Mehndi a la Laurie

Here’s a card that I made last month when I went on the scrapbook retreat. We had a pretty sketchy wi-fi connection that weekend, so I was pretty much on my own for ideas. This one came to me easily, because it was inspired by a lovely card by Laurie Willison, and I’ve made several similar cards over the past few months in various colors and textures. Funny thing is, I remembered that I was inspired by Laurie, but didn’t have her original blog post pinned so that I could find it again, so a working wi-fi wouldn’t have made any difference that weekend. After speed-surfing Laurie’s blog (and finding tons more inspiration on the way!) I found the original card that inspired me. Check it out and see her lovely card. Even funnier is the fact that Laurie was inspired by someone she forgot to pin, too!



Details (all Papertrey unless noted): stamps – Mendhi Medallion, Signature Greetings; paper – Kraft, Stampers Select White, Bermuda Bay (Stampin’ Up); ink – Versafine Onyx Black, Lucky Limeade (Stampin’ Up); accessories – Cuttlebug embossing folder (I think the name is Textile Texture or something like that?), Nestabilities circle die, Corner Chomper (We R Memory Keepers)

Papertrey 5th Anniversary–Day 1

This month marks the fifth anniversary of Papertrey Ink, the maker of my favorite stamps and many, many of my stamping supplies. Anniversary month is always full of fun contests, prizes, and inspiration. Today’s contest was to look at the personal favorite projects of the last year from each of the Papertrey design team members, choose one, and use it to inspire our own creation. I chose Maile Belles, of course, because she’s the designer who constantly inspires me with her designs. I’m a Maile groupie!



Maile’s card, which you can see above, used chevron stripes in a rainbow pattern. I thought I would make chevrons using my all-time favorite Maile-designed stamp set, Modern Basics. My love for this set is well known. In my opinion, it is the best stamp set on the planet, and will probably remain in that position for a long time to come.

I had a blast experimenting with chevrons using the shapes in this set! In the end, I went with this simple pattern. I only used two stamps from the set, the large solid 3-leaf stamp, and the corresponding single leaf. I love how easy it is to line up the stamps in Modern Basics, even if you’re covering a fairly large area. I started at the edge of the paper and lined up the center of the leaves right along the edge (see the blue stamps at the top of the strip) and then just built from there.

Here’s the card with no embellishment.



And since I’m indecisive, I put a ton of little adhesive-backed pearls on the second card. I like it both ways.


Just another view so that you can see the pearls better.


Details (all Papertrey unless noted): stamps – Modern Basics, Think Big Favorites #3; paper – Kraft, Stampers Select White; ink – Versafine Onyx Black, Stampin’ Up Pacific Point, Perfect Plum, Regal Rose, Real Red, Summer Sun, Old Olive; pearl embellishments (source unknown)

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