Lace Tea Cup Happy Birthday Card

Here is a challenging new 5x7 happy birthday tea cup card. It combines fabric, die cutting, coloring, ribbon and distress. Click on the image for full directions if it interests you.

Masculine card using die cut soda cans

Stop recycling soda cans! You need those soda cans for your crafts!

Here's a masculine card I made using distress ink and die cut soda cans. The front is made using a distress tool with a foam pad to pick up distress ink from a distress ink pad and them blend it onto the card front. The embossing causes the higher areas to naturally pick up more color.

The gears are die cut from aluminum soda cans using Spellbinders dies. Aluminum is a much softer metal than steel so any steel tool will easily cut it without damage. This is why knife manufacturers like to cut up soda cans and then cut up something delicate like a tomatoes.

Here's the card:

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

Little Girl Cards

It's been a while since I've put any of the new cards I made up on the web, but here are a few I have gotten the directions and pictures for up on the website.

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

This one is a combination of a Penny Black stamp colored with Copic markers, a Heartfelt Creations die and some nice DCWV paper. The image has been cropped down but the stamp was large that this had to be a 5x7 card to fit all the elements.

Same 5x7 card as above, but redone in purple.

A 4x6 card using a Sweet 'n Sassy stamps colored with Copic markers. All of the oval mats are done using Spellbinder dies.

The beauty of nature

Here's a fairly straight forward 7x5 card I did with some of the new stamps I got at a rubber stamp convention this summer. The edge underneath the mountains is also a new Spellbinders Edgibilities die. The mountains have been colored with 4 shades of  nuetral gray Copic markers with a little bit of warm gray mixed in a few places. Rather than try and make a scene with the mountains, I opted to cut them out and mount them on dark blue cardstock since the words speak about the beauty of nature and giant mountain peaks are awe inspiring examples of nature that dwarf anything man has built.

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

Watering Can, Take 2

Here is Mom's take on the watering can image. She colored hers with colored pencils but used the same circle and scallop mat. She wanted her card to be an A2 sized card (4 1/4 x 5 1/2), which didn't leave much room for anything else on the card other than the scallop mat. To add more elements, she stamped the image a second time, colored some of the flowers on it again and then cut out and mounted some the flowers on top of the original image to give it more dimension. This proved difficult to do though because the colored pencil added a layer of wax that required a better adhesive than what was on the dimensional foam.

It makes sense, stickers are essentially on a wax paper and colored pencils use wax to hold the pigment particles together so you basically end up making a small area of waxy paper that resists dry adhesive when you color with them, although you may not be thinking about it at first. Some liquid glue solved the problem of the extra layer falling off.


As always, click on the card image if you want the full directions.

Masterpiece Watering Can

Here's a masterpiece I created. This is a masterpiece card because it's the kind of card you would see at a vendor booth at a stamping convention. It's beautiful and eye catching. It requires lots of expensive stuff to make - 4 different Spellbinder die sets, 3 different stamp sets and Copic markers. It takes a long time to create one, an hour or more, even if you are talented and even after you have designed it and know how to make one. If you were going to sell it, you would have to sell it for $15 or more just to get minimum wage for your time. It's not a card, it's a masterpiece.


As always with my posts, just click the card to get the directions if you want to know more about the stamps, die sets or just want to read more.