Yes, two blog posts within little more than 24 hours. Sometimes it rains, sometimes it pours. :)
I'm still not finished working on my brooches, I started making more so that when I get the epoxy out I can do several at a time. I will get around to finishing them soon, especially since two are for long overdue gifts.
It struck me that I hadn't made a card for my husband. Woe is me, I was so caught up with the thought that I couldn't afford to buy him anything, that I completely overlooked the fact that I can MAKE him something. Yup, this whole cardmaking thing is still new to me, lol. So here is a quick post with what I made.
Materials used:
Recollection white A2 card blank
Recollection cardstock
Neenah 110 lb brilliant white for the hearts
An old SU heart stamp, don't know what the set is called
An old Sizzix embossing folder that was given to me, don't know what it's called
Martha Stewart embossing powder in ladybug and carnation
All Night Media embossing powder in silver
Graphic 45 Time to Flourish paper
Wow, it's been 12 days since I last posted. Last week I was working on a mixed media project and intended to blog about that, but I haven't finished the assembly so perhaps next week.
If you haven't noticed yet, I adore The Cat's Pajamas. Their TCP Tuesday challenge was the first challenge I ever participated in; I had a blast and realized I needed to do more of this card making stuff. So I try to make a point of joining in each challenge, which fortunately is only every two weeks. :)
This time it was a sketch challenge:
I really love sketch challenges because I'm still quite new at this whole cardmaking thing, and it gives me a really good jumping off point.
For some reason, I've been wanting to make a card with a kite. And in my mind, kites are bright bold colors. I kept trying to use patterned designer paper, but I don't have much in bright and bold. Fortunately I had a pack of primary colors cardstock to work with.
You know, I didn't even realize till just this moment that I used the same yellow background color as the sketch. Too funny, that was so not deliberate!
I used a Lifestyle Crafts embossing folder from the 'Dainty' set. The kite is a retired Sizzix die that was in the package Krista sent to me. It was one die, so I ran it through with red, yellow, and blue cardstock, and then cut out and layered the yellow and blue bows over the red ones.
The buttons were from The Cat's Pajamas Buttons CutUps die. This was my first time using this die and it worked great! Then I dabbed the buttons and the kite with Versamark ink and used Judikins clear embossing powder to heat emboss everything. Then I layered some of the buttons over different colored non-embossed buttons to show a little pop of color in the buttonholes, without the gloss.
Last but not least, I used the 'Life is Good' sentiment from The Cat's Pajamas 'Spring Fling' set. I really waffled back and forth over the sentiment. I originally planned on using the 'Happy Spring' stamp from the same set, but I really liked the font of 'Life is Good'. Realistically, 'Life is Good' is more versatile. :)
And there you have it. My contribution to TCPTues282. I really like how this card turned out, and I'm actually thinking of replicating it for a card swap I'm in. What do you think... if you were one of the swappers, would you want to receive this card? What kind of sentiment would you prefer? I might put the sentiment on a little banner and send a bunch of them so they can use the one they like. Thanks for reading, and I look forward to your comments. :)
It was all going quite well until I tried to fix a minor annoyance... I bet you've never had that happen to you, right? I'm seriously debating redoing this card, but first I need to buy more adhesive *sigh*. I had some more, but in my clean up I seem to have misplaced it. I did say organized chaos, didn't I? I haven't stocked up too much because I'm still trying to figure out what I like. I've been using Elmer's permanent tape runner. It's okay, nothing to write home about. In fact, my first roll got 'gunked' up because I was using it on paper that had Perfect Pearls on it, which is what made me think I should probably try something else before settling on the end all and be all. Adhesive runners seem to be awfully expensive here in Canada. I wanted to try the Tombow MONO Permanent Adhesive, but do you know how much it costs at Michaels? A pack of one applicator and two refills is $16.99. Ahh! Of course I could use this week's 50% off coupon, but I try to save those to buy Copics! Yes I know I can use a coupon a day... but that's a coupon a day I could be using on Copics. ;)
So anyhow, back to my card. The Seasons Givings Blog Hop just happened last week, and it included over 100 bloggers. Wow, this was so neat to discover so many new blogs, and a whole shwack of new-to-me challenges. I bookmarked a bunch of them, and decided to give some of them a try this week.
I was combining two challenges, Verve Stamps' Mojo Mondays and Taheerah Atchia's Cure For The Monday Blues:
I really liked the sketch that Julee Tilman put together for Mojo Mondays, and I wanted to make a very literal card out of it. As for Taheerah's inspiration, I loved the pink cupcakes and sprinkles. I thought the two would come together quite nicely. I like to use pre-folded cards for practicality's sake, but I didn't have one big enough for what I wanted to do. I thought this should be bigger than than a 4-bar, so I grabbed a sheet of Strathmore Bristol 300 series smooth and cut it down to... uh, I don't remember, lol. Okay, I just went and measured, and it was 5"x 8". I know, that's a weird size. Me and numbers don't go so well together. You can also tell why I prefer to use pre-cut/pre-folded cards. :)
I started rummaging though my small supply of paper, and pulled out a new 6"x 6" pad of Graphic 45 Time to Flourish paper that I bought during Boxing Week. I loved the pinks in it, and thought that would be perfect to represent the soft pink fluffy cupcakes from Taheerah's challenge. I eyeballed square and rectangle sizes to represent the Mojo Monday sketch. I used a coral pink ribbon from my stash, and instead of a bow, I decided to use some balloon embellishments. I thought that would give it a celebration feel, which is what cupcakes and sprinkles remind me of.
I used a stamp set by Inkadinkado. I picked one of the cupcakes and the word 'Celebrate'. I stamped in Versamark ink, and pounced it with a raspberry-colored mica pigment (my own secret no-name supply, lol).
I then got out some pearl and rhinestone embellishments which I semi-randomly placed on the card. I have a whole bunch of little vials of nail embellishments from when my sister was studying to be a nail technician. I thought she was pretty good at it, but she decided to go back to office work and gave me all her embellishments. I found some teeny tiny hearts which I placed to the lower left of the cupcake. I had these pretty pink shell-type fragments that I wanted to sprinkle in the lower right. I was struggling with that a bit, and then next thing I knew, I had smudged the pigment in the cupcake and the sentiment. So I got some pigment powder out again and tried pouncing a little bit. I figured if that didn't help, I would use my Versamarker and touch it up before adding more pigment powder. Well, next thing I knew, there was pigment powder everywhere. It got down in the shell fragments, which I tried to dust with a brush and just ended up spreading it everywhere. I smudged some of the white background cardstock, and it just all went downhill! I added a little string of pink pearls to the corner where the shells and pigment were making a mess to try to distract from said mess. Then I tried 'erasing' the pigment from the cardstock, and that made it worse. So guess what? We're now smudging pigment all over the white cardstock! It was looking a bit too glaringly white anyhow. ;)
I truly debated cutting around the Graphic 45 paper and regluing to a new piece of cardstock. Alas, that's when I ran out of adhesive, and couldn't find my spare. Yup, a real fiasco. I was going to wait a day or two and start all over again, but who cares?! I'm doing this for me, right? I had fun putting it together (until pigment got everywhere!) and that's all that should matter. I decided to document everything so that I can look back at some point and see how far I've come (hopefully!)
So there you have it. I think it's okay. Could I have done better? Absolutely. Can I give this to my sister for her birthday? Um, I'll think about it! ;)
Feedback is always appreciated, but please be nice. My hubby will be terribly upset if he finds me curled up in the bottom of the closet crying, lol. ;)
Supplies used:
Eek! It has been two years since I last posted, in fact since I ever posted. Time to try again? A lot has happened since then. As you can see in my profile, we lost our princess Jenna last year. Somehow, the desire to make hair bows and cute girly stuff went away. Even though Jenna was my dog, she was my baby girl. When I lost her, something broke inside of me. I was already struggling with depression, and this made me spiral down further. I could not bring myself to crafting anything.
My mom was getting remarried in October and she asked me to make the wedding favors. This was good, it helped bring me out of my crafting darkness. I scoured the Internet and YouTube, to find something that will be beautiful and my gift to her. I wanted to use my Fiskars Fuse to make some sort of container for the favors. I finally settled on a die by Lifestyle Crafts. I ordered a small handcarved rubberstamp Happie Stamp on Etsy. It was a teeny little heart with my mom and stepdad's initials inside. I dug through my craft supplies, and remembered that I had "inherited" my sisters Stampin' Up! supplies when she moved away a few years ago. Amongst them, I found a tag punch. I ended up making little tags out of the same cardstock as the gift boxes, Core'dinations cardstock in Iced Cocoa, and heat embossing the heart on them in copper, which I attached to the little gift boxes. I bought a Spellbinders lacy border die to make paper lace that I glued around the box. I didn't really know what I was doing, so it was a lot of trial and error. I finally ended up running the lace border die through my Fuse using three layers of tissue paper. I had also discovered Perfect Pearls by Ranger, and made a mix of Perfect Pearls and water which I painted onto the lace. This fused the three layers of tissue paper together, which was serendipity because I didn't know if I would have to glue them together or what I would do.
Back to the tags. I used Tim Holtz's Vintage Photo Distress Ink to distress the edges of the tag. I also used my Perfect Pearls mix to paint over the tax which created a resist with the embossed heart. This gave the tags a bit of a different look from the box. Now would you believe that I don't even have a picture of them? I have all the supplies still, so I will try to make another one and take pictures and post on my blog. I was just really preoccupied, because as it turned out, I ended up making my mother's wedding cake as well as her centerpieces.I do have a picture of her wedding cake so I will post that here in the meantime. I won't go into details on the cake making that'll be a story for another day… maybe even another blog (just kidding)!
Anyhow, the whole point of this was to tell you about my path back to craftiness, and a whole different kind at that! In all my OCD anal-retentive research for my mom's project, I discovered the wonderful community of SplitCoastStampers.com. As they say, the rest is history, so now since November, I consider myself to be a fledgling cardmaker and rubberstamper. :)
Supplies used:
