A challenge!

I have joined a group of fabulous blogging paper-crafters. Our goal is to motivate and inspire each other to keep creating and blogging! I rarely have problems with the creating side of things but I seem to struggle with some sort of pre-posting anxiety which makes posting often fall to the very bottom of my to do list, even though I really do love to share my projects. (especially when I get all of you lovely and encouraging comments!!) Hopefully my new crafty friends will encourage me to push past my posting dread and you will hear from me a little more regularly. (You can see their great blogs on my side bar under My SU! Blog List)


One thing our (soon to be named) group has started are weekly challenges. This week our challenge was to create a simple card; sticking to the basics of ink and cardstock and it had to be made in under 15 min. For me this is the very definition of challenge! I always overcomplicate my projects and they generally take me a lot longer than 15 min to make!


I have been wanting to play around with my new movers and shapers die ( the one that looks kind of weird and useless in the catalogue but is really fabulous!) So this is the card I came up with: (Sorry the first pic is over exposed, I edited it on a very dim monitor and did not realize how bright I made it)








{Recipe}

Stamps: Circle Circus, Thoughts and Wishes (hostess level 2)

Paper: Soft Suede, Crushed Curry, Mellon Mambo, Whisper White

Ink: Same as paper + Dusty Durango & Old olive markers

Tools & Acc: Movers & shapers curly lable & modern label dies, modern label punch.



I coloured the flower in with markers directly to the rubber. I started with the lightest colour (crushed curry>dusty durango>mellon mambo) then moving darker and finally just before I stamped it I sprayed my stamp with a very fine mist of water so that the inks would blend.


Oh and for an example of my posting procrastination, I made the card Monday, edited the images Wednesday and I am finally posting today literally just hours before our challenge cut off!! {sigh} I'll do better next week!


While I am posting I have one more card to share with you. This is one of the cards I created for my next techniques class. I was going to hold it in August but with so many people on holidays I think I will hold off until september. I used the ever popular water colour roses or re-inker spread technique on this card with our new in colours Mellon Mambo and Rich Razzleberry. This technique is so much fun and deceptively easy to do. If you haven't tried it out yet and are in the Edmonton area, plan to come to my class, you'll love this technique, I promiss!




{Recipe}

Stamps: 5th Avenue Floral

Paper: Soft Suede, Rich Razzleberry, Mellon Mambo, Whisper White, Shimmery White

Ink: Same as paper + crushed curry marker & Versamark

Tools & Acc: Top Note die, ticket corner punch, soft sued polkadot gg ribon, white EP, aquapainter, Texturz plates.


I hope you enjoyed my creations this week, thanks for stopping by.

Happy Stampin'!

Experiencing Technical Difficulties!

Apparently my laptop (2 yrs old) and camera (3 yrs old) and our home network (items ranging from 1-12 yrs old) are hideously out-dated and are doomed for retirement! I must be a little out of touch because, I am still under the impression that if you pay hundreds and even thousands of dollars for a piece of equipment it ought to last more than 2-3yrs!! My husband, who is very tech savvy, assures me that in the world of computers this is a very acceptable life span. On the one hand I think that this is terribly unreasonable and I don't want to put another dime towards computers etc. but, on the other hand I just don't know what I would do without internet access, a computer that I can take with me and a digital camera! Weird how you can go from not even knowing something exists to not being able to live without it in a matter of years!


Ok, enough philosophising, Let's see if I will at last succeed at posting some new creations. I hope to post as many as I can while the gettin' is good"!! Once again I won't take the time to list the recipes but, if you want to know about something from any of these projects just leave a comment and I would be happy to fill in the blanks!

This is the first card I made using my new catalogue goodies and 2009 In-colors. The stamp is
one of the level 2 hostess sets in the new catalogue (Wings of Friendship). I really love all the hostess sets this time (especially the ones coming in the Holiday Mini Catalogue this September! {sshhhhh..})


AAAck! I can't believe it, I just dropped my laptop!! It literally slid right off my lap onto the floor and I could not stop it! Thank goodness it's still sort of working...in case you haven't guessed yet I am a bit of a klutz! Do you think Fisher Price is likely to start making electronics??


Ok back to the cards! I'm using 4 of the new in-colours: Rich Razzleberry, Mellon Mambo, Bermuda Bay and Soft Suede oh, make that 5 there is a teeny tiny bit of Crushed Curry on the bird. Thanks to SU!'s offering in-colour markers this year, I was able to colour directly on the stamp to get a multicoloured image. I really did not know how to use the in-colours at first they are really rich and beautiful but, also kind of intense and intimidating. What I discovered is that the colour soft suede goes really well with any of them and sort of grounds them. I love this colour, it's a great neutral and sort of reminds me of my favorite cargo pants from high school, they went with everything!


There is a lot of distressing on this card some sponging and some direct to paper ink application. The only other particular thing on this card worth noting is the corduroy button. Nope! they did not come out with them in Bermuda Bay, I just took a Kraft one and coloured it with my marker, super easy!! You can also smoosh the buttons directly into the ink pad, this should work with any darker colours.



These Next two cards make me want to laugh...or cry! Neither of them got out to their intended recipients thanks to my 3yo DD. I actually just found them a couple days ago behind our sofa when I was tearing the house apart in search for my lost wallet. The first card is a little girl dress I created based on Lauren Meader's onesie cards. I simply cut a straight line from the under arm to the bottom of the card then lightly rounded the bottom using my circle cutter. The pinafore was made of vellum that had been embossed with our polka dot BG stamp in white. The flower on the waistband was created using the Sizzix Bigz Daisy 2 die. This card was intended for the christening of a friends daughter. I wanted something really girly but not pink!




This card also did not make it out. It is one of the cards I created for Mother's day though it is my least favourite of them. ({sigh} the pics of the other ones got lost one of the times my camera decided to have a moment). I used the Reinker Spread, or Watercolour roses technique that I believe was shown at a SU! Regional meeting then spread like wild fire across the stamping world. The end result is so stunning that you wouldn't guess how fun and easy the technique is! Take a peak at a great tutorial here on Patty Bennett'ns Blog. The reason I am not as fond of this card as the others is that I dropped an ink pad on the card while I was making it so I was forced to change my design on the fly. The other ones don't have the lily, the leaves are placed differently and I have a die cut butterfly...hmm I will have to ask my mom to bring her card so I can take a pic to share.


Speaking of my Mom it was her birthday recently so I made this next card. I really had fun making this one, my mom is a fan of anything Mary Engelbrite (sp?) so I took that as my launching point. She also loves scotties since she had one when before I came along. The pedestal that the dog is on was from the Crazy for Cupcakes set. I was inspired by another stamper (which I can't recall at the moment) who had stamped animals from the Wild About You set on the same pedestal. The paper is the now retired Rockabilly Specialty paper, boy I wish I had gotten it earlier, I LOVE it!




Here's a peak at the inside:


And this framed scrapbook page was part of her gift. It did not turn out quite as I had planned but looks much better in real life than in this pic. The page is in honour of my mom's father a Québec fiddle player, who passed away this fall in his nineties. The moment I saw this violin stamp in the catalogue I knew I had to have it, but this is the first time it has seen ink! The top picture is a collage my uncle made depicting different periods in my grandpapa's life and the bottom pic is of the time my daughter met him. She loves music too so she just sat and watched him play piano awestruck.


While we are talking birthdays, I had the pleasure of doing a couple of stamping projects with my little cousin's friends at her 15th b-day party. She wanted one project to be a box that she could put her guests favours in. I decided to do a purse theme since this cousin is a real pink loving girly-girl. And so here is the purse/box in Mellon Mambo and Bermuda Bay. I adapted a template that I found on this blog. She has tons of fabulous paper purse designs it's definitely worth a look!




For the card I was inspired by the many punch art purse cards out there and the colours in the Sweet Always DSP (retired now). The girls enjoyed putting together the little purses and got really creative making their own designs. One girl added scraps of the Mellon Mambo paper from the big purse to accent her little purses and it looked fabulous!


One more Birthday card then have to go to bed! I was soooooo happy to see this stamp set, Lots of Bots, in the new catalogue. The men in my family tend to be more geeky-techie rather than sporty athletic so I know I will get a lot of use out of this set. (not to mention that my daughter loves robots since watching the film Wall-E). So this was the card I made for my cousin who is turning 17. It's not at all what I had planned on but, when I mounted my new Gallery set which I earned free last month (I love being a demo!) I had to play with it and this is what was born! I used a few recently retired colours and DSP to make the card but, I am totally addicted to kiwi kiss and how it looks with pacific point....I don't know how I'm going to give it up!! The little embellishment on the greeting was made with coated telephone wire that I got years ago from a great little recycling shop in town. It's fun stuff if you can get your hands on it and comes in every colour combo imaginable!




Well that was an über long post, apparently I felt babbly after my long absence! Well no technical glitches so far tonight (cross fingers, knock on wood and all that stuff!) so hopefully, that mean y'all will get to read this! Hope you enjoyed, more to come as always!!


Happy Stampin'!