Two More Cards for the Week

Here are my last two cards for this week, two birthday cards!

 The first is a card for a friend who is celebrating her golden birthday today and having a party tonight. I wanted to include some gold on the card, so I decided to go with gold paint.  I pulled out my Adirondack acrylic paint dabber. While I was trying to get the paint to flow, the top popped off so I ended up with a big pile of paint on my scratch paper.  (How are you supposed to get the paint to flow out of those things?? I press the tip on paper over and over and nothing comes out, so then I squeeze the bottle and the top pops off!  Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!)  Since I had a pile of paint and no brush (I was upstairs in my dining room so I could hang out with my kids) I decided to spread it with my finger.  The paint got kind of blobby (totally not a word, but I'm using it anyway) around the edges of the paper, but I do like how it turned out on the dry embossed paper on the bottom.  I stamped some swirls and flowers on the center piece with ink and then rubbed the paint dabber tip in the spilled paint to "ink up" the sentiment stamp.  A couple of stickers popped up with foam adhesive and the card was done!

I used this week's Card Pattern for this card.  Sadly, this is the last one as the site owner has decided to stop.  :(  I will miss those sketches!

Finally, I have a birthday card for my father-in-law whose birthday was yesterday.  I used this week's Mojo Monday sketch.  I played again with heat embossing over dry embossing and I am really happy with how this one turned out!  For the background of my card I used a Crafter's Workshop mask, my foam blending tool and Walnut Stain Distress ink.  For the leaf, I stamped it and then poured embossing powder over only part of it to made a more distressed look.

Cards Using My Kit

With three birthdays, one anniversary and a birth, I have been busy this week making cards! I am going to share three of them tonight that used my Counterfeit Kit and some sketches.

 This first card is a birthday card for my grandma whose birthday is today. I used the card sketch posted this month at the Counterfeit Kit challenge blog. I also used the new "summer" distress ink colors. I love how bright they are! I used Resist ink to stamp the flower and the word "Happy" and then rolled over them with an inked up brayer.  To add a little interest to the transparent blue accents, I attached them to my page with glitter glue.

Materials-

Cardstock- Bazzill, Ranger

Patterned Paper- Die Cuts With a View, Provo Craft

Ink- Ranger

Stamps- Close to My Heart, Limited Edition

Tape- Target

Acrylic Accents- Heidi Swapp

Brads- Basic Grey

Cricut Cartridge- Storybook

Next is a card I made for a friend who had a baby almost two weeks ago.  Again I used some of the new Distress Inks, but this time I used my star Crafter's Workshop mask and the sponge inking tool.  The flower and letter blocks for the word "baby" were cut out using the "New Arrival" Cricut cartridge.  I used this week's Unscripted Sketch as inspiration.

Materials-

Cardstock- Bazzill

Patterned Paper- Die Cuts With a View, Provo Craft

Ink- Ranger

Stickers- Provo Craft

Mask- Crafter's Workshop

Twine- Pink Paislee

Cricut Cartridge- New Arrival

Glitter Glue- Ranger

Finally, I made this anniversary card for my sister and brother-in-law whose anniversary is Saturday. I used the current sketch at Sketch Saturday for this, but rotated it and made a few slight adjustments to fit the new orientation.  

Materials- 

Cardstock- other

Patterned Paper- Chatterbox, Robin's Nest, Die Cuts With a View

Stamps- Stampin Up

Ink- Tsukineko, Ranger

Sticker- Little Yellow Bicycle

Buttons- My Mind's Eye, Jesse James Co.

Check It Out!

My "Rockets' Red Glare" layout is featured on the Scrapbook and Cards Today blog!  You can see it and several other awesome celebration layouts here!

Nuts About Sketches #219

I am a day late on this, but here it is. Yesterday a new sketch was posted at Nuts About Sketches. This time it was a fun single page layout.

   

 This was another layout that came together really fast. It helped that the photos were already printed on the 8x10 collage.  I wasn't sure how I was going to scrap these photos, but when I saw this sketch, I immediately thought of these photos and how they were laid out.  Keep that in mind the next time you have a preprinted collage you need to scrap, you can use a sketch for them too!  I decided to limit my colors to black, white, and red to bring out the red and white costumes and downplay the turquoise.  I played a bit with my sewing machine to add the border.  I've seen other layouts where people go from straight to zig zag stitch and decided I wanted to try it.  I really like how it turned out, and I will definitely be doing it again.

 

Materials

Cardstock- American Crafts, The Paper Company

Patterned Paper- Provo Craft, Doodlebug Designs

Marker- Marvy

Pen- Zig

Flowers- Prima and Kaiser Craft

Brad- Basic Grey

Buttons- Jesse James Co., Other

Dew Drops- Robin's Nest

Ribbon- Doodlebug Designs, other

Photo by Sunshine Photography

Second Quarter Top 5

Ashley Sisk is hosting another quarterly link up on her blog.  The challenge is to select our favorite 5 photos of our kids (or pets) from the last 3 months.  I had a lot more to pick from this time thanks to warm weather so we could get outside and use some natural light!  Here are my top 5:

I've shared this one before, but I really like this photo of my little "duck hunter" carrying his ducks home.

I just love the sweetness of Addy holding up some flowers she picked for me. What mom doesn't love a bouquet of dandelions?? :) 

 

I have also shared this one before, but I enjoy how I caught my little guy in the moment, a moment that truly shows off his personality.

This one is a photo of Ellie doing something I see her doing often; helping her brother or sister. Here she is picking chives and handing them to her brother to try. She is such a great big sister! 

 

 I have shared this one before too, but this is my favorite photo of the year so far. I just love the bliss on Addy's face and how I caught her mid-air. 

 

Well, there are my top 5.  I am looking forward to the warm weather and taking lots more photos in the months to come!

Happy Birthday- Sketch and Color

I'm back with yet another birthday card. This time I used the current sketch at Sketch Saturday and the current color challenge at The Play Date Cafe.

 I bought a couple of sets of stamps last night at our church's garage sale and I used one of them on this card.  The set I used is by Close to My Heart and is called "It's Your Day."  This set is really fun and I can see myself using it over and over!  I used my Cricut and the "Storybook" cartridge to cut out the center piece.  The cake pieces are stamped and the sentiment and bursts are stamped and heat embossed.

Happy Birthday With a Sketch and Ombre

I have another card to share (yes another, I am related to a lot of people celebrating birthdays and anniversaries this month). For this card I used the current sketch at Mojo Monday.  I'm really enjoying the small squares down one side, they are so fun to embellish!

   

I also used stamps and paper from my Counterfeit Kit for this.  ScrapFit has a challenge right now to make some kind of ombre effect on a project.  Ombre effect is where one color fades into another or a single color fades from dark to light.  You can see several great examples here.  For mine, I decided to use glossy cardstock and distress inks.  I stamped the image first with Resist Ink.  I let that dry and then rolled my brayer over the two colors of Distress Ink and then rolled them onto the Glossy Cardstock.  The trick is to roll so that the colors overlap to create the fade.  I think it turned out pretty cool and I think I will be trying this some more with some of my other colors! The square in the bottom corner was also stamped with Resist Ink on Glossy Cardstock, but I just rolled over that with blue ink.

 

Materials:

Glossy Cardstock- Ranger

Patterned Paper- Die Cuts With a View, Chatterbox

Ink- Ranger

Ribbon- Target

Stamps- Stampin Up

Punch- Tonic

Liquid Pearls- Ranger