BOiNG!

Good morning, Blogger peeps :-)
I'm super excited about the cards that I get to share with you today because I think they turned out so flippin' cute!  The challenge for Day 249 at 365 Cards is to create a coil pop-up card.  For those of you who have seen this before, it's waaaay easier than it looks.  If you don't know what I'm talking about, take a look...

This is actually the second card I made, but you can see the coils easier, so I'll show you that one first:

To make the coil, all you do is start with a circle and cut it into a spiral from the outside, almost all the way to the center.  For me, the trickiest part was figuring out how big of a circle to start with and then how wide to cut the coil.  On both cards I used a 2-inch circle for the main coil.  The smaller coil on the butterfly card was made from a 1.5-inch circle.  I found that somewhere between 1/8th and 1/4th of an inch works for the width.  Too much bigger and it's not as "springy".  Too much smaller and it doesn't hold anything.

For the next card I used acetate for the coil.  I think it looks kind of cool with the leaves.  Also, I really hate when I use acetate and I can see the glue, so I usually try to cover it up.  In this case, I cut mirrored versions of the die cuts and sandwiched the coil between them.

 

I'll also mention this: In order for the card to lay flat, the coil has to line up.  To make sure mine was lined up, I glued one end on the bottom of the card, then let the coil lay flat.  Then I put glue on the end that would be attached to the top and closed the card.  When I opened it, the top end was positioned right where it needed to be.  (Hope that makes sense... :-P)

Okay, well, I think that's enough blah-blah-blah from me!  I'm telling you-- this was SO much fun.  Go give it a try and then link it up RIGHT HERE!

Color and Dimension... and Mice in the Jam

Hello Blogger-friends!  Happy Thursday, once again.  We've survived another week!  For my friends here in the States, I hope you all had a lovely Labor Day weekend.  We had some awesome weather here.  My sisters and I lit up a bonfire in the backyard and had a couple of friends over.  It was so much fun :-) And since no one had to be at school or work the next morning, we were outside until about 3 a.m.   We even ran out of firewood!  But that didn't stop us.  Earlier that afternoon, we'd seen a stack of wood on the curb a few blocks away.  So a quick trip around 1 a.m. solved that problem. Lol.

Today I've got a card to show you for the challenge over at 365 Cards.  Click on the link to view the details!

I love coloring with markers.  Especially new markers ;-)  The ones I use on my cards, most of the time, are a set of Prismacolor permanent markers that my dad used a bajillion years ago.  They sat up in a closet for the longest time and then, a couple of years ago, I adopted them.

Another thing I did on this card was use foam squares.  I never used to do a lot of layered or dimensional stuff when I first started making cards.  But recently I find myself using them on EVERYTHING. Haha.  My only problem is that sometimes even the 1/8" squares are a little too thick for my taste.  So in some cases (like today's card) I'll split each square into two layers.  You get more "pop" for your money and the card still fits in the envelope! *clapping*

Okay peeps, I've gotta get to sleep now (cuz it's still Wednesday night as I'm typing this)!!  See y'all soon... I'm shooting for at least one more post this week!

Keep It To Yourself

The challenge for today at 365 Cards was to design a "congratulatory card that uses decorations on the outside of the card to help convey the message on the inside of the card."

So here's mine:



I think it's pretty obvious that I'll be congratulating someone on their new tractor...

Ha. Just kidding. Sarcastic am I.

Also, just for grins, here's a Christmas card I made a couple days ago... Turns out pastels don't photograph very well ;-) But thanks for looking!

Stars and Flowers

It's been another late night (or is it early morning??), but I whipped up a couple of cards that I think look pretty good ;-)

My first card is for 2 Sketches 4 You. I LOVE how the flowers turned out. I ran across this tutorial and loosely followed it to make these blooms from paper punches.


The flowers are attached with foam squares to lift them off the card for just a little extra "pop."

My second card is for the daily challenge at 365 Cards as well as this week's Color Throwdown challenge.


These colors were fun to work with! The challenge at 365 Cards was to make stars the dominant shape on the card... I used 8. I think that should work. Lol.

What day is this?

Oh, yeah. Monday. And it's been a loooong one. I made a couple of cards today for the challenges at 365 Cards. I had a hard time getting the creative juices flowing, but here's what I finally squeaked out...

For Day 162's Sketch Challenge, a VERY simple card. I pulled out the glitter for this one. I haven't used glitter in quite a while, and it didn't take me very long to remember why. I am sparklier than Edward Cullen and so is my table, the carpet and everything else in a five-foot radius. lol.


The color on these photos is a little off today... weird.

This next one is for Day 163's masking challenge. I love doing this! It always looks like such a mess of paper and ink until you pull off all the masks and then... VOILA! I used chalks to color the dress and rose.

Birthday Boy

Ah! I was gonna sit down and post something this weekend, but boy oh boy! It got busy fast. I didn't get around to doing any blog challenges this past week, but I'll show you what I did work on. My little cousin "Eef" turned 8 years old this past Thursday. We celebrated on Friday night with all the family. He's quite the little character and I know he'll do great things one day-- I fully expect him to be one of two things: 1) NFL Quarterback or 2)Late night comedic talk show host. Although, recently he's expressed and interest in becoming my mom's "clown assistant." Oi.

Here's the card I made for him:


It's not very complicated, but I had fun distressing the edges with a nail file. This cardstock has a great texture, but it has a white core so it always looks a little funny to me with a clean edge. I adhered the "8" with foam tape to make it pop a little bit.

My mom usually does the honors as far as writing in the cards, but this time she asked me what she should write. She jokingly started with "Roses are red..." and then I, JOKINGLY, finished with "Gas makes you farty/You're turning 8/So let's have a party." Would you believe she actually put that in there!!??!! LOL. And now you've got a little taste of my goofy family.

Rockin' Out

AAHHH!!! I'm so excited! This card turned out pretty much just like I wanted it too (which is SO rare. lol).

This project is for Caardvark's shaped card challenge. The first thing I did was find a picture of a guitar (thank you, Google), then I used Illustrator to create a line drawing of it. Next, I used carbon paper to trace the shapes onto the cardstock, then I stuck it all together. Ta-da! It was actually a lot easier than I thought it was gonna be.


Okay, so the white part on the body of the guitar (it probably has a name, but I don't know what it is) is cut from a piece of glossy photo paper. I wanted it to have a little bit of a shine so that it would look different from the white pick-ups and knobs. The little... uh... thingamabobidders at the bottom and the pegs are cut from a little piece of super shiny silver cardstock that I had in my scraps.
































I didn't want to add any crazy stuff to the front of the card because I thought it looked cool as-is, so I added a pop-up sentiment to the inside. The epoxy stickers were a dollar store find. I stuck those to the acetate oval. The tricky part was mounting the acetate with the foam tape. Luckily, the "r" and "k" stickers were square-ish and you couldn't see through them. For some extra color, I put the blue star behind it.

Anywho, thanks so much for looking!

Pop-up Card

Today's challenge from 365 Cards is to create a pop-up card. This is one of those projects that pushes me a little bit. I don't usually do pop-up stuff. I'm not really big into dimensional projects... I like them, I just don't make them. Anyway, I kept this pretty simple. The front of the card is just covered with patterned paper from one of "The Stack" collections that I've had for FOREVER...


I used the same paper to create the "vase" for the pop-up. The greeting is from SU's "Sincere Salutations" set. Here's a shot of the inside of the card: