Welcome Gnome

I started this card several weeks ago when Lola kindly gave all the Cardologists the Gnomegrown and Garden Wheelies sets from Peachy Keen Stamps.  At the time I didn't really like the scribbled background I gave the card and I left it aside on my desk.  But this week I was inspired by the Just Add Ink challenge to Just Add Butterflies.

Lo and behold, on my desk was a lone Stampin' Up butterfly languishing from another card I did not use it on and a butterfly body left over from another project.  And they worked perfectly to put the little gnome and his wheelbarrow in perspective. 

Since I used snippets of white to stamp and cut out the flowers and the gnome head I am also linking this to the challenge at  Pixie's Crafty Workshop.  Di, the author of the Snippets Playground challenge is also the guest designer on the Less is More blog this week where the challenge is to use snippets.  Alas, I fear this card is not CAS enough for that one. Another reason not to like my scribbles filling in all the beautiful white space <sigh>.

This card will be used to "Welcome Gnome" a friend to her new home.
Thank you, friends, for stopping to visit.

Sisters Day

I have to start out by saying that I have downloaded a new web browser - that is, new to me - and it is working much better with blogging and email.  With Windows Explorer I kept getting worrisome messages when I tried to access my blog; and none of the links in my email were working.  So I am now using Firefox on my PC with none of those annoying problems.



I made this card to give to the Cardologists, Thursday.  Usually I want to wait to post a card after they get it, but I am trying to make the deadline for Muse Challenge 125 where I took inspiration from this week's muse, Anita Bowden.   Here is her lovely friendship card.



My card is turned but with the fold still at the top. I also created a strip for the sentiment by scoring above and below it.  I brought in the pastel colors (the camera really accentuates the pink I used, I think it is neon!) and also used dotted paper below the sentiment.  Believe me, now that I see the squares I added for embellishment are sliding out of kilter, I have to go straighten them out.

I am using the Vippie stamp Ladies en Vogue to represent my friends, my sisters of the heart. With all the friendship stamps available, I cheated and used the computer for the exact saying I wanted.


Now I leave you with this saying I adapt for my own: Sisters aren't always blood. Its the women in your life who want you in theirs. The ones who accept you for who you are. The ones who would do anything to see you smile, and who love you no matter what.

Happy Sister's Day!

July birthday

Hello,
I hope you are having a good weekend and are finding time to relax.  

This week the Cardologists celebrated a birthday.  You might have seen Susanne's card for our friend on her website here.

For the focal point on my card I chose two flowers from an Inkadinkado clear stamp set called Artistic Flower Creation. They were embossed with clear embossing powder and then colored with peerless watercolors. When they were dry I added a little Wink of Stella.

I really like how the flowers came out, but then I had an almost square piece and was stuck on what to do with it.  Since I waited until the night before the party to finish the card, I was a little panicky.  

Of course I needed layers because Jules likes layers almost as much as she likes purple.  I pulled out a Darice leave die and cut three pieces to glue together to offset the square.  The Stampin' Up butterfly, embellished with pearls, had the wings popped up for dimension.  The dewdrops are a joke with the Cardologists - three down and thirty thousand to go.

The final touch was the sentiment from Stampin' Up, perfectly positioned thanks to my Misti.  No challenges to enter with this one.  It was inspired totally by our friendship.  Hope you like it.

Thank you for stopping by.

Christmas in July

The Happy Little Stampers challenge this month is Christmas and Tree.  Luckily I made good on my promise to start my Christmas cards in July this year so I have a card to use for their challenge.  Okay, this is where I confess I started this card last year at a Stampin Up workshop.  Somehow it didn't look finished to me so I set it aside and just found it as I was cleaning. 

At the workshop we started with a stamp from the enduring Stampin Up Lovely As a Tree set.  We used the dryer sheet technique to make it a glittery snowy day (can you see it in the picture?) and a silver ribbon for embellishment.  To "finish" the card, I cut it down and layered the panel on green because I thought it needed to be grounded.  My friend Lola loaned me a vertical Happy Holidays; if it had been my own stamp, I would have unmounted it and used the Misti.  As it was, I used a positioner but still it was crooked.  I had to cut it off and went with this sentiment from Inkadinkado which is much easier to layer on.

Now can I start some other Christmas cards this month??
Thank you for stopping in.

Inependence Day

My belated greetings to my U.S. readers for Independence Day.  I signed in to post on my blog last week and picked up a virus. Yuck! I clicked 'yes' on a pop-up without thinking, and instantly knew that was not a good thing.  I have a good anti-virus program that stopped it from doing great damage and was able to retreat to an earlier point on my computer.  Whew. I was so discombobulated that I couldn't finish my post that night.  If that wasn't bad enough, another nasty old virus made its way into my throat so I spent most of the weekend in bed. But I am back in business now.

I made three versions of this card since I had only two 6x6 inch squares of the patterned paper.  One version that I gave to the Cardologists used a triangular piece of the patterned paper at the top with a diagonal strip of blue embossed paper.  In these two versions, I used up the scraps of the patterned paper.

The embossing folder used on the blue paper is by Darice; the sentiment is by Serendipity stamps purchased a while ago from a local store that has gone out of business:-(  Inside the card is a larger white star stamped with "Have a Star Spangled day!"  The stamp is by CC Stamps and purchased years ago at a stamp convention.

Because the nasty viruses threw me out of schedule, I missed entering these cards in the Retro Rubber challenge for the 4th of July.  Please check out the winners of that challenge now. I can enter these cards in the Pixie's Snippets Playground 184 challenge though since I used up my snippets of patterned paper on these designs.

Have a good day.