a good book or DVD on how to color with these wonderful markers. I colored the flowers okay, but couldn't do anything with the background, so I ended up coloring it in almost completely with blue. It looked awful--lots of streaks, so I used a tumbled glass distress ink and sponged in enough to make it look better, then I sponged vintage photo along the edges to give it a more defined look. I added yellow Stickles to the flower centers to give them some pizazz. If the dp I chose wasn't in such muted colors, I wouldn't be happy with my coloring at all, but it actually turned out alright, and it photographed pretty good, too.

 Thanks for stopping by. Hope you'll visit again soon!

 

Stamps: Zinnias (Flourishes); Essential Messasges (Hero Arts)
Paper: Best of K&Co; Shimmer Stack (DCWV); Recollections
Ink: Staz-On; Tim Holtz Distress Inks
Accessories: Labels Four (Spellbinders); Monarch Butterfly Lg Punch (Martha Stewart); Crop-a-dile corner chomper; ribbon (Offray); Mini Round Gems (Recollections); Stickles; Glossy Accents; Copics
Size: A-2 (4.25" x 5.5")

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Life is good

Hi blog friends! I've got another challenge card today. The sketch this week is by Amber Hight for the Viva la Verve challenge. I love distressing cards, and I think this is probably the most distressing I've ever done on a card. It was fun aging all the little chipboard embellishments and "dirtying" them up with ink. And, since I finally broke down and ordered a few rolls of seam binding, I was able to put a bow on a card that didn't look all stiff and formal. My fingers will probably be stained for days from all the red and brown reinker I used to age it, but the seam binding sure looked good when I was finished.

I don't know if you can read the stamp in the upper left square, but it says "Life is Good." It's a little freebie stamp that Verve Stamps included in an order I received recently. I heat embossed it in bright red so it wouldn't get lost in the patterned paper I stamped it on. Since it's more of a statement than a personal sentiment, if I don't give this card away, I'm thinking of framing it instead. I haven't done that with any of my cards yet, but I sure consider it often enough. My project room has a little wall space left that doesn't have anything on it yet ;)

Thanks for stopping by.

 

Stamps: Life is Good (Verve)
Paper: Sweet Threads pack (Basic Grey); Best of K&Co; DCWV Textured stack, Recollections
Ink: Tim Holtz Distress Inks & Reinkers; Colorbox
Accessories: Standard Circle Lg. and Peony dies (Spellbinders); Embossing Pwdr (Zing); seam binding (Hug Snug); chipboard embellishments (Amy Butler); gem brad (Recollections); Perfect Pearls Mist; dimensionals; sewing
Size: 4.25" square

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My very own Froggin' Fantastic Four Blinkie!!!

Hi friends! Almost a month ago, Lily Pad Cards had a challenge to design a card using ribbon. I enter challenges hoping to win, but never actually expect to. I'm just happy to have succeeded in completing the challenge and getting the card entered. Shoot, just being able to maneuver through the technology to get my card photographed, downloaded, and posted somewhere on the web is a huge accomplishment for me right now. But, today, something different happened. I went to browse the Lily Pad website and saw that a winner had been chosen for the ribbon challenge. The winner's card is spectactular. I know it will be a long time before I will be able to even conjure up a creation like Heather Maria's, much less actually make one.

So, I'm reading the post, scrolling down, looking at the other awesome cards chosen for the Froggin' Fantastic Four, and suddenly, my card...MINE...is staring at me from the computor monitor.



Click on photo to enlarge



I nearly fell off my chair! I must have re-checked the post five or six times to make sure it really was my card. Yep, it was mine. You'd have thought I just won the lottery! I called my husband right away and sent an email to at least a dozen people. "I won a blinkie for my blog!!!" Wow!



Inside sentiment



Well, I'm still a baby blogger. I have to spend a great deal of time looking up what different blogging terms mean. I don't even know what most of the scrapbook/cardmaking terms are yet. So, when my husband asked me what a blinkie was, I couldn't tell him. Remember, my blog is less than a week old. All I knew was that someone out there, besides my family and close friends, liked my creation.

Today, my sweet daughter turned seven years old. Today, I know what a blinkie is, and I was even able to get it into my sidebar fairly easily. Today I am one of the Froggin' Fantastic Four and I have a brand new blinkie over there in my sidebar to remind me. Today has truly been a great day. Truly.

Thanks, Lily Pad Cards! And, congratulations to Heather Maria, Maria, Susie, and Therese. Your designs are incredible. Visit their blogs and see their creations. You won't want to miss them.

Thanks for stopping by. (And, check out that cute blinkie!!!)

 

Stamps: Sentiment typed in Word and printed on cardstock
Paper: K&Co Abrianna; DCWV Neutral stack, Recollections
Ink: Tim Holtz Distress Inks
Accessories: EK Success punch (Morocco Lace Edger), Spellbinders Labels Four; Recollections Mulberry Paper rose; Recollections mini round gems, Michael's ribbons

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