Last Minute Christmas Cards

Only three shopping days left! Are you ready? :)

Just a quick post tonight with some last-minute cards I made. I bought some spray inks recently and I've been playing with them a lot. I've had a ton of trouble with the October Afternoon SprINKlers smudging all over the place even after days of sitting and drying... especially disappointing because I wanted to use them for masking. But I'm in love with Mr. Huey's Calico Shine! :)

 I used the "merry" die from Papertrey Ink Wonderful Words: Holiday die set to emboss the background. It's a really fun technique!

He-llo, adorable chevron background stamp! This one's new from Hero Arts and I adore it! :) This card also uses the new Seasonal Distress Inks - plus a few of the golden oldies inks too.

Thanks for stopping by!

Paper-Piecing-Palooza

(LOL I know, I know, that's a wicked lame title.)

In honor of the previews beginning for Lawn Fawn's October release (it looks amazing - check it out!), I finally busted out the second stamp set I bought from their September release, Cozy Christmas. Also, after everybody else is totally over it, I finally *finally* received the Cosmo Cricket Mitten Weather items that I ordered a billion years ago! So I decided to combine them. Word to the wise: Don't try to paper piece the stockings in this stamp set. They're teeny-tiny! There's a third stocking that I didn't end up using - an adorable striped on that I got halfway through before I gave up because I was going crazy and blind! :)

This is an über-simple card I made using Hero Art's So Thankful set and Lily Bee Designs' new Catching Fall collection. I got all three of the new paper collections - plus they have cardstock stickers, chipboard buttons, and a 12x12 sheet of rub-ons. (I was actually somewhat disappointed that the rub-ons are so big, because many of my fave sentiments are too big to use on a card). The designs of the papers are so beautiful and the details are really nice. My favorite are the two (count 'em, two!) text print snowflakes in the Christmas Town collection.

Here's a close-up of the turkey. I ended up embossing the outline using a Ranger Embossing Pen and black embossing powder, because it was hard to see the black ink on the dark brown cardstock.

StampTV Thursday 9/30 Sketch Challenge

Again, out of all the challenges people post and sketch blogs I read, the StampTV Thursday Sketch is the only thing that actually gets me off the couch. :-D

This week we were, again, given a CAS/Beginner sketch and a Layered/Intermediate sketch.

This week, again, my card is somewhere in between. :)

This card has been in the works for a while... I've been wanting to try a ton of the techniques from Jennifer McGuire's Thinking Inking class since I first saw the videos. (P.S. Have you seen this news??) But I just didn't have enough of the appropriate supplies and couldn't justify buying them, not knowing how often I'd end up using them. Well, obviously, as soon as I tried Distress Inks, I knew I'd use them constantly and so my collection has been slowly growing. :) And I recently found a pot of Perfect Pearls for sale individually (didn't want to commit to the set) at my LSS. And then I got this awesome Hero Arts silhouette stamp that I thought would be perfect for mixing Distress Inks on, and voila! This card was born!

BTW: To make the focal image, I inked up my stamp with Distress Ink in Scattered Straw, Spiced Marmalade, and Fired Brick. Then I spritzed the entire stamp with some water mixed with Perfect Pearls and stamped it onto plain cardstock. It took a couple tries to get it right. :) Check out the videos on Perfect Pearls (episodes one, two, and three!) for this technique and a bunch of other cool ideas.

Have a good weekend!

StampTV Thursday Sketch 9/16

Here's the sketch for this week

And here's my card using my new Hero Arts goodies that I picked up yesterday from my LSS! :)

And... Here's another variation that I made for the Hero Arts September Challenge Contest. This is more like what I wanted to do with the square card, but I couldn't figure out where I could make room for the sentiment.

Isn't that patterned paper great! It's by Moxxie. The other side is a really pretty yellow and orange with branches and falling leaves. It will definitely make an appearance soon! :)

Oh, and in other news, while DH and I were in the "city," we bought a futon! It's a really high-quality, pocketed coil innerspring mattress - not like the junky ones you find in dorm rooms :-P We're not going to use a frame - just sleep on the floor à la Japanese. We'll probably be picking it up this weekend or early next week! :) Not sure what we're gonna do with the bed we currently have... The box spring and bedframe are perfectly fine, I'm sure, though the mattress should probably just be chucked. Technically, though, it all belongs to my parents, so it's up to them what we do with it!

Have a good weekend!

Hero Arts 2010 Holiday Catalog

Have you seen it? Boy is there some great stuff! You can check it out online here.

I know most of the items are starting to be available online at various places, but my awesome LSS, Colorful Creations in Hyannis, MA, is doing a pre-order with 10% off and (obviously) no shipping. So here's what I picked out :)

So Thankful clear stamps

(I can't wait to color these!)

 Wreath of Leaves cling stamp

(Doesn't it just beg for red rhinestones?)

Felt Poinsettias with Leaves

Mixed Cards and Envelopes (A2 with white interiors) in Foliage

So excited! :)

A challanging challenge...

I'm going to try hard not to ramble here... I have a lot to say about this one little card but most of it I'm sure won't be interesting. Still - consider yourself warned ;)

Kristina Werner's blog is one of my favorites and with her latest video she issued a challenge: Make a one-layer card using only stamps. You can take a look at her card here. This is not normally something I would even attempt, but I figured it would be something fun to try for my new blog. Here's what I came up with:

Well... now that it's done, fun is not necessarily the word I would use... I've had Hero Art's What's Perking stamp set for a couple months now and I've never been able to figure out what to do with it. So for this challenge I was determined to use it. I was going to make a Mother's Day card using the teacup stamp, and it was going to say "Take time for you." But the "take time for" part of the stamp set is really small, and I don't have any large alphabet stamps that I could use for "you." So scratch that idea. I created a little scene that I liked with the coffee pot and mug, and then found another stamp set that had a sentiment that I liked. The circle border is from Sassafras.

This challenge was kind of embarrassingly hard for me. I rarely do this much stamping on one card, and it took me three tries to get it right! I'd get halfway through what was turning out to be a great card and the next stamp would be crooked or uneven and I'd have to start all over again! I vastly prefer stamping on individual elements so I don't end up ruining the entire card. And I made my card a little more like Kristina's than I would normally have liked. I really like how she layered the stamps, so I decided to try the same technique. I may try to make a stamps-only card again using a different format.

And in conclusion... I think I'm ok with paying extra postage and standing in line at the post office to have stamps hand-canceled. :) If I do want/need to make one-layer cards, I think I'll try it with patterned paper adhered straight to the card base and without large three-dimensional embellishments.