This is the card design that my friend Maggi brought as a shoe box project. She was so organized! She had envelopes filled with color coordinated DSP (all sorted by color families of course).
She let us pick the color family we wanted to create with and then walked us step-by-step on how to lay out the DSP and get the basic design. I chose a teal color family just because I don’t work with that color much.
I left my cards CAS (clean and simple), and when I go to mail them out to a friend, I can add a stamped sentiment then if I want too. But they look just fine with out any stamping at all. (gasp!) Did I say that?
No ribbon, no bells, no whistles, just DSP and some punched flowers from the Wedding section from Michael’s Craft Store. I am gonna have to get me some of them!! The flower centers are some of my homemade dew drops in pearl colored hot glue.
Early last week I was making plans with my stamping buddy Maggi to get together for some play time. As I was emailing her, a co-worker dropped by my desk (at work) to say good night for the day. I casually mentioned that I was planning a craft night and would she like to come. To my surprise, she said yes. Not only did she show up, but she brought dessert too. Am I training her right or what??
This is a photo of last Wednesday night. After I finished work I raced home to set up my table for a craft night. Here you see Maggi and Ashley hard at work in my basement craft area.
We made a total of 9 cards. 3 with similar layouts that were designed by Maggi. And 3 other cards that we made 2 of each of. I’ll be showing them all off to all this week. I will tell you who inspired them and give my thanks as well because I only had one evening to prepare, so I needed CASED ideas, and fast. So stop back to see the craft fun.
Didn’t my husband and son do a wonderful job of decorating and finishing? And a side note here…
My whole family helped me to prepared for my stamping friends to come over that night. Here’s the quick story:
My husband was quite happy that I was getting together with stamping friends. I had told him that I hadn’t crafted since I started back to work full time (I started on 1-4-10) and that I was really looking forward to it. Of course it snowed the day before the ladies were supposed to arrive. This is a tremendous problem for me as I live on a hill and once it snows, it packs down and turns to ice making it hazardous for anyone to try to drive up the driveway. My son fixed the snow blower on Tuesday during the day and plowed before I got home so that I could easily get up the drive. But I was still worried I would have to cancel if the sun didn’t shine during the day Wednesday to melt the ice.
My husband came home for a lunch time and salted the driveway during the day just to make sure my friends could come over. My son helped out again…I also found out later that what ever the salt didn’t get off, he spent 1 1/2 hours scrapping it off manually just before I came home from work and before the ladies arrived.
I don’t give the men in my family enough credit; and when I do they think I’m “laying it on.” Let me say it for the record…they both take very good care of me!
I originally made this flower to go with the two mini ones that I made and showed on yesterday’s card. I didn’t think they looked all that nice on the same card so I saved the big flower and used it today. (Directions for flower below).
I used a $1 stamp from Michael’s Craft Store; my Scor-Pal for the embossed lines; an office brad that has been colored and embossed with clear embossing powder and some crystal effects on the heart.
Crochet flower instructions:
Metal crochet hook #3 and size 5 crochet thread.
Chain 5; slip stitch to form round.
Through center ring; single crochet; chain 5. Repeat until you have a total of 5 loops.
Slip stitch to base of 1st loop.
Slip stitch around 1st loop; **single crochet; chain 2.
Again, around 1st loop; double crochet. (Repeat until you have 7 DC and the 1st ch 2 (total of 8)**.
slip stitch in 2nd loop. Repeat ** in each of the remaining loops; slip stitch to end and fasten off.
Very clean and simple.
Normally I would have centered the flower and just stamped the words under the main image but I decided to leave lots of white space.
The words happy “heart” day is a $1 stamp I got from Michael’s Craft Store last week and the the flower stems are stamped in Mellow Moss and are by Stampin’ Up from the set Water Color Garden II.
I left the center of the flowers different on purpose so I could have the two flowers look a little different from the other. I colored the plain gold office brad with a pink sharpie marker, dipped it into clear embossing powder and embossed. The flower on the left has 2 coats and I left it rumpled looking; the flower on the right has 4 coats and I heated until smooth.
In addition to the heat embossing, I also added crystal lacquer on the heart to give it a glossy look, which happily also matched the shinny brads.
Crochet flower instructions:
Metal crochet hook #3 and size 10 crochet thread.
Chain 5; slip stitch to form round.
Through center ring; single crochet; chain 5. Repeat until you have a total of 5 loops.
Slip stitch and end. Weave loose thread into back of flower.
Here we are at February 1st…can Valentine’s Day be far behind?
I write to a few ladies regularly and I’m going to need some Valentine’s Day cards. I decided to use some thread crochet flowers that I had made over the weekend.
The stamp set is old and retired by Stampin’ Up called Country Vine. I stamped it in Mellow Moss and then added Barely Banana stamped flowers. I found some heart brads in my stash drawer and used those for the flower centers and to hold the thread crochet flower down on the card.
Here are the directions for the flowers I made. I’m not really a crocheter and I made this up as I went….so be sure to cut me a break if you are experienced in crochet.
Metal crochet hook #3 and size 10 crochet thread.
Chain 5; slip stitch to form round.
Through center ring; single crochet; chain 5. Repeat until you have a total of 5 loops.
Slip stitch and end. Weave loose thread into back of flower.
A couple of months ago I took some acrylic stamps, watercolor markers and watercolor paper with me to the cottage. It turned out really good that I brought something along as it was a rainy weekend and I got to practice with these Art Impressions made for water coloring acrylic stamps. (click here to see the set I used to create the card below.)
I’ve had about half a dozen practice pieces that I had worked on and then never mounted. I put them in my “inspiration box” to be thought about later. This box has lots of different things in it….one stroke painting practice pieces, assorted cut up pieces of DSP that was left over from other projects, extra stamped images, ribbons…and well s-t-u-f-f too important to be discarded.
I pulled out card stock from a challenge package I was given and created the base and mats for this card. The DSP is from The Slab III and if you look at the punched gate (Martha Stewart) you can see a scrap of Basic Gray DSP too.
Can you see where I used my Scor-Pal and added some embossed lines? Probably not, but they are there just for effect. In case I forget to mention it…the fancy stamped corner is from one of Tim Holtz’ collections.
Thinking that the card needed sprucing up after assembling, I added the brown vellum butterfly’s. (Martha Stewart punch) This is the larger butterfly and you can see I stacked the small on top of the large one, added one stitch using DMC metallic gold floss and then cut a minuscule piece of 3-d mounting tape to apply it to the card. The gold floss was slippery and the knot looked like it was coming apart, so I added a dot of crystal effects to hold it together.
This word, stamped on DSP and die cut using a Sizzix tag die is from a stamping friend who sent me a whole baily-wack of TAC (The Angel Company) words for my Christmas present. It may be years before I am able to really use all of them, but won’t it be fun!
Are you interested in seeing a couple of other samples I’ve already mounted?
Sometime ago I played with making Sculptured Paper. (See directions here.) I still had a remnant of it left and held it up to some dusty colored purple card stock to see what it would like like.
I used just one stamp (by JustRite Stamper) along with pink DSP and came up with this:
I’ve been trying to make loopy bows and am having marginal success. On this bow I used a standard office brad to hold the whole thing together. I used a plumb colored sharpie marker to color the brad so it matched the color scheme. I just held the looped ribbons in my hand and put the brad prongs around the center of the ribbon, then punched a hole in the card stock where I wanted it. So basically, only the brad is holding the bow and the bow to the card. The “dots” you can see in the background are something called rain dots. I was thinking I should have gone with crystal gems, but I’ve been over-doing those lol!
Would you like to see another sample using the Sculptured Paper?
Weeds with sculptured paper
and don’t forget to look at the Haiku Bunny sample at the end of the tutorial on how I made the Sculptured Paper…I love how that one turned out!
I continually am looking through my stash for some manly themed cards. I need them on a regular basis as I have a son that lives across county. A card a month brings a little of home to him. But it is really hard to make cards that are well, not girly. He did tell me it wouldn’t matter what kind of card I sent as he used to help critique my work and liked seeing all the things I made. (I miss my color coach lol!) However I still strive to get more manly styles to him.
Here are two I came up with last night.
I used two stamps; the camping scene is by Inkadinkado and the word escape by Scrappy Cat. I added some score pal lines and raised up the image on 3-d mounting tape. The leaves are by Sizzix. The main image is stamped onto butter cream card stock with Chocolate ink, the edges shaded with vintage photo. The word is stamped in mellow moss.
I’m not too sure about the leaves…do they make it girly?
This is not a Joy fold card. The main image hangs off the front flap and overhangs in mid-air. The right half that you see is the inside of the card. On this version I used DSP and drywall tape that had been inked with chocolate. Why didn’t someone tell me the ink doesn’t really dry on drywall tape? I have mesh prints all over my hands. The main image is stamped in versa mark ink then chalked with various colors; then oversprayed with pearl-x. This seals the chalk and also has the advantage of giving a specklie golden splatter that doesn’t show in the photo.
I am having paper crafter’s withdrawl. But for a good reason. After 14 months I finally got a job. Yahoo! Crafting money is on the horizion at last lol!
I took a few minutes last night to craft up this gift card pop up box that I saw in the Scrap-n-Stamp February 2010 issue. (HERE IS THE LINK TO THE MAGAZINE) Because I made it for a man, I left off the extra do-dads and pop-ups that were designed into the original box.
I used card stock, DSP and 2 stamps. This is the closed view.
Once opened, the sides flop down flat and the gift card holder is standing up-right in the middle of the box. I threw the cover of the box down in front of it so you could see how easy it was to make, as well as the box itself. This can certainly be made any size, depending on the size of the gift card you have to give away.
Man-o-man, have I ever missed crafting lol!
CAS (clean & simple) with a crocheted flower
What can 2 stamps, ink, a punch and a crocheted flower get cha? A really pretty CAS card that’s what! After seeing Susan’s card HERE, I thought I’d see what I could come up with using what I have on hand. Nope I don’t have a nice plain white button, or really narrow twine. But I do have a flourish…here’s where I went with her idea.
The flourish is just one stamp. On the left side you see the top part of the stamp and then on the right I flipped the image over and stamped the base of the flourish. Flourish by Inkadinkado.
The words are a $1 stamp from Michael’s Craft Store by Kolette Hall.
I used my Scor-Pal to emboss some horizontal lines and then added a scrap piece of gold crochet floss . The punch is by Martha Stewart.
Need instructions for the crocheted flower? HERE are the directions that my daughter made up for me.
Here is another variation on the theme.
Still couldn’t find any buttons even after searching. But I did find some DSP. This image is from a sheet that is something akin to postage stamps. I just cut off an image, matted it and used 3-d mounting tape to pop it up.
I also changed out the punched boarder, still kept the Scor-Pal embossed lines but switched out the gold embroidery thread and instead used my Scor-bug to add punched holes.
