a little holiday inspiration...

Hope you had a great Thanksgiving! As of today, there are exactly 29 days until Christmas, so I wanted to share something I've found really inspiring and fun: Kristina Werner's Holiday Card Series. She's currently mid-way through her 2010 Series and I seriously suggest you check it out! But for today, here's last year's Holiday Card Series to help you get your Christmas juices flowing! :)

Enjoy!

my first craft fair

Wow, I really haven't blogged in a while! Been feeling pretty uninspired lately... working on packaging and displaying and not much else.

So, yesterday was my very first craft fair! :) It's one I look forward to going to every year, so I figured it would be a good place to start. I literally had zero expectations, and was pleasantly surprised. I made my table fee back in the first ten minutes (that was really the only thing I was hoping for). A couple items were sold out in an hour or two, with people asking if they could purchase my sample items over and over for the rest of the day. As I honestly expected, the things I thought would sell the best really didn't sell at all. But I did sell over $200 worth of items... not bad considering most things were priced at $3-6! :)

So if you've read my blog, I'm sure by now you're used to the mostly-crappy photos my little point-and-shoot takes. It's the best camera when you're outdoors on a sunny day, but yesterday we just could not get the lighting correct. But I wanted to share these pics, despite they're less-than-stellar quality!

Hope you're having a great weekend! Getting any Christmas shopping done? :)

Caring Hearts: A Reminder

Hey all!

I've been busy getting ready for my *first* craft fair coming up a week from Saturday... mostly working on packaging and displays, and unfortunately, I haven't been feeling very crafty lately. BUT, I wanted to check in and remind you that all Caring Hearts Card Drive cards must be received by this Monday, November 15th. That means you've still got a couple days to get your cards into the mail!

Hope you had a great week!

my new {obsession}

:)

A quick post today to share some cards I made recently with The Girls' Paperie Tinsel and Twig line. These are seriously some stunning products. The papers are incredible and the colors are just perfection. And the embellishments? Don't even get me started! I haven't used any of them yet (except one button) because I can't suppress my hoarding instinct! ;)

My inspiration for all these cards was patchwork. One of the pieces of patterned paper has a gorgeous patchwork of some of the other papers' patterns, plus a couple that don't appear anywhere else in the collection.

Tinsel and Twig paper

Here's a card I made using a piece of this paper as my background.

(I also used Papertrey Ink's new Big and Bold Holiday Greetings set, which I am also in love with.)

For these next two cards, I made my own patchwork by gluing together 1 inch squares punched from all the different patterns.

(This one uses another new PTI stamp set, Merry Little Christmas - another current fave! It's inspired by an adorable card that PTI DT member Erin Lincoln made for the release countdown.)

And, lastly, a bit of a different spin on the concept of patchwork. This one didn't come out quite how I wanted... I wish the circles were a bit closer together, but I only have 1" and 1.5" punches and the larger circle was just too big. So... we make do, right? :)

Hope you had a great weekend! Wasn't it awesome to get an extra hour of sleep last night? :)

Holiday Tag Swap

I am SO excited about this! My first swap! And what a great way to start... My LSS, {Colorful Creations} in Hyannis, MA, is sponsoring this Holiday Tag Swap. I wish it was the type of swap where everybody got together and made the tags, but it's still going to be super fun. I signed up for two "groups," which means I made two sets of 5 identical tags and I get two sets of 5 unique, handmade tags in return.

My first tag is inspired by an amazing card that Maile Belles made for the Lawn Fawn October release countdown. I just fell in love with the simplicity of it. I used the mistletoe stamp from Lawn Fawn's Bows and Holly set. Also, I decided to make 3x3" folded "gift enclosure" cards instead of using the traditional tag shape.

My second tag design uses another technique from the Thinking Inking class - the same technique that I used in my card for the Caring Hearts Blog Hop. This is the acrylic block stamping technique, and I am obsessed with it ... especially in this Tumbled Glass/Milled Lavender/Pumice Stone combination with snowflakes!

And just to show you how much I love this technique and Distress Ink color combo... Here are the two cards I originally made that inspired these tags! :)

Have a great weekend! :)

Happy Birthday to Me! :)

So, today is my birthday. I'm 26 on the 26th! :) But I actually purchased this little treat for myself a while back, and have been meaning to share it since it arrived.

I love this thing already! Amazing! I don't have a ton of surfaces to store things on top of, but this is such a great use of a very small footprint. I picked up the Base Unit and the Upper Tier Add-On. You get a TON of clips and dividers too. More than enough to get started... unless you're lucky enough to have a ginormous stamp collection - haha! :)

a Distress Ink experiment

I was so inspired by a card that Ms. Papertrey Ink herself, Nichole Heady, made for the most recent PTI release. She embossed flowers on vellum and rubbed ink on their centers using a sponge. Then she flipped the vellum over and adhered it, wrong side out, to her card.

Here's a photo of her card (and you can see the original post on the PTI blog)...

Is this not the prettiest thing you've ever seen? My immediate thought when I saw this: How gorgeous would this be with snowflakes! :) So I grabbed my then-brand-new Lawn Fawn Frosties stamp set and...

Epic Fail. No matter what I did, I could not get that amazing, vibrant, gradient color with my Distress Inks! And wherever I tried to add a new color and blend, the new color just wiped off the old color. I used makeup sponges, sponge daubers, Inkssentials foam blenders, my fingers... I just couldn't get that pretty gradient color concentrated behind my snowflakes!

Ok, Ok, so maybe calling this card an 'epic fail' is going a little too hard on myself. I like the end effect, and I like how sweet and simple the finished card turned out. But I'm not pleased that I couldn't get the look I wanted. I wonder if it might work with a different type of ink? Hmm...

Caring Hearts Blog Hop

Wow! This is amazing! I can't believe I'm here, hopping with the best of them! What a testament to this amazing cause to have so many fantastic crafters involved. Major kudos to Vera Yates for organizing all this!

So if you're here from Amy's blog - Welcome! I hope you're having fun! If you've come here by another route, I hope you'll head over to Vera's blog to make sure you don't miss any of the goodness!

We live in a country where the wisest and most experienced members of our society don't always receive the respect they deserve. We've all banded together today to celebrate and bring joy to some elderly people who may not be lucky enough have friends and family nearby during the holiday season. I encourage you to join the ♥ CARING HEARTS CARD DRIVE ♥ and make a card to send! All the information can be found by clicking the badge in the upper right corner of my blog. You have until November 15th to get your card to Vera.

I wanted to show you something I've never shared before, but since I don't have a TON of supply stash, that was kinda hard. I was hoping my new Papertrey Ink stamps would arrive in time, but alas, they did not :( So I decided to employ a bunch of Thinking Inking techniques for this card. I used acrylic block stamping for the background (you'll see more of this technique here soon!), generation stamping for the trees (with the same stamp that Jennifer used nonetheless), watercoloring with Distress Inks for the trunks, snowflake centers, and garlands (except I used my blender pen instead of mixing the ink with water), and inking with a foam blender for the edges of the card base.

Thank you so very much for visiting! The next stop on the hop is Ayana's Creations. I can't wait to see what she made! :) I hope you will be inspired to participate in the Caring Hearts Card Drive!

I have a confession...

If you were to make a list of Anna's Top Ten Rules to Live By, number one on that list would be "Christmas music may only be listened to from December 1st until December 25th." Well, yesterday I sat down to work on some more Christmas cards, and I just couldn't resist the urge to break my own Number One Rule :) So, for two evenings now, I've been crafting along to some of my favorite Christmas tunes on my ipod! And I'm having a blast... I just hope now I can stop and wait until December! :-D

Most of the projects I've made are things I'm not quite ready to share, but I do have some Basic Grey Jovial collection and Lawn Fawn Bows and Holly for you today.

 One of my favorite things about the Jovial collection is the really unique color combination. I used Broken China Distress Ink to stamp the label on this card... Now, I mean, how often do you see turquoise for Christmas? :) I muted it a little with some Antique Linen, because the turquoise in the paper is a little bit greener and somewhat distressed.

I apologize for the supreme crumminess of this photo... I'll try to take a new one tomorrow! 

This card was totally inspired by Brit Swiderski. She had the amazing idea to use the Distress Ink Bleeding technique that I used on my fall placecards with this adorable wreath stamp from Lawn Fawn's Bows and Holly. Genius. I love how it turned out... even though when I re-stamped over the image with bleeding I kind of, well, missed :) So there's the bleeding and also a little bit of a shadow effect. I used a Sakura Stardust pen on the ribbon that's wrapped around the wreath. The bow was painted with Fired Brick Distress Ink mixed with water and gold Perfect Pearls. (This is Technique 3 from Week 1 of the Holiday Thinking Inking series.) I also added a little Glossy Accents (I *finally* bought some!) to the berries.

Here's a closeup of the wreath so you can see all the special treatments.

Wish me luck in turning off the Christmas music! :) Thanks for stopping by!

StampTV Thursday Sketch 10/14

This was another tough one for me... so different from what I usually do! I really wanted to change it up somehow, but I challenged myself to stick to the sketch! Except I flipped it. Oh, and forgot it was supposed to be square. Oops! :)

This was also my first time using the new Gina K. Designs set Buds and Vases, illustrated by Melanie Muenchinger. I've never Copic colored glass before, and I wasn't exactly sure what I was doing!

Here's the sketch...

And here's my card...

Hope your week's gotten off to a great start!