A Little stitching....

....no, A LOT of stitching. My good friend, Tanya won these awesome stitching templates last Spring at a crop we were at. I was thinking about them the other day and asked her if she had ever used them. "Nope, not yet," she says, "Why? Do you want to try them." I jumped at the suggestion since I already had an idea for them in mind. I should have paid attention to who they were made by because they really are cool. Sorry, so I can't tell you were to find them. Anywhoo, I got way in over my head with this project. This first card is what I started out with. Easy, peasy, short and sweet. I love how the card turned out and I especially love the little cross-hatches on the two corners. This turned out just like I wanted it to-Love that! I got the idea for the bird on a branch from this card by the uber-talented, Becky. So, after this quick and simple card, I went on to the original idea I had for these templates-a stitched border on a scrapbook page. I love my sewing machine, well, on most days I do, but I wanted a bigger stitched look around my double page spread. There was this cool, loopey stitch that I thought would work well on my spread. It did and I love how it turned out, but OH MY WORD did it take me FOREVER to so all the stitching. Now let me remind you that I am NOT a seamstress so maybe that had something to do with it, but I am not kidding you I think it took me almost two hours to complete both pages of stitching. The things we do for the love of this craft! So here is a close up of the detail on the stitching. Now that I look at it up close, it isn't so impressive, but I love home-made feel it gives my pages. I have to give credit to the Sketch 102 class for the layout. This is one of the last ones I had left to use. Check out those letters, too. I found some Thickers and now am wondering why I waited so long to get some. They are too cool. I even got them on sale, so bonus for me! I think I carried on enough about these two projects. Thanks for listening to me ramble. Check back tomorrow for my BIG announcement. It's big to me, anyway. Have a fabulous Thursday! Hugs,

The Other Set

I ordered two sets on my Holiday Mini pre-order. The Christmas Cardinal is the other set I got. This is the set I will use on my personal Christmas cards this year. I do have to say how proud I am of myself for stepping outside my comfort zone to purchase this set. While I can appreciate the beauty of stamps with a similar style, I normally, actually have never bought a set like this. Now that I have been using this set and playing around with it, I know there will be more sets with this type of art work added to my collection. I designed my GSG swap card with this stamp set last week and I'll hold off showing you that until the due date gets closer. But here are two sneak peeks I can show you. I almost wasn't going to share this first one with you since I really don't like it all that much. It's not that I don't like it, I just wish I had used Choc. Chip ink on the bird image, instead of the red on red. The more I look at this, the more I think I am going to re-work it. I'll share the revamped version later. Plus, I {heart} this new ribbon and wanted you to see it! It is part of the new Alpine ribbon original pack (the other design of ribbon included is that fun brown felt ribbon I showed you on one of the tree cards).

This second card was something I whipped up in a few minutes yesterday. It was for the weekly challenge on the N.M.B.S. blog. The talented, Adela posted the challenge this week and she asked us to use stitching on our cards. It could be real or faux. I wanted to use my machine to sew, but it wasn't cooperating with me, so I had to pull out my paper piercer and marker. I haven't done faux stitching in a long time and aside from the texture missing I actually think it has a realistic look. What do you think? This is a square 4 1/4 inch card and I always see to use this same layout, a strip of dsp behind the main image. This time the dsp comes from the I Wish Simply Scrappin' kit. I adore how my ribbon turned out. I tell you, these tailored bows sure look fancy, but they are super easy to make. I colored the bird with re-inkers and a blender pen. Hope you are having a wonderful weekend. The weather is beautiful here! We are still holding onto summer during the days with some brisk cool air in the morning and evenings. Perfect for me! Hugs,