A Card for a Bestie!

Here's the challenge at Seriously Creative Challenges:

Ooooh, colours, lookit all the pretty colours!  That's what inspired me to create this card for one of my best friends:

As always, the photo doesn't really do it justice, but I'm quite pleased with it.  I used this sketch from Try Stampin' on Tuesday (really love the simplicity of this sketch):

And I also decided to enter a new (to me) challenge called Shopping Our Stash - challenge #72 is a Tic Tac Toe challenge, and I decided to do brad/kraft/embossing.  It was so fun to use my new embossing folder from Sizzix - it's double-sided with bricks on the other side!  Stamps are all from Close To My Heart, and patterned paper from Studio Calico.  I stamped the leaves with Distress Stain, which gives kind of a neat effect, kind of messy.  I guess it doesn't really show, but I wanted my leaves to be glossy, and since I can't find any Glossy Accents, I inked up each leaf with Ranger Perfect Medium and heat embossed with clear embossing powder.  Worked pretty good!  What do you think of my asymmetrical idea of having the leaves on one side?  Not sure I'm happy with it, but hoping that my friend doesn't notice or care, haha!  That's the great thing about making cards for people who aren't card-makers, they tend not to notice if you've made a mistake (or 10!)

Well, thanks for looking, and I do hope you join us this month at Seriously Creative Challenges!

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Summer Layout to Share

Quick post today as I still have my MIL and BIL here visiting, and I don't want to neglect them too much.  I've been working on this layout for a while, just playing with the finishing touches and finally finished it last night.  I'm quite pleased with it!  I used some colours that I normally wouldn't choose for this photo, but I just felt like experimenting.  I started off with a new Dylusions mask and some Fresh Lime Dylusions spray to do the border, then just layered various papers until I got the effect I wanted.  The papers are from Studio Calico, Echo Park, MME and Simple Stories.  There's a floral border there from Sassafrass Lass, and another B&W polka dot one from Amy Tangerine that I cut into little flags.  The flowers are made with the ever trusty Tim Holtz Tattered Florals die, and I was surprised to see how easily this die cuts felt!  Fun, never tried that before!

There's some Kaiser rhinestones there, and an Echo Park sticker, some cool buttons from my stash, and look here:

See that butterfly pin?  That's one I won from Channa, and it's just beautiful!!!  I have four more, and I'm torn between wanting to use them all up or just hoarding them forever!  Here's the sketch I used from Creative Scrappers:

I'm really loving their sketches these days, but once again, I missed the deadline.  Huh.  I'm seeing a pattern here...

Oh, I should write out the journaling, because I doubt if you can see it.  It says:  "You two look so peaceful here, sitting by the Nechako River in the sun.  The relaxed mood was broken abruptly about two minutes later, when Brenna decided to pitch herself face first into the water!"  Yep, you can just imagine her surprise and tears, it was hilarious!!!

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Creative Accents' October Stamp of the Month

Ack, totally forgot to post these yesterday for the first of the month!  Bad DT member, BAD!  Every month Creative Accents has a Stamp of the Month that they order in for club members at an extreme discount, and this month was my turn to play, yay!  I got this lovely Ranger Melt Art Texture Treads stamp called "Scattered Leaves" in the mail from Tara:

along with some BoBunny papers and washi tapes to play around with.  Now these texture treads aren't like normal stamps - they're made to work with UTEE, and you can either pour the UTEE right on to the stamp, or pour the UTEE into something and stamp into it with the Texture Tread.  I don't have UTEE or a melting pot, so I thought there wouldn't be anything I could use the stamp for, but after playing around a bit, these are the two cards I came up with:

I was totally inspired by Jennifer McGuire's cards she made in this video, although mine looks nothing like hers!  If you look at the image of the Texture Treads stamp up above, you'll notice that there are two sides to it, a positive and a negative.  For this card I inked up the negative side with Perfect Medium ink, embossed with clear embossing powder, then rubbed two different colours of Distress Stain (Spiced Marmalade and Antiqued Bronze) over the whole panel.  I then sprayed the panel liberally with water to blend the stain together.  Then I pieced my card together using strips of washi tape and paper.  I quite like the end result.   

But I really love how this one turned out:

Same basic idea, only this time I inked up my panel first with the same colour stains, heat embossed the positive side of the stamp, then rubbed Walnut Stain Distress Ink over the whole panel.  I love how the colours work so well with that BoBunny paper.  See that little bit of lattice in the background?  That's a new die from Spellbinders I got to play with too!  Here's a close-up view:

Thanks for looking, and I hope you enjoyed my Autumn cards!  I think I will use this same idea to make some birthday cards, I have a few coming up soon and I am totally unprepared (as usual)!  

P.S. - I just heard that my Cameo has shipped, and I cannot wait to get my hands on that sucker - sooooooo many ideas, woohoo!  

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Stuck?! Sketches

Real quick post tonight as I want to get this linked in time and we're just starting a movie for "family movie night" - hmm, there's an idea for a new layout!  Anyhoo, here's my newest layout:

I really like how this one turned out!  I just love the brights of this Amy Tangerine collection, and I think Ailis looks just like a model in this picture!!!  Here's the sketch I used from Stuck Sketches (wow, isn't it awesome?):

And a couple of close ups, because I don't think my blog photos are really doing the layout justice, so maybe this will help:

Oh, I should mention that I didn't have the right alpha stickers for my title, so I changed an "m" into an "r" and the "t" is made from an "l" and part of an "x" - pretty clever of me, eh?

Well, I'm off to watch "Snow White and the Huntsman" - hope it's good!

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Let's Get Sketchy (Again)!

Quick post again today, here's the layout I did for Let's Get Sketchy this week:

 

And here's the sketch I used (gotta say, I'm loving their sketches!):

 

 

I changed it up a bit to go with the pictures, but mostly I stuck with the sketch quite closely.  I didn't add much embellishment here because I wanted the focus on the photos (isn't that an amazing face painting job?) and the beautiful Basic Grey paper.  I did a little bit of outlining around the plain jane alpha stickers to mimic the colours of Ailis' face, but that's about it.  Hope you like, and thanks for stopping by!





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Let's Get Sketchy!

When my friend Alison made it on a new Design Team, of course I had to check out the site and challenges!  The site is "Let's Get Sketchy!", and here's the page I made for this week's sketch:

I used new papers and stickers from Echo Park's Everyday Eclectic line.  I couldn't decide on just a few papers from this line, so I bought the whole collection pack, which I very rarely do, and I LOVE it!  It's definitely my new go-to collection!  The hardest thing about this page was figuring out which papers to use - they all looked awesome with these photos.  Anyway, I'm quite pleased with the end result.  Here's the sketch this week:

 

I switched it up a bit, but it made putting this page together pretty easy.  And here's a close up of the journaling:

 

 

And some of the fussy cut balloons:

 

 

Oh, and if you're wondering why Ailis is wearing clothes to the spray park, it's because her bathing suit disappeared in the move (along with my camera battery chargers and Close to My Heart Inks, not to mention my box of photos, grrrrr!) Thanks for looking!  Now I better get this posted and linked before I miss the deadline!!!

P.S. I'm also entering this page over at ScrapFIT for Warm-up #31 - the challenge is to use patterned paper for you background, fun fun!

 



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Quick Card for Drunken Stampers

Another one making it in under the wire!  I've been wanting to play along with Drunken Stampers for quite a while, simply because I love the name, heehee!  Looks like I'll finally get my chance!  The challenge this week is to use the colour peach, in honour of endometrial/uterine cancer month.  Well, I have a few paper packs from Close to My Heart with some Sorbet coloured papers, so I decided to see what I could do with them:

 

Admittedly, sorbet is probably my least favourite colour.  I have a heck of a time using it on any scrapbooking pages because it just doesn't seem to go with anything, but when it's combined on a card with some other colours like Sweet Leaf, Crystal Blue, and Cocoa, it's not that bad.  What do you think? 

 

I also found this great sketch from Try Stampin' on Tuesday:

What a great sketch!  Made this card really easy to put together!!!  Well, that's it for tonight - I'm into some really great books that I can't wait to tell you about, and of course I haven't forgotten about my earlier promise of blog candy...

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