BIRTHDAY

I am nearly ready for the card making class that I donated to my church to raise money for Outreach. We are focusing on Birthday cards and I have been working to make five cards that are fairly simple but each teach different things. Partly what will make this work is that I have done a lot of the preparations for them. I'll show the technique (for example, cutting out shapes with the Big Shot and dies) but I will have done the heavy lifting already. 

So, on this super-easy card, I stamped, stickled, and cut out the flames ahead of time. The sentiment is a retired Close To My Heart stamp that they will use (sharing one stamp between 10 of them) while the washi tapes are placed and the flames adhered with adhesive foam tape. 

I really like how fun this card looks for the little effort!

Technique for January

This was the card we made at the January Open Stamping. The intention was to show possible uses for the new Brushstrokes stamp set, to stamp the sentiment in dark ink over the brush strokes, and to use sequins. Everyone received a small package of sequins of their very own. Yes, I do realize that I am pretty late jumping on the sequin bandwagon.

News here? I've got Mr. Baggins on a diet.  It is in his best interest, and bless his heart, he is VERY excited to see me get out of bed in the mornings because he knows I'll feed him right away.  Let's pray this works without turning him into a little monster. So far, so good.

Hugs!

Birthday

Wow, that was a long week! Sorry about that! I saw my doctor the day after we got back from Minnesota and he had an unexpected opening in his schedule. I jumped on it and had a total knee replacement on Dec. 9th.

My schedule has been very hectic with PT and healing, but I have had some time to create, just not to blog about it!

This card was inspired by Debby at something-oodle blogspot. I have spent countless hours trying to find her original post without success.  Debby, with all my respect and admiration, I have R & D'd your card.

(R&D = rip off and duplicate).

I changed the template by flipping it horizontally. This was because the only bird I had that would work was facing the left, not the right. I hand-stamped the background damask pieces with a CTMH background builder set. I modified the sentiment to Happy Birthday. And I LOVE this card!  All CTMH products, colors are Canary, Glacier, Whisper, and Slate. The sentiment is black on vellum.

For those who care; our trip home was "different" with a circus of things all surrounding poor Mr. Bilbo Baggins. Long story short, I swear he kissed the ground when he stepped out of his carrier inside my home in Mesa.  LOL

Gratitude

This year I have been lucky to have some scrappin' time - WOOT!!! I created this simple card for Thanksgiving. It's an "A" size stamp from Close to My Heart. I do love my trees! To create this, I first inked the tree in Goldrush, rolled the edges in Ruby, and added the sentiment in Cocoa.  I also put down a piece of scrap paper for a mask and sponged on some cashmere ink. Inside the card says Happy Thanksgiving.

We travel soon. I will be thankful that Mr. Baggins goes with us, even if he is NOT! I'll post from the other side, but this might be the last for a week, as I'm sorting the MN studio and creating inventories to have as a reference.

Hugs!!

Birthday - embossing on vellum

Did you know that I will prepare Close To My Heart gift certificates for you to use as gifts? This is a good time to be planning one - let me know who it's for (so I can personalize the certificate and card) and how much you want to give. Sent me the gift payment, and I'll send you the gift! I put a generous 12 month date on them as an expiration date. Most of the time these are used within a month! I can redeem the certificates with an e-mail, phone call, or hand-written order and the certificate can be combined with other discount specials and can be used as partial payment for big orders. I'm flexible like that!

The reason I used this particular post to explain all that is that this card was one I made recently for a surprise birthday party and it contained a tag gift certificate.  

I have tried embossing vellum before with near disastrous results! (The vellum was burning!). This time it worked. Whew! I think next time I might use silver embossing powder. Silver might stand out better . . .

Tags

Perhaps the reason I love making tags is similar to the reason I do FAR more cards than scrapbook pages? Can you say "instant gratification"? Sure you can! (Does anyone else miss Mr. Rogers?)

I was inspired by some tags posted for a new Papertrey Ink release with birds. I realized that I had the perfect birds in a vintage CTMH set and whipped them out right away! The two bird tag designs are double layers - the top swings to the side and the Kraft piece is stamped with "to/from" for labeling packages! The polar bear was in the October stamp of the month reward from CTMH and I used the CTMH Snowhaven papers. I free-cut the hearts from some red felt, and plan to label these on the back of the tag. So, the lesson here is possibly, don't miss those CTMH specials!  

On another note, it snowed here yesterday (all day!) and my world is bright and crisp this morning! {deep sigh} I love it as long as I don't need to drive anywhere! *giggle*

Gratitude

A dear friend was showing photos of some leaves she stamped, and then colored with pencils. I recognized the stamps as vintage Close to My Heart, and lamented that I have them, but they are in AZ and I'm not. So what did my friend do? She stamped them for me on both black cardstock and off-white watercolor paper and mailed them to me. I was both surprised, and yet not at all surprised by her sweet and generous gifts!! So, this is the first thing I made with them - for Eve. 

We had a wonderful Halloween! 84 trick-or-treaters! So blessed!!