Absolutely Fabulous

Hello there!  It's sunday evening here and back to the normal day to day as of tomorrow.  It's our youngest last week of school and it's jammed packed with activities from a field trip, baseball games and school carnival. The card I have for today is one that I made about a week ago to send to someone who was kind enough to gift me the My Favorite Things, Absolutely Fabulous dies I used on the card I'm sharing today.  She was so sweet to send me these die since she already had a set and I truly appreciated receiving them. For my card, I started out with an aqua mist card base and die cut a piece of white cardstock using the Absolutely die.  Once that was die cut, I used the MFT Circle Grid stencil and stenciled on some aqua mist ink in a circular pattern.  Then I stamped and watercolored three of the flowers from the Pretty Posies set onto watercolor paper and die cut them.  Before adhering them to my card front, I played around with my arrangement of where I wanted them and stamped some of the other leaves and flowers from the set around where I wanted my flowers to go and once I was done, I adhered my three main flowers popping up the orchid colored flower with foam tape.  Next I die cut my fabulous word from lavender lace cardstock and sponged on some wilted violet distress ink along the bottom and add it to my card. To finish off my card, I added some silver sequins, some silver glitter pen, white gel pen and some Wink of Stella glitter pen over the main flowers. I hope you have a peaceful evening and a great start to your week tomorrow.

Concord & 9th May Guest Designer - You Are Enough

Hello there!  I'm back today to share another post as a Concord & 9th Guest Designer.  Today I'm showcasing the Concord & 9th stamp set, You Are Enough. I ended up creating two clean & simple cards using this beautiful stamp set.  This set is so versatile and can be used so many different ways.  In one of my past blog post I used this set along with the, You've Got This die and had fun watercoloring the flowers from the You Are Enough set. The flower stamp from the You Are Enough set is so pretty and whimsical looking, I wanted to show how stamping them slightly overlapped in different colors makes them seem opaque, almost like balloons.  I stamped the outline image of the flower from the set three times on a piece of white cardstock overlapping each one (it's nice because the stem of the flower is flexible so I straightened the stem on my stamping block), then I stamped the inside of each flower in a different color using two shades of ink per flower (aqua mist/hawaiian shore, hibiscus burst/raspberry fizz, daffodil delight/summer sun).  Once I was done stamping, I did some fussy cutting and cut along the top edge of the flowers and adhered the flower piece with foam tape to my card base which I stamped my sentiment from the the You Are Enough set.  In the pictures it looks as though the flowers are stamped directly on the card base, but in real life having them popped up from the card base gives some nice dimension.  I added a group of three iridescent sequins to each card to finish them off. Thank you for your visit and for the sweet comments on my work.

Monkey Business - (CTD395)

It's the first of June!  Time is flying!  Are you ready for this week's Color Throwdown Challenge?  Before I get to my card, I'd like to extend a warm welcome to the talented, Kara Vrabel who is our guest designer for this month.

For my card, I kind of took liberties with the colors for this week because I used these fun My Favorite Things, Cheeky Monkeys which I already had colored weeks ago and yes they have some teal and yellow colors but I thought they would work well for my card.  I colored the Monkeys with Copic markers and stenciled my background using a MFT Diagonal Bars stencil and some new leaf (PTI) ink.

For more inspiration, check out the design teams' blog links below OR you can go to the Color Throwdown blog for details on how to play along and you can see all the sample entries in one location.
Amy Rohl Amy Rysavy

Barbara Anders   

Broni Holcombe   

Jodi Collins 

Lisa Henke 

Lori Tecler

Lynn Put   

Vickie Zimmer 

Wanda Cullen

Kara Vrabel - June Guest Designer

Thanks so much for stopping by!

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Something Blue & More or Less White Space

Hello there!  I hope your weekend is off to a good start.  Today I'm sharing two cards I created for two different challenges.  The first challenge is the Fusion Challenge: Something Blue, I chose to use only the cake as my inspiration.  The second challenge is the Addicted to CAS Challenge: Petals. Am I the only one who struggles with white space on a card?  I take that back, I think it may be that I might have a hard time with spacing things out.  For example, I made my first card on the left below with the intentions of having a lot of white space (you see how that worked out).  Once I stamped my large main flowers I felt that I needed to "fill in" to balance my design, then once I was done stamping, I wasn't sure I even like it because I thought it might be too busy.  Soooo, I made another card trying for more white space, this time was better but I had to hold myself back so I wouldn't add more.  It's not that I don't like white space and CAS cards, I do!  Maybe for ME, I just like color more. I would consider both of my cards clean & simple (CAS) since they're mostly one layer cards with the exception of the die cut hello.  For both cards I started out with a white card base and stamped the My Favorite Things Pretty Posies onto a white cardstock panel using the colors new leaf, limeade ice, spring rain, enchanted evening, hawaiian shores and marina mist (SU).   First I stamped the outlines of the flowers and leaves and then I stamped the colors slightly off centered.  I also stamped the friend sentiment from the MFT stamp set Label Maker Sentiments.  Once my stamping was done, I die cut my stamped panel using the MFT hello die and also die cut the hello from a piece of fun foam to layer the two together.  I did some ink blending on both of the die cut hello words before gluing them to the fun foam, marina mist & enchanted evening on my first card and hawaiian shores & marina mist on my second.  Below I have a simple slide show of some of the steps I took to create my dimensional die cut hello sentiment.

One of the funnest things for me while making these two cards was the finishing details, adding the blue and silver sequins, some white gel pen to the tiny dots around some of the flowers, using a silver glitter pen to add dots in the daisy flowers and some Wink of Stella glitter pen on a few of the flowers. Thanks for stopping by!