Deck the Card

Hey friends!  It's SUPER icy on the roads this morning, so school is canceled... can I get a "Woot, woot!?"

It's Thursday, which means I've got a card for today's challenge at 365 Cards.  All you have to do is create a detachable ornament for your card.  It doesn't necessarily have to be a Christmas ornament.  This was such a great idea and a lot of fun to make!  Here's what I did...

The ornament was pretty easy to make.  I Googled images of "paper ornaments" and got a lot of great ideas.  I found this blog with some absolutely GORGEOUS examples.  My ornament came together mostly by trial and error, since I didn't follow instructions. Hehe.  But I like how it turned out.  I used super fine gold glitter on the edges for a little sparkle.  It looks so pretty, but unfortunately I will also be sparkling for weeks to come.  My sister stopped to talk to me for, like, two seconds and even she had glitter on her. Lol. And so continues my love-hate relationship with glitter.

I used my "Accent Essentials" CC for the frame, and the "Home Decor" cartridge for the center of the ornament.  Sparkly ribbon, silver button, sticky pearl and "Voila!"

The trickiest part of this card was deciding how to attach the ornament so that it could be removed later.  I ended up just using some gold thread and tacking the bow to the top of the card.  Seems to work just fine.  To gift this, I'd probably have to figure out a way to stick the actual ornament down.  I thought some kind of re-positionable glue dot would work... I just don't have any.

I really hope you give this a try!! Since I've got plenty of unscheduled time today, I'm thinking I might have to make some more of these ;-)  Thanks for stopping by!

Ad Inspired

Happy Thursday!  Thursday used to be my least favorite day of the week... now I think it's turning into my favorite.  It's the only day where I don't have anything major to do.  I don't really have anything on Mondays either, but it's the beginning of the work week, so it's tainted.

ALSO, it being Thursday means that I need to tell y'all about the challenge for today at 365 Cards!  I really enjoy ad-inspired challenges, and that's exactly what I've got for you today...

Here's our inspiration piece from Pier1:

And here's my take on it:

When I saw this ad I knew exactly what paper I was going to use.  I've had this last little piece of embossed paper by K&Company forever.  It's so pretty and now I finally knew what to do with it.  The only problem was that it was an off-white color and I needed gold.  Thankfully, I've got some metallic acrylic paints.  I just used a little bit of paint on a dry brush to cover the paper.  It took a few coats, but I didn't want to get it too soggy and mess up the embossing.  If you're able to see the large version of the photo, you can kind of see the brush strokes which gives it a little bit of an antique-y look.

Can't wait to see what you all come up with!!  Thanks for stopping by :-)

Yay, yay, yay!

Okay guys, I've got a super fun announcement for you today! :-D

Today I get to reveal my card for my first week as member of the 365 Cards design team!! YAY! Lol... I'm kind of excited. Can you tell?  I love playing along with these ladies and getting so many ideas and inspiration from everyone who joins in.  I don't know how Pam manages to come up with a new challenge for every day of the year, but she does. And it's awesome.  And I'm so honored to be a part of it :-)

SO, without anymore rambling from me...

This is "card recipe" week, so today's ingredients are:

5x5 Card

2 3x3 Patterned Papers

Sentiment

1 Image (stamped, fussy cut, digi, whatever)

2 Buttons

Since everyone's starting to get into that "back-to-school" mode,  I chose this super cute digi stamp from Meljen's Designs.  I colored the image in Photoshop before printing.  Normally I enjoy coloring by hand but, on this occasion, my coloring was particularly atrocious. Haha.

Well, thanks for stopping by!  Can't wait to see what you come up with :-)

You Got Me Flying

Hi there, friends!  I sure hope you all have had a wonderful week.  This past week has been pretty rainy, but it took a break on Thursday night so I could go see The Sound of Music at the Muny with my sisters.  Only two more shows left! This summer has gone by so fast.

It's Monday-- and you know what that means!  (Right?) There's a new challenge over at Scrap It With a Song, and our song for this week is "This Kiss" by Faith Hill.  There are some great lyrics to work with.  Make sure you go check out the projects from the rest of the DT, too!  Here's what I did:

Obviously, this is a love song, but I have so many love-themed cards already and I just don't use them.  So this time I wanted to do something a little different.  The kite and the front cloud are on foam squares to add a little dimension.  I scored the lines on the kite, but they're a little hard to see in the photo.  The kite string is a piece of hemp cord, with some white satin ribbon tied on the tail.

Whaddya think?  If you've got an idea, come sing along with us at Scrap It With a Song!  Our sponsor for this week is...

The winner of this week's challenge will get a $20 gift certificate to the store! Click on the logo above to do some pre-shopping :-)

Cookin' Up Some Punny Stuff

*If you're looking for my card for 365 Cards, it's down toward the bottom!*

Hey there blogger-friends!  It's been a while since I've done a regular ol' "hey, look at this!" post.  This summer has been shaping up to be a pretty fun one so far.  I had a couple of goals that I made for myself, and I'm well on my way to meeting those!  The first one was to make cards to send in to Operation Write Home.  I picked up a medium-sized box at the post office the other day to see how close I was to actually filling it-- and I'm about half way there!

Oh, and speaking of cards (ummm... duh, what else would we be speaking about on here?), I added a couple of links over there on the sidebar.  Take a second and check out Susie's blog, where I was a featured stamper.  She has some great stuff to share! ---->>

My other goal was to see every show at the Muny this season.  Three down, four to go.  I've seen Beauty and the Beast, Titanic: The Musical and Damn Yankees.  I don't know if there's any other place like the Muny, but it's definitely one of my favorite attractions during the summer.  Because it's an outdoor theater (and because St. Louis weather is kind of ridiculous) it's a bit of a hit-or-miss situation with the rain.  This is the first year that I've gone and a show actually got rained out.  My whole family went to see Titanic a couple of weeks ago. They were predicting storms for that particular night, but we decided to go anyway, in hopes that any rain would be over with before the show was supposed to start.  Besides, we always do the free seats, so it's not like we were gonna lose money on tickets or anything.  No such luck.  It rained from the time we arrived until well into the evening when they finally canceled the show at 9:30.  Oh well :-) We had fun anyway-- This was our view from the free seats:

I ended up going a few nights later with a friend.
She had tickets.
They were really close.
It was awesome.
"Cats" is showing this week... I've never seen the show before, so I'm looking forward to it.

SO... finally, I've got a card to share with you.  This one is for today's challenge over at 365 Cards.  The challenge is to create a card with something related to the cooking of food. Well, it just so happens that I recently picked up some super cute stickers at Archivers for exactly this purpose.  I was fishing through the "hot spot" corner and I said to myself, "There's always some kind of food-related challenge and I never have anything for it... I'll buy these."  And whaddya know! Hehe.

HAHA.  I love puns. When I started making this, my original idea was that it could be used as a belated birthday card.  But it kinda works as any kind of apology card.

Also, I made this card LAST week, but never got around to posting it to the challenge...

This one was for 365 Cards' "Imagine This: Chalkboard" challenge.  It's almost back-to-school time!  I'll be back at work in almost exactly one month. *sigh* It's gonna go so fast.

Hope y'all are having a fabulous week!! Thanks for stopping by :-)

HA!! I did it! (Part One)

At the risk of driving all of you completely bonkers, I've been playing catch up with the challenges at 365 Cards and not posting them as I go... So I have SIX cards sitting here, waiting to be revealed.  Sheesh.  I think I'm gonna split this up into two posts to make it easier.  SO, here's the first few...

Day 96, Color Scheme

Green, Pink, Purple, Yellow and Orange

I had a really hard time getting started with this one.  It's not my favorite, but the cupcake turned out kind of cute.

Day 97, Supersize It

Card dimensions = 8.5" x 5.5"

The reason I chose this sentiment is because I can't think of why you would need a gigantic card like this unless there were gonna be a whole bunch of people writing in it. Lol. But this is coming from a girl to like to keep things short and sweet. I know a couple people who could probably fill this whole thing up in no time ;-)

Day 98, Super Sketchy Sunday

Click the link to see the sketch!

This one is a little bit out of my usual style, I think.  But I really like how it turned out.  The green and gold color scheme is kind of neat.  It looks more sparkly in person :-)

Thanks for taking a look! If you wanna go straight to part two, CLICK HERE.

Wackiness

Today is "Wacky Color Wednesday" and Day 10 at 365 Cards. The color combo is orange, purple and blue. It sounds a little crazy, but I decided to go for a sort of simple, "chunky" look and I think it turned out rather nice. I even pulled out the sewing machine again... it was a bear getting it to stitch evenly around that curve!


Well, hopefully I'll have another post up tonight... I got the new "Forever Young" Cricut cartridge (the flower on this card is from this one) and I'm itching to try it out some more! Thanks for looking :-)

2-in-1

Hey folks. How's it goin'? It feels a lot later than it really is... I was sure it was closer to 12:45, maybe even 1am. No clock in the craft area. *shrugs*

Anywho, I decided to get one more card in today. It combines two challenges that I've been contemplating over the last couple of days. The first is the Asian-themed challenge at The Corrosive Challenge blog. The second is EBTKS Challenge 10 which is to use fabric. I've had scraps of this gorgeous brocade fabric in my stash for a few years. I had started making a top with it, but something went askew and I never was able to quite figure out what I did wrong. Oh well. I probably like it on the card better than I'd like it on me. Haha. I used gold embossing powder on what I hope is the Chinese character for "love." I wouldn't know if I was wrong. lol. I'm gonna trust Google... this time. :-)

Enjoy! Thanks for looking.