More cards!

Here's a bit of updating from September's pictures: (My new Christmas cards are at the end.)



I LOVE the birthday card above... I had so much fun with stamping and layering. I made the little piece behind the flower using a few flourish stamps which I stamped in different directions to form the shape. I also stamped it with a graph patterned stamp I have, and before I did any of that, I had started with a plain white sheet and aged it with some Antique Linen distress ink. I love making cool stuff with my stamps.


I loved this card, too. I love the mindscape stamps by Inkadinkado. If you look closely at the humming bird, you can pick out several pictures, mainly butterflies, that make the whole. Do you see the one in the wing? That one's easy. How about the one on the face? Cool, huh?

And HERE are my new Christmas cards. I just made these a couple of nights ago. The one on top here is continuing my theme of stamping stuff. I started with plain cream paper and stamped these gorgeous images for top and bottom to create the patterned paper look. All of the red stamped images are from Stampin' Up!: Tiny Tags, Artistic Etchings, and Day of Gratitude. Over the tops of these papers, to add some extra interest, I stamped another pattern with Antique Linen colored Distress Ink--music notes on top and my graph stamp on the bottom. Most patterned papers, if you look at them, have several layers of images. You can create the look yourself by adding a bit extra like this. ^_^



I love this one, too. I cut the red piece from an old patterned paper scrap I had on hand that I couldn't throw away because it was too pretty. The paper was stamped with the Joyeux Noel first, then I covered it with another paper and stamped the rest of the sheet with the pretty french script stamp from Stampin' Up!. The Joyeux Noel and the cool tree from the other card are both from the Mistletoe & Co. stamp set by Pink Paislee.

I also really loved the fun sequin addition I did to the bottom card. It's SO easy. I love sequins, first of all, because they're super cheap and you can really load up on colors without breaking the bank. I used to glue them one at a time all of the time (like on the first Christmas card, come to think of it), but in the last month or so, I've started stringing them in a lump and tying them to things. Once everything is set, you can play with spreading them out a bit and making them look cool. They're very garland like, aren't they? I thought they worked for Christmas. But I'm putting them all over my scrapbook pages right now, too.

Okay, that's it for now. Gotta go do some laundry. I'm also probably sewing some napkins today, finally. I'm redoing my table in fall colors, so I've got some nice burnt orange cloth from JoAnn that I'll make into napkins with instructions I got from the Martha Stewart Encyclopedia of Fabric and Crafts. I love Martha Stewart and I'm not afraid to admit it. She is one incredible woman. She had a vision and she really went for it and she achieved it. What a success story! I think those of us who are really young don't even realize that the world used to not have all of this information out there, and she is really one of the pioneers that started this entire sharing of information thing, not only in household stuff, but in crafty stuff, too. And it's just awesome! I'm really glad I live in this time! And in America. But that goes without saying. And I said I was doing laundry, but I kept typing instead... so now I'm actually going to go do laundry. ^_~

Catching up, Cards, & New Clay Shawl Pins

First of all, I have to share this with everyone:


We let this verse sit unfinished on our wall for probably two months or so and we finally finished putting it up last night! Yay! I used my Cricut to cut the letters out of a slightly textured black contact paper I picked up at Home Depot. This is NOT vinyl. Sheesh. I'd go broke if I tried decorating my house with vinyl. Anyway, when I bought it, it was about $6 for a roll of 18" wide contact paper that was several yards long. It does, as I said, have a slight texture, but it's seriously no big deal. You can't tell from far away. I cut it with the contact paper side down, with the sticker part sticking up (leaving the sticky backing on it, of course). So if I'm cutting any words, I reverse them so that when I pick the letters (which are face down) off of the mat, they come up facing the right way.


Here are the new shawl pins I just took down to Tempe Yarn and Fiber. The flower ones can double as pendants. The flowers and the little Japanese style one have sterling silver loops in the back for the knitting needles to slip through and they're only appropriate for lacier weight scarves and shawls. The flowers can also double as pendants because of the way I placed the loops. Oh, and the little Japanese girl is already gone. She got purchased the first day they put them out. I need to make more! ^_^


Isn't she CUTE!? I had so much fun with her. She was about 1.5" tall, maybe shorter. I just loved doing the details on her little face. You can't see from the picture, really, but her lips were totally textured and shaped like little lips, and I brushed a hint of pink PearlEx on her cheeks to give her a slight blush. I coated her (and all of the other shawl pins) in a satin finish clear coating to give them just a tiny bit of shine, but not too much. I like the satin finish because it doesn't make them look all plastic. At least in person.


Here's a closeup shot of one of the flowers. I made a base petal shaped Ikat cane out of blue pearl and white which I proceeded to slice. I dyed the slices with alcohol inks before arranging them into flowers. I think they're so cute! Especially this one, with its little clay button center. The others have Swarovski crystals in the middle.

And now for some cards...


Above is a thank you card I made with a coffee theme. The inside, of course, says "Thanks a latte", which was SO cute when I first saw it, but now every single coffee themed stamp set seems to have a stamp that says that. I mean, it's still cute. I feel a little dorky using it now, though, like I always feel dorky doing anything I feel that a lot of other people do. I need to get over it. Most people haven't seen it yet. (This one got sent to my Aunt and Uncle, thanking them for a cool birthday gift!)


Another fun layered card.... I sent this one to my Uncle and Aunt, thanking them for their cool birthday gift.


And here's another thank you card... I forget where the idea came from. Some magazine. I LOVED the idea, though. It is such a cool, fun use of scrap papers! Especially my oh-so-precious BasicGrey scrap papers. A moment of silence for the glories of BasicGrey, if you please. Okay. That's enough. It's not like I'm super weird or anything. I just love BasicGrey above all other paper companies. It all started with Marrakech. I won't get into it. This card got sent to my mother in law for the awesome birthday gift she gave me. (I just had a birthday, if you couldn't tell, so I sent a lot of cards which I naturally had to photograph before I sent them.)


Naturally, with Christmas quickly approaching, I'm making Christmas cards now!!!! (I don't usually do Hanukkah cards even though we celebrate it, Messianic style, because I don't know anyone else who celebrates it. So who am I going to send cards to?) I loved this card so much because I used a little piece cut from a Scattergories game that we recently played where Elliott obviously got a hold of a pencil and scribbled on one of the pads. I just thought it was the cutest, so rather than using some random piece of paper, I used that one, and so this card is definitely going to one of the grandmas this year.


And here's the last card for now. Very fun! I stamped the kraft background paper with watermark ink to create this look which I totally scraplifted from a paper that Stampin' Up! sells. I don't think it's wrong. I mean, the paper uses these stamp images, which I bought, so I made it.

I was looking through September and I still have so many more pictures to post. I've really got to catch up. I'll do that later. I can't believe I haven't posted pics yet of my new craft space! It's so lovely! I'm really excited about it!

Until I post again... many blessings on you and yours. You're fabulous. Go make cool stuff.