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; paper – White, Hibiscus Burst; ink (all Stampin’ Up) – Melon Mambo, Pink Passion, Cameo Coral; tools – large scallop border die

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

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; ink – Versafine Onyx Black; paper – White

Sunflower note

Here’s another fun card from the scrapbooking weekend. I love, love, love Simple Sunflower. I was born and raised in Kansas, where it’s the state flower, so that’s my excuse for my adoration of the lovely sunflower. This is just about my all-time favorite sunflower stamp set, and I’ve owned (and sold) a bunch of them!



Details: stamps – Simple Sunflower, Background Basics: Sheet Music, Accent Notes (Verve); cardstock – Kraft, Pure Poppy, White; ink – Chocolate Chip (Stampin’ Up), Cantaloupe (Memento), Bamboo Leaves (Memento); dies – Simple Sunflower, Eyelet Lace

Here’s what I took with me on the retreat, in case you’re wondering:

one DVD box of stamps – I focused on birthday, thank you and thinking of you sentiments, and chose a variety of stamp image categories – a few flowers, circles, backgrounds, frames, flourishes, leaves, trees

ink – I only took a handful of full size pads (dark chocolate, crumb cake, bermuda bay, real red, and lucky limeade from SU, Versafine onyx black, Versamark) and at the last minute I decided to bring along my box of 24 dew drop Memento inks

cardstock – full packages of kraft, white, pure poppy; a handful of sheets of bermuda bay, lucky limeade; about 15 sheets of patterned paper in various colors taken from bitty dot basics, bitty box basics, and distressed dots collections

tools – Big Shot, box of dies, a couple of embossing folders, Tonic paper cutter

That’s all I took other than my usual stamping “kit” – scissors, adhesives, etc. I was surprised how much stuff everyone else brought compared to me! And then the funny thing was that when people were looking for something specific in terms of stamps or dies, I was often the one who had it. So I guess I packed pretty well. I’ll definitely do the limited color scheme thing in the future. I had plenty to play with, but not having every single color of ink and paper available to me really helped to focus my energy.

Colorful tree

Last weekend, I went on my first scrapbooking retreat. I’m not a scrapper, but I was eager to go and work on my cards. It was a wonderful experience for me. Since I took a limited amount of supplies, I was forced to be creative with colors and designs. In addition, the bed and breakfast where we stayed was having some issues with their internet router, so we didn’t have a lot of opportunities to check Pinterest and other sites for ideas. Rather than worry about that, I kept myself busy playing with my stamps, and came away with a stack of new cards, which makes me very happy.



This is one of my favorite cards from the weekend. I love the colors on the little tree and the ground created using the Bitty Box Basics paper. With my new stamp organization – separated by category rather than stamp set – all of the plain round stamps are together and mostly lined up in size order, which made finding just the right size dot for the tree super simple.
I have lots more cards to show you from the retreat, so hopefully you will see a flurry of posts from me in the coming days!

Details: stamps – Tiny Giggle Grove (Unity), Birthday Bash Sentiments, Dot Spot; paper – White, Bitty Box Basics; ink – Chocolate Chip (Stampin’ Up), various Memento dye ink colors

Stamp reorganization progress report #2

Today was an exciting day in the reorganization of my stamps. I’ve been steadily moving the stamps from their former homes in CD cases to their new places in the Tim Holtz unmounted stamp envelopes, and I needed some more of the DVD boxes that I’m using to hold the envelopes. I’ve had four of the boxes lined up at one end of my stamping table, and I love the convenience of having them right at my fingertips. I wanted a shelf directly above the table so that I could line up four more boxes there.

Off I went to the Container Store, which is tied with IKEA as probably my all-time most dangerous places to shop! After conferring with one of their most amazingly helpful salespeople, I decided on a free-standing Elfa unit. It’s been about 20 years since I installed any Elfa shelves, and boy, have they improved since then! This unit is 36 inches wide and seven feet tall, and I built it in under an hour, with very little frustration and zero bad words! It doesn’t attach to the wall in any way, but is very stable due to its nice long “feet”. It’s easy to move the shelves around any way I want, and I can easily add more shelves or drawers if I want to in the future. I can also add another runner to either or both sides and continue to grow the unit. If I had a big enough room, I could even move it out in the center and add on to the other side! Best of all, I got it during the annual Elfa 30% off sale.

I was able to fit my stamping table (BJURSTA square slide-out leaf dining table from IKEA) right up under the shelves on the Elfa unit. My table is 35 inches wide and its legs just slipped right in between the feet of the Elfa. Pretty cool trick.

Now you can see all eight of the DVD boxes right at the end of my table where they’re easy to reach. I’m hopeful that my entire stamp collection will fit here. I haven’t decided yet if I’m going to put my unmounted wheel stamps and my large background stamps in here. If I don’t, then these boxes will likely be enough.

Here’s my CD rack after a few weeks of reorganizing stamps. As you can see, there are a lot of cases missing now. And the ones remaining are getting pretty empty. Many of them are down to just one or two stamps.

This stack of boxes is full of empty CD cases – over 250 of them! I’m pretty excited to get this process finished. I can see the light at the end of the tunnel now.

Clean and Simple Card Making Class–Day 2

Oh, boy, am I having fun with this class! There are so many great ideas to try out that I can’t wait to play each day. Here are today’s cards.

I always need lots of birthday cards. I’m the hospitality chairperson for one of my daughters’ middle school PTA groups, and I make sure that everyone on the staff gets a handmade birthday card. I’m really enjoying doing this, and the staff is thrilled as well.

For this card, I was using some of Julie Ebersole’s hints about faux letterpress style designs. I love the way it turned out.

Details: stamps – Harvest Berries, Year of Flowers: Daffodil; cardstock – White; ink – Lucky Limeade (Stampin’ Up), Onyx Black (Versafine)

For this next card, I followed some of Julie’s hints for creating the illusion of an extra layer by masking off the edges of my card as well as the flowers, then adding color to the center. I don’t have any of the mists that Julie uses, so I went back to my early days of stamping and applied ink using a sponge. Not sure how well this particular card works, but the idea is great.

Details: stamps – Simple Sunflower, Birthday Bash Sentiments; cardstock – Rustic Cream; ink (all Stampin’ Up) – Chocolate Chip, Marigold Morning, Bashful Blue; tools – Simple Sunflower dies

And last of all is this little 4x4 inch thank you card. I was pondering the sketch from Day 1 with the three elements in a row, when I came upon this stamp with three butterflies all on one stamp. Makes the stamping much simpler, and I like the resulting card.

Details: stamps – Kindness Matters (Stampin’ Up), En Francais (Stampin’ Up), Floral Frenzy; cardstock – Rustic Cream; ink (Stampin’ Up) – Buckaroo Blue, Soft Suede; tools – Chocolate Chip marker (Stampin’ Up)

Clean and Simple Card Making Class–Day 1

I’m really excited today because it was the first day of the Clean and Simple Card Making Class taught by Kristina Werner, Julie Ebersole, and Jennifer McGuire. All three of these ladies’ blogs are way up high on my list of “must reads”, so it’s a no-brainer that I would take the class. There are also a bunch of guest teachers, which include a whole bunch more of my stamping idols.
Here’s the link to the class information - http://www.onlinecardclasses.com/cleansimple/. It’s a real bargain, and all of the class materials will be available forever if you sign up.
Today’s class consisted of a few really nice card sketches, examples, and helpful hints. It took no time at all to come up with this birthday card. Using my newly reorganized stamp storage, it was so easy to find exactly the right flower, flower center, and the perfect sized sentiment.

Details: stamps  – Beautiful Blooms II (flower and center), Gracious Vases (sentiment); ink (all Stampin’ Up) – real red, pacific point, summer sun; cardstock – Kraft, SU Real Red, generic office store white (yeah, I know – it’s what was plentiful and in my way at the time!)