It's a Stamp Something Friday...

...and today is dedicated to Friends. Create something for a friend, make a card, scrap a page about you and a friend, create a little gift, just Stamp Something! This week is my second week as a guest designer for the site. I have been asked to help my neighbor and good friend create some easy, fun, and cute center pieces for the tables at a dinner she is helping organize. I saw these adorable vases on the tables at the SCS dinner during Convention, so I recreated them and figured out how to make them. I will give this to my friend to show her what they will look like (although her's will have a different color scheme for the dinner) and just because she really is a wonderful friend! These really are easy to make with 1 sheet of 8 1/2x11 cs, some score lines, and the photo corner punch to create the diamonds. The paper flowers were made with various scallop and circle punches as well as some dies for the Big Shot. I used some grilling skewers for the flower picks and attached the flowers with a pop-up glue dots. The vase was stamped with the polka dot background stamp and finished off with some Autumn Vine dsp and stitched choc. chip grosgrain ribbon. The sentiment on the tag is from Season of Friendship. I just inked up two of the words at a time with a marker to change the shape to fit the circle punch. Here's a close up of that. To help stabilize the vase, make sure you add some little rocks or something to help weigh it down so it doesn't fall over easily. I think I need to make one of these for myself, it sure looks cute sitting on my counter. Take time today to do something special for a friend!

ETA: You know how much I love Unity Stamps?! Well, I'm especially excited about the prize for this week's challenge because it is Unity Stamps! Angela is sooo generous! Thanks for offereing up this awesome prize, Angela! If you want to try and win some of these super cool stamps, make sure you play and link your creation to the Stamp Something site.

Hugs,

Thankful sketch card

I spent yesterday finishing up a project I can share with you tomorrow. I was able to squeeze in the sketch challenge over on SCS. Go check it out, it is a wonderful rectangle layout. Can you believe it is the 197th sketch challenge over there? WOW! It amazes me that they keep coming up with new ideas.

The picture is horrible here, it was so dark and dreary at 3pm yesterday that this just doesn't show you the true beauty of this card. The base is more mustard and then I lined it with the Haiku paper (I just love those mums). The stamp I used is Thoroughly Thankful and let me say I am very thankful this set made the catty. I bought it last year while it was on sale and really only used it once! I am really liking it and love to color in the images. I stamped them on watercolor paper and used my aqua painter to color the images with re-inkers (well, I really just depress the lid of the ink pad and use that as my pallet-works great for me and now mess to clean up). I mounted the images and sentiment onto Old Olive cs and them popped those layers up on dimensionals over a piece of textured Tangerine Tango cs. The ribbon and brads are both in More Mustard. It makes for a nice fall card. I think this one will go to Ryan's preschool teacher to tell her Thanks for all she has done. I know, it seems early in the year to be thanking a teacher, but she actually has been struggling with whether to leave the classroom to home school her own children. She made her decision and her last day is next Friday. I know she is sad about leaving. It is one of those bitter sweet moments. Hugs,

The End of them...

These are the last of my WCMD challenge cards. I didn't win the Unity prize, but that's okay, it was just the incentive I needed to jump in and do all seven challenges. This first one was the Limited Supplies challenge-No P's please. We couldn't use designer paper or pastels! No pattern paper was definitely a challenge for me, especially when told not to use it, it made me want to use it more. I decided to make my own. I used the funky, Hullabaloo stamp. Inked it up in white and stamped it on Kraft cs. I also kept it simple with just the two colors, tied it up with some Riding Hood Taffeta ribbon and added a choc. chip felt flower. The last challenge card I have for you turned out to be my favorite for the fact that I really tried something new. It was the technique challenge and we had to create our own layered flowers. If you use different sized circles and layer the on top of each other, ruff up their edges and hold them together with a button or brad you can make some pretty cool flowers as an accent for your card. I really wanted to try one of those ribbon flowers like we did at Convention. So I did. I actually made three of them and used them as a layer on my flowers. I really struggled with the stitching at Convention when we did these, but this weekend I was able to make them rather quickly. Yeah, me! This is a big, bulky card, one I would never mail ( at least not without special packaging) but someone someday is going to get this beautiful, card for their Birthday! Happy Wednesday! Hugs,

Some more of WCMD!

I finished all seven challenges over on SCS for World Card Making Day. The other day I showed you a couple of the cards I did. Here are two more of the ones I finished up on Sunday. This is the color combo challenge card. Lemon Lime twist was the name for the challenge. We needed to use a a lime green, a yellowish-orange, black, dark gray and vanilla. It sounded a bit weird to me at first, the lime green was really scaring me (I am not a big fan of the bright colors, green galore makes me cringe). Then I remembered a little tip, if you don't like the color, use it sparingly. That's what I did and actually REALLY like this card (plus I got to use a retired favorite, marigold morning). The Ways to Use it challenge was called, Tree-mendous and required the use of a tree stamp or anything to do with a tree. I used this beautiful tree image from Unity (Growing in Unity). I must have been on a square card kick, because most of the cards I did on Saturday were a 4 1/4 square. I paired this up with some of the Autumn Vine dsp and my rectangle nestabilites for the scallops. Rectangles you ask, those are squares. Well, if you cut out two of the same size rectangles and overlap them on each other, lining up the scallops you can create squares (probably wasn't the best explanation of that, but I tried). That was one reason I ordered the rectangles first, because I could get some more mileage out of them. The ribbon is white taffeta dyed sage shadow.
I do have two more cards to share with you from WCMD, but I'll stretch it out one more day since I haven't really stamped much since then. As always, thanks for stopping by! Hugs,

Frankie and Spiders

I made myself get into the Halloween spirit this weekend. I feel like I already missed the Holiday since I have been seeing Halloween stuff posted on most blogs for weeks now. I know we have to think ahead in this business, but I have a hard time "getting into the spirit" if it is just too early. Now that we are a week into October and the air is starting to feel cool (well it was last week, today we are supposed to be 80!) I'm starting to feel Halloween. This first card is something you have probably seen now, multiple times all over the stamping world. I sure wish I knew who came up with the original idea, I just adore him. He is created with the Top Note bigz die for the Big Shot and lots of SU punches. I mounted him on a full sized card of black cs, lined with tangerine tango. I used the sanded background and distressed the edges with the cutter kit (still one of my favorite tools). I kept the sentiment simple with two words from Everyday Flexible Phrases (had to go diggin' for this set, it had been awhile). The next two cards feature my newest, Unity stamp that I won for FREE on a Hip Hop Thursday two weeks ago. It is the Distressed Spidey Dance. I stamped it three times on this card and pieced it together to make the journaling brackets a little wider. This fits the Limelight sketch from last Friday. I pulled out my one and only Halloween set, Booglie Eyes (retired, SU) and colored and cut out Frankie. OH, yeah, the ribbon is from Limelight and I won that a few weeks back for playing along with their sketch challenge. How cool is that?! Here is the other card using the Distressed Spidey Dance from unity and it shows the complete image. I added the words using my Simple Serif mini alpha and Everyday Flexible phrases again. This was the second card I did with the WCMD sketch challenge by AJ on Saturday. This time I used the ribbons for the three strips. If you haven't jumped into any Halloween projects, now's the time! Have fun with this fun color combo-kiwi, pumpkin/tangerine, purple and black! Happy Monday! Hugs,

I was busy stamping yesterday

Lucky me! the day turned out in my favor. Tim napped (he's working nights this weekend) while the baby napped, the boys were playing outside, no afternoon soccer games, and after Nicholas woke up the girls next door played with him for almost two hours (they were great little mommy helpers). I was able to stamp, stamp, and stamp. I'm on a mission to finish all 7 challenges over on SCS. If you have them uploaded by Monday evening they qualify for some prizes AND the wonderfully, generous, Angela at Unity is offering up a prize to one lucky winner that uses all Unity stamps for all 7 challenges. Couldn't pass that up...Here's what I've done so far. This is one for the featured stamper challenge.

This was for the sketch challenge that AJ posted. It was such a fun sketch. I also did a Halloween card and used ribbon for the three strips on the left. But I'm saving that for another day.

And this was for the Inspiration challenge. Our inspiration piece was the cover of the Coldwater Creek catalog. That's all I have time for right now, off to church. Hugs, Lisa

Let's Celebrate!

Happy World Card Making Day! How cool is it, that we have a Holiday to celebrate this wonderful craft we all do! I'll upload some eye-candy a little later (we have an early soccer game today) so for now I'll just link a few of my favorite sites that are doing something for this special day.
SCS-there a challenges and giveaways all day long check it out.

Unity Stamp Co.-check out their blog and the member company forum on SCS

Limelight Papercrafts-follow this link to see all the details

Anywhere you go today, you'll find tons of fun and lots of sharing. Get involved and if nothing more, then I challenge you to just take some time to stamp. Make a card, feel good, and send it out to someone. There is nothing better than paying it forward!