A girly birthday card

This card is for a brand new challenge, Virginia’s View. This challenge is going to be a monthly one courtesy of the fabulous Virginia Lu. This is the inspiration photo that we were to use:



I love the colors and the dangling hearts, so I chose this dangling heart stamp from my collection and stamped it in various shades of pink and orange.



Details: stamps – Bright Spirits (Verve), Think Big Favorites #7 (Papertrey); paper (all Papertrey) – Stampers Select White, Hibiscus Burst; ink (all Stampin’ Up) – Melon Mambo, Pink Passion, Cameo Coral; tools – large scallop border die (Papertrey)

CASE Study Challenge #74

I decided to play along with the CASE Study Challenge this week. The muse right now is Jen Rzasa, who is one of my “must read” bloggers. I loved Jen’s design (see below), so I stayed with the same layout. I had scraps of the distressed dots paper on my table, so they became the focal point. I think this card is a first – I don’t think I’ve ever used fourteen dimensionals on a card that could end up being sent to a man!

The distressed dots paper started off as squares cut to 1 1/8 inch on my paper cutter. The black paper was punched with a 1 1/4 inch square punch. I used my corner chomper’s 1/2 inch cut to round opposite corners of all of the squares.

Here's my card:



Details: stamps – Birthday Bash Sentiments (Papertrey); paper – Rustic Cream (Papertrey); ink – Versafine Onyx Black; tools – 1 1/4 inch square punch (Stampin’ Up), Corner Chomper (We R Memory Keepers)

Here is the inspiration card by Jen for this week:

Scrappy birthday cards

Here are some colorful birthday cards created using scrap strips of various patterned papers. These were fun to make. The only tiny challenge was choosing the ink colors to go with the papers. I made these on the scrapbooking retreat a couple of weekends ago, where I had taken limited inks with me. I found that my dew drop Memento pads yielded close matches for pretty much every paper shown here.





Details: stamps – Birthday Bash Sentiments (Papertrey), paper (all Papertrey) – Stampers Select White, Kraft, Bitty Box Basics, Bitty Dot Basics, Distressed Dots, ink – various Memento inks; tools – Corner Chomper (We R Memory Keepers)

OLW 75–Masculine Birthday

Okay, so it’s not Wednesday, but I did it! I finished an OLW challenge before the deadline passed me by!

This week’s One-Layer Wednesday challenge  was to create a masculine birthday card. I love this new birthday stamp from Papertrey Ink, and the distressed stripes seemed to be a good foil for it. I really like this and might just have to make a bunch of them in different colors.



Details: stamps (all Papertrey) – Think Big Favorites #12, Distressed Stripes, paper – Rustic White (Papertrey), ink (all Stampin’ Up) – Dusty Durango, More Mustard

More scrappy stripes

Here are a couple more of the cards that I created from the scrap stripes. These were so much fun that I can definitely see doing some more using various papers and dies.



Details (all Papertrey unless otherwise noted): stamps – Think Big Favorites #7; ink – Bamboo Leaves (Memento);paper – Stampers Select White, Bitty Dot Basics, Bitty Box Basics, Distressed Dots; tools – Seeing Stars dies



Details (all Papertrey unless otherwise noted): stamps – Enjoy the Ride, Background Basics: Circles; ink – Bamboo Leaves (Memento), Cantaloupe (Memento);paper – Stampers Select White, Bitty Dot Basics, Bitty Box Basics, Distressed Dots; tools – Seeing Stars dies

Happy stripe scraps

While at the scrapbook retreat, I decided to make a sheet of striped paper from “scraps”. They weren’t really scraps – I cut strips from whole sheets of patterned paper, but it would be a great way to use scraps if I’d had some with me on the retreat. I glued strips down to a half sheet of cardstock and then started die cutting stars from it, with the intention of using the stars on some cards. My plans went slightly off track when I saw the negative image left by cutting three stars out of the sheet. I loved it so much that I quickly trimmed it to card front size so that I wouldn’t mess it up. This is the card that resulted, and it’s easily in my top five cards that I’ve ever made.



Details: stamps – Birthday Bash Sentiments (“happy”, Papertrey), Mother (“birthday”, Papertrey), Everyday Classics (star, Papertrey); ink – Rhubarb Stalk, Bamboo Leaves, Sweet Plum (all Memento); paper – Stampers Select White, Bitty Dot Basics, Bitty Box Basics, Distressed Dots (all Papertrey); dies – Seeing Stars (Papertrey)

CAS-ual Fridays–Penguin Awareness Day

This week’s challenge on CAS-ual Fridays is to celebrate Penguin Awareness Day by creating a card using only black and white. I was excited to use this amazing stamp. It’s spent several years languishing in a box across the room from the rest of my stamps because it’s too big to fit in a CD case. My new storage system allows it and the other gigantic stamps in my collection to join the others where I can see and use them!



Details: stamps – Pollen Dust (Fancy Pants), Think Big Favorites #12 (Papertrey); ink – Versafine Onyx Black; paper – Stampers Select White (Papertrey)