THE BEGINNING OF "BIRTHDAY SEASON"

In our family the month of September is our "Birthday Season". It starts off on the 9th with the grandtwins' big day, followed by Hal's on the 17th, mine on the 25th, and our son's wedding anniversary on the 29th. In between those days are various other family/friends' birthdays, which makes the whole month very celebratory.

It's hard to believe that those two twin-souls (Alexis and Colin) will be 12 soon! They were born on 9/09/09, which has always felt rather auspicious. They have just finished their first week of middle school. They go to the same school where Hal teaches so, while he teaches in the high school and they are in the middle school, he sees them on campus nearly every day and always gets hugs. Not a bad thing in the course of one's day!

 

Today I set out to make a birthday card for Alexis, jumping off from the latest Freshly Made Sketches #500. I decided to try the sketch out as a slimline card and chose to use 4 different patterned papers from my scrap bin. My granddaughter has always loved to mix patterns in her clothing so this seemed appropriate for her. I used the same number dies by PTI for this card as the one I made for her brother, which you can see here. After gluing the patterned elongated rectangles onto a pale pink folded card, I wrapped a strip of striped paper on which I had white heat embossed the sentiment around to the other side so I can insert a gift card there. I had punched holes all of the way through the layers and tied the strip on with some pink and white bakers twine and glued on three die-cut hearts. 

I'm sending this over to Freshly Made Sketches #500.

Freshly Made Sketches: Freshly Made Sketches #500 - A Decade of Sketch Inspiration

 

ADDICTED TO CAS #205 - NATURE

For our new two-week challenge Toni has selected "Nature" as the code word, giving us a large field of ideas to maneuver within! 

I've been thinking about my brother recently, and while it's easiest to just pick up the phone, I sometimes prefer to surprise the people I love with a card and personal note. He and most of his family live in West Virginia so we don't see each other very often - especially with the whole COVID thing. We lost our middle brother rather suddenly just a little less than a year ago so it seems particularly important to stay in touch. Given his love of the outdoors and all of nature I selected images that I thought he would respond to.

I find these tones of gray and gray-green to be very soothing and befitting Bill's calm mind and soul. I used Hero Arts CM316 "Color Layering Waves" and CM317 "Color Layering Sea & Sky for all of the images, stamping them in PTI "Soft Stone", "Smokey Shadow", and "Ocean Tides" and Memento "London Fog". I took a white Prismacolor pencil to the dolphin's tale to make it look submerged in the water and added a sentiment from HA+Gina K #PR101. Once that was completed I wanted to highlight the main images and sentiment a bit more so I die-cut them from one of my Lawn Fawn stitched rectangles and popped it out with some dimensional foam and adhered it to a PTI "Ocean Tides" cardstock for the base.

This close-up shows the sequins and dots I attached last. This card was a bit larger than normal so I had to make a custom envelope for it by adjusting one of my Anna Griffin envelope templates.

Well, given Toni's generous choice for a subject matter, there are lots of ideas for all of you to explore. Have fun, but keep it clean and simple! 

Addicted to CAS: Challenge #205 - Nature

TRICK OR TREAT

It's too smoky outside to work in the garden, so here I am this Sunday afternoon thinking about making Halloween cards. The current AAA Cards CAS Challenge #197 is "One Inch Strip + Optional Coloured Cardstock". This was so much fun that I might do some more with 1" strips since I have quite a few Halloween stamps that will fit within that format.

Onto a gray cardstock I stamped the haunted house from Stampers Anonymous Tim Holtz "Haunted House" CMS308 with Memento Tuxedo Black then heat embossed the sentiment from Simple Stories "Boo Crew" #13820 with Zing! "Apricot embossing powder. The bats from one of  Tim Holtz's Halloween collections were heat embossed with black, although the shininess of the heat embossing doesn't show up in my photo. I finished it off by punching the end with a blood drip and inserting an orange punched piece, gluing the strip to a black textured cardstock. I think if I were to do this again I would stamp the house in a dark gray so that the bats would show up a bit more. The custom envelope is cut from some orange stock I had on-hand and lined with some lightweight skull paper. 

This layout has some promise as a preliminary thought about my personal Halloween cards. We'll see if I develop it further.

AAA Cards: Game #197 - One Inch Strip + optional twist Coloured Cardbase

Added on September 13, 2021:

Be sure to return on October 31st for my Guest Designer shot!

SHADES OF BLUE

We've been pretty much in and out for the past couple of weeks so I've been sneaking a couple of minutes of crafting time here and there. I did this card in response to Less is More's Colour Challenge #449 - "Shades of Blue" before leaving for a day-trip to the Oregon coast.

This little 1-3/4" x 1-1/4" nighttime sailing ship is from Hero Arts CM357, as is the compass rose (I've used it previously for a sun by cutting off the stars). I heat embossed navy embossing powder directly onto the face of a folded card and colored it with about 4 blue Copic markers and touched it up with a bit of white gel pen. I then cut out a rectangular mat of white cardstock and layered over that and glued a 3rd layer over that of a slightly smaller panel that I had pre-stamped with the compass rose in Memento "Summer Sky" and the sentiment (Simple Stories "Great Escape") in PTI's "Enchanted Evening". I finished it off with some denim blue scrap paper to line the envelope.

 

 This close-up shows the plate marks from my rectangular dies.

"Less is More": Challenge #449 - Shades Of Blue (simplylessismoore.blogspot.com)

FISHY LEFTOVERS

The week before last I drove up to Longview, Washington (the place of my birth) and picked up a cousin who lives alone and doesn't get out much and brought her back here to southern Oregon for a week. Then last weekend hubby and I drove her back to Longview and stopped off in Portland on our way home, where an old friend hosted us in her home. She fixed the most incredible baked steelhead for our dinner and I wanted to send a special thank you to her and her family. I had this leftover fish that I had decided not to use on my Addicted to CAS "Fishy" card and it's been sitting here on my craft table for a week. Then I saw this week's Freshly Made Sketches #498 by Jen T. and decided that with a couple of oval dies for a platter it could make the perfect thank you card!

I started by die-cutting a Pink Fresh Stitched Rectangle and then die-cutting an oval opening in the center of it and mounting that to a cardstock base. Then I layered 2 more ovals over that opening, finishing with the largest oval with a decorative edge. I die-cut a couple of branches from Penny Black's "Airy" 51-423 in green lightweight scraps, glued them to the platter and laid the fish that I had fussy-cut last week onto the greens with some dimensional foam. The fussy-cut spoon is from PTI's "Tea for Two Additions", and the lemon wedges are Tim Holtz "Happy Hour Cocktails" dies. The sentiment is a random stamp that I heat-embossed in white onto a mauve scrap.

What to do with leftover fish!

Freshly Made Sketches: Freshly Made Sketches #498 - A Sketch by Jen T 

 

Added August 17, 2021

ADDICTED TO CAS #204 - FISHY

Jaydee selected "Fishy" for our code for the next two weeks at our Addicted to CAS challenge.

I honestly didn't think I would be able to come up with a "fishy" card for Jaydee's chosen code word without a trip to the craft store to search out fish stamps. But then I remembered that I had at one point purchased a couple of wooden stamps for birthday invitations for a 4-year-old daughter of one of my son's friends. That little 4-year-old is now 20, so that tells you how old this stamp is! It must have been one of the first stamps I owned and other than the invitations, I don't remember ever using it anywhere else. I had thrown it into a bin of old stamps and ink pads for the grandkids. The wooden block says Postmodern Design #RE3-106-C "Funny Fish". I have a habit these days of peeling the old rubber images off of the wooden blocks and using them with my MISTI or Tonic stamp platforms.

The first thing I did with this fish image was to stamp it twice with a very pale warm gray ink. Then, using "Laurel Leaves" rubber stamps from IndigoBlu (because I thought it looked more like seaweed than any other of my leaf stamps), I layered them over the fish with PTI "New Leaf" and "Pinefeather" inks. Then I colored the fish with Copic markers and white gel pen and stamped the sentiment from Hero Arts #CM316 "Color Layering Waves" with PTI "Pinefeather". I had cut the cardstock just slightly smaller than the 4 1/4" x 5 1/2" folded card so I attached it with dimensional foam.

Sometimes I completely surprise myself with what paper scraps I find in my heaps of paper, and I loved that I was able to line the grape-colored envelope with this river rock printed paper!

Now over to you so you can amaze yourselves with your clever ideas - can't wait to see what everyone comes up with for this theme! Just remember to keep it clean & simple.

Addicted to CAS: Challenge #204 - Fishy

  

FANGTASTIC F WORDS

While wandering through card challenge-land I discovered a new (for me) challenge called The Sisterhood of the Snarky Stampers. Wow! Where have you guys been all my life? This challenge has my name all over it and the current Challenge #191 is "F is for F Words" and since Fran is an F word...

I don't have any "naughty" F word stamps or supplies but as I LOVE making Halloween cards, I opted for this Count Dracula (Stamp Francisco) and the sentiment from Impression Obsession (#CL366 "When Life").

On a a 5"x 5" folded card base I stamped the corner cobweb (Tim Holtz) with Memento "Tuxedo Black" ink and then stamped it twice more with white embossing powder on black and black ink on the lavender scrap. I black embossed the count on white stock, colored his skin with "Wax White" Copic marker, added some blood to his fangs, and fussy-cut him out. The sentiment was white embossed on red-orange card stock and die cut with a Stampin' Up "Framelits Chalk Talk" tag. I cut down a matching red-orange envelope to make it square and lined it with some cobweb paper from my Halloween stash. The blood spatters on the tag and envelope are from a very old stamp set and I used VersaMark watermark ink to get the red stains. And finally, I tied the tag off with some black and lavender baker's twine.

I'm looking forward to some further participation with these snarky ladies!

Sisterhood of Snarky Stampers: SoSS Challenge #191: F is for F Words