Larger Get Well Card That A Group Could Sign

Here's the last variant Mom made of her get well card. This one was designed as a 5x7 card so there is more room on it so a larger group of people could sign it if someone wanted to pass the card around in an office or group setting. It doesn't show up on the web background well but the card base is white so the entire inside surface and the back surface of the card are usable for writing.

She changed the sentiment stamp to something larger with a little more weight and rearranged the elements a little to take up more space on the front of the card but the rest of it is similar to the way the elements on the previous cards where made.

Here's the card. As usual, click on it to see the full directions for it on http://www.sharedcards.com.

Two More Get Well Cards

About a month ago, I posted this get well card that my Mother had made.


She made two more variants using the same basic design but using a more monochromatic color theme instead of the a Red Hat Society color theme that I just put up on the website. Here they are:

  
One thing that she did that didn't translate too well into web images is to place Crystal Effects on all the heart images. This gives them a clear dimensional shiny appearance in person. You can see the light reflection in the bottom of the some of the hearts from the dimensional layer it added if you look closely at the enlarged image on the website.

The full directions with stamp sets and techniques used are up on the website, as I normally do. Just click any of the images to go to that page on the website.

Three Paper Candles

Here's another quick card idea. No stamping required, unless you want to stamp something inside. All you need is a piece of patterned paper that has large images on it. In this case the paper was nothing but a repeating pattern of these candles in a few different coordinated colors. Since the images all coordinated, all I had to do was cut them out to the same size with the paper timmer, mat them and then mount them using dimensional foam to make it look like I really did something.

Some, like the one on the left below, where made with different images. Others, like the one on the right where, made using the same repeated image and colors that coordinated with it, which gave the card a different look.

  
As always, click on the images for full directions. There are some additional assembly tips on there that I didn't repeat here.

Happy Valentine's Day

Here's an animated gif from last year that I'm reposting for those who might not have seen it before since the blog goes out to a few new sites this year. If your into digi-images and digital scrapbooking this is another idea of something you can do with those images to create an animated greeting that you can email to someone. It's really not that hard and the software you need is freely available for all the popular OS's.



If you would like to add this to your own web page, blog or wall to celebrate Valentine's Day, please use the following html code:

<a href="http://www.sharedcards.com/"><img border="0" src="http://www.sharedcards.com/free_greeting_card_designs/2010/Love_Is_Like_ECard/thumb.gif"/></a>

What do two Xryon machines, a Cuttlebug and a heat gun equal?

They equal this really quick amazing card that never made it online last year. I don't know why. The images were done for it. I just needed to find the name of the embossing folder and the cutting cartridge. It would have been easy to finish but it never gone done until now.





There's no stamping involved, but it uses 3 different machines, 4 if you count the heat gun, and two different embossing techniques - dry and heat.

Anyone remember the Xyron Personal Cutting system? It was one of the first generation electronic cutters and used 6x6 mats with LeapPad like books to select the image. It's discontinued now but that's where the large purple flower shape came from. It had some really nice shapes you're going to see coming up in some of the nicer simple cards that I made years ago that I'll be mixing in with some of the more complicated newer stuff in the coming months. I should probably update the card to use one of the newer cutting machines or mega sized punches but since I don't have a commercial sponsor to promote, I'll just stick with my original Xyron PCS flower since its got nice chunky petals that fill the card front.

The large purple flower is heat embossed with a rather unconventional technique that I came up with up that actually created a large glittered image that did not shed glitter all over the place. Essentially I made my own glitter paper, but just out of the image so there was no waste. How do you that? I'm going to leave that as an evil teaser. It's all explained in full on the direction sheet you can get by clicking on the image.

Loon Birthday Wishes

Here is another birthday greeting card designed using Purple Daisy Designs' stamps. This one is designed around masculine colors. For this one I decided to play with airbrushing the water since it was a larger area to cover and there wasn't much else to do since a loon is black and white.

I thought it might go faster and require a little less ink. It should have except I though I had refilled the B91 marker I was using a few days ago and was starting with a full marker, but not much color was going on the paper for some reason. It turns out B93 had been refilled, not B91. It should have been obvious from the result on the paper. No ink in the marker means no ink to go on the page. I had myself convinced this marker had been refilled though.

I didn't figure out the problem until I decided to just color it with the super brush and the marker tip started turning white, which is a bad thing. It was then that I went over to my container of refills and pulled out the B91 refill and found myself staring at a new, sealed, full B91 refill, sitting next to B93 refill that was missing about 2 oz of ink. Since I had the B91 refill I was able to immediately refill it, and the super brush tip seems to still be working fine, although it does have slight discoloration now where it went white. If I hadn't of had the B91 on hand I would have needed to keep it wet with either colorless blender or a little B93 until I could get B91 ordered and shipped to me.

Here's the card. As always, click on the image for full directions.

Two Stepping Butterfly Kisses

Here are two cards I made with what's now last month's {Stamps} of Life release. I meant to get them posted sooner but the snow and ice took out TV and Internet for the first few days of the week.



   
Nothing fancy, just a simple all stamping card using the various images on the stamp sheet and the two step stamping technique to add color.

If you aren't familiar with two step stamping, it's when you stamp one image and then stamp another one on top of it. Usually the stamp vendor has made different stamps for this purpose as a coordinating set and one or more fit inside the other one. For example, on this card the flowers start out as simple black outlines but there are other stamps in the set that fit perfectly into the two different wing sizes. It lets you add more color to your card with nothing more than another stamp pad. It's easy with clear stamps like these were because you can see where you are stamping.

To do this with rubber stamps you need to either admit you can't like two stamped images up under a wood block and go for an artsy abstract look or you need to use a Stamp-a-ma-jig. Its a tool where you place a plastic jig against the edge of a clear sheet and then stamp on the clear sheet using the corner of the jig to guide the stamp down. You then take the plastic sheet and line it up where you want to stamp. In this case, you would line it perfectly over the other image. Once in place, you put the plastic jig back against the edge of the clear sheet and then take the sheet away without moving the jig. You can now stamp in the corner of the jig like you did the first time to make the image on the clear sheet except this time it will be exactly where you want it on the paper. Here's what the Stamp-a-ma-jig tool looks like if you have never seen it:





 
As always click on the greeting card images if you want the full directions. The directions do explain the best order I found for stamping them and why which I didn't repeat here.

The card was really done as a general purpose card for someone special that you customize with the words inside. If you are still looking for a Valentine's Day card idea, imagine the butterfly wings in pink and red.