Happy Birthday Cricut Flower Card

Once upon a time, in a craft table mess that still partially exists, I cut out a set of three nesting flowers on white cardstock a half inch smaller than each other using the Cricut machine. My plan was to color them using a low cost technique like the colored pencils and mineral spirits or maybe water blending Tombow markers. Whatever I was trying didn't quite work out as well as I hoped and the two smallest flowers of the set got buried under stuff from the next project, and then the next one, and the next one and so on.

Too much of the craft table had disappeared and it was time for an archeology dig. These long since abandoned white flowers cutouts were unearthed, along with many other forgotten and abandoned spare images and card parts. In a twist of fate, (or was it planned from the start months ago?), they happened to be exactly the same shape as the clear stamps for the butterfly wings in this month's {Stamps} of Life set and a new card was created.

The morale of the story is one of two possible things:

1. Don't ever throw anything away and keep it in a big pile as long as possible because it will be useful one day.
2. Cleaning up is a good thing

Which one were you thinking?

Here's the result of the archeological dig. The image doesn't do it justice. The flowers are extremely dimensional in person. As always, click on the card for full directions.

Red Hat Get Well Card

Here's a card mom made last weekend. If you have followed the blog long enough you might recognize some of the Stampin' Up! stamps from the Bling-Aid card. She had planned her card to be pink to match the hearts, which were supposed to be pink. They were colored with a Stampin' Up! Pink Passion marker. The marker color doesn't look much like the ink pad color though. If you read the directions on the the last card I posted, it actually used the Pink Passion Ink pad and the ink clearly looks pink. In the end I think this turned out to be a good thing. After looking at the flowers overnight though she decided to follow the Red Hat Society color theme which really stands out and I think was an excellent move for this card.


As always click on the card for additional instructions on the stamps sets and other products used and how to make it.

Pink Retro Bouquet Card

I am still working through some of the Purple Daisy Design stamps I've been using most of the month. This card is a play on an idea I had when making the Copic colored purple daisy one that was posted last week. I had the idea to extend the field of flowers all the way across the front of the card and mount the sentiment over them, but that would have required me to color and mount at least 25 flower images per card and added another hour or two of additional work per card so I stopped the flowers half way. For this one I tried to go for a similar look to my original idea of mounting the sentiment in the middle of the flowers but simplified it so it was easier to make. To try to speed things up a little more I glittered each flower with a quick thin coat of Stickles instead of coloring and shading each one. You do have to wait for this one to dry but takes a lot less effort to get this one done. The hardest and most time consuming thing on this one is peeling the backing off of 31 pieces of dimensional foam tape.


As always, click on the card image for complete directions. Often times the directions have some helpful tips and explain a few things I didn't here and that's especially true for this card.

Copic Seagull Card

Here's another greeting card based on one of the Purple Daisy Design stamps I brought last year to color with that has finally been used. If you recall from previous posts, I'm trying to start the year off by being less of a stamp collector and more of a stamper. I've been buying their stuff at conventions for the last few years but have done very little with some of it because I have too much stuff and not enough free time. I have not gone crazy and decided to stop buying new stuff though if there is cool new stuff out there that I don't have, so it's admittedly a lost battle. (Note to the local crafts stores like Michael's and AC Moore - you need to get new stuff - I have all of your current stuff that I want!) I actually haven't had this stamp that long if you disregard the Thanksgiving and Christmas cardmaking seasons so I guess I did pretty well on this one.

I thought about stamping something on the background to step this up a bit but I really didn't want any other elements on the card to distract from the main image and the saying. One thing this card does really show off is the visual color difference between the warm, cool and neutral grays available in the Copic marker line. The bird was colored with the neutral grays, trying to match the normal feather colors of a real bird. The posts were colored with the warm grays and the bolt was colored with a cool gray, which is perfect when you want something metallic. As always, click on the image to be taken to the website for full directions including the marker colors and paper sizes if you want more information on how to make the card or even if you just want to see the bigger image you can get to from the directions.

Purple Daisy Bouquet

Here's my latest handmade greeting card and another one using the rubber stamps from Purple Daisy Designs that I've been catching up on this month. Fair warning though, this one takes forever to make. You'll have to stamp out 11 flowers and color and shade all the flowers using Copic marker, or your favorite coloring technique. You might want to have an ink refill handy for your light purple marker too if you decide to make a lot of these. One of the nice things about this stamp is that it's designed to fit into a punch. To punch them out you just turn the punch over so you can see the cutting parts and then insert your paper into the punch so you can see the flower through the hole. Line up the flower image with the die inside and squeeze the punch. It's much faster than having to fuss cut out each flower. The really time consuming thing is arranging the bouquet on the paper and putting pieces of the right height of dimensional foam under each leaf. The flowers are at three different heights on the card but taking the time to lay them out right at the three different dimensions makes the card look fabulous. Another really cool thing about this card is the design lends itself to being whatever kind of card you want - all you have to do is add the appropriate words inside.





Click on the card image if you want the full direction sheet from my website on how to make this card.

A Quick Valentine's Day/Thank You Card Using Dazzles Stickers

Here's a quick, simple and elegant Valentine's Day/Thank You Card. All the center images are Dazzle stickers. It probably took more time to free the intricate Dazzle stickers used and get them arranged correctly on the card front than for anything else. The border is a punch and paint. I used a heat tool to dry it almost instantly after it had been applied. You have probably seen them do this a dozen times in the local paint store when they mix a color to show it to you but have you ever thought about applying this technique to your crafting to speed up drying times when you don't feel like waiting until later to finish something?

Here's the cards. Its just dazzling :)


As always, click on the images for full directions including the sticker sets and paint used and the paper sizes.

Did you frog-ot?

If you have frog-otten someone's Birthday already, it's never to too late to send them a card. Here's another card I put together with Purple Daisy stamps that I decided to stop just collecting and actually use this year. It's a fairly straight forward card. The images were colored with some quick and straight forward Copic marker blending and then because of the image size and my desire to make an A2 (4 1/4 x 5 1/2) sized card the frogs and sentiment are just mounted on top with dimensional tape.

It's probably not the last time you'll see this image or idea this year. I've got some ideas for more complicated cards with this that might get made in the next month or two so stay tuned.



As always, click on the images for full directions including the marker colors and paper sizes and if you've made similar frog cards, share them in a comment.

First card of 2011 - Happy Valentine's Day

Happy New Year!

Here's the first card for 2011. It's an early start on Valentine's Day which is only about 5 weeks away now. It was also an opportunity for me to play with a bunch of products I brought last year and hadn't got around to playing with yet. The new Valentine's Day section of the website was kind of bare too so I thought I would try and get a few more Valentine's Day designs out there. There is at least one more coming once I get the web page for it done and there are 2 more heart stamps I have as well that I'm hoping to work into a smaller design before next month gets here.

It doesn't show on the web well but the hearts are covered with a Crystal Lacquer product that makes them look glossy in person so they stand out more. You also can't tell right away but this cards is also an A7 card (7 x 5) because the hearts were so big.




As always, click on the images for full directions including the stamps used and paper sizes.