Spring is here and that means more cards!

Had a great time at the Scrapbook Expo in Anaheim last month and used my evening crop time to make my spring cards.  With Easter and Mother's Day all bunched together I needed to get a lot done.  Thankfully, I've got more supplies than I know what to do with (and I purchased even more at the event)! Here are the cards I made -- a few of the Easter cards are adaptations from designs I saw on Pinterest and others are my original designs.  Enjoy!

Featuring a Technique Tuesday butterfly stamp and colored with Spectrum Noir pens.

Unity Stamp sentiment - this is a graduation card for my God Daughter.

I love this chicken stamp from Stampin' Up.

I recently subscribed to Simon Says Stamps' monthly card kit and I'm so glad I did.  The quality and choice of the paper and embellishments are wonderful and I find that having these all together has sparked my creative mojo.  Here are some of the cards I've made with the October 2015 and January 2016 kits.  Let me know what you think, I love hearing from you.  Enjoy!

This first set is from the October Kit which included some gorgeous My Mind's Eye, My Story paper and journaling cards.  The Happy Birthday die is from Simon Says Stamps and was not included in the kit.  The Celebrate and butterfly dies were from my stash and I'll have to update this post later with the details on those:

These next three cards are from the January Kit, Flurries of Love.  They are a little "cutesy" but still fun.  I needed a lot of thank you cards after Christmas and this kit really delivered the goods and inspiration. Here is a link to their website: https://www.simonsaysstamp.com/product.aspx?id=337993

This card has a shaker window with snowflake and sequins inside!

New Cards for the New Year

Happy New Year!  I recently got busy in my craft room recently and made a bunch of New Year's cards.  I'm really excited about how they turned out and wanted to share.  Since I was trying to make a lot of them I used a Blueprints die set from My Favorite Things and just made a variation on a theme with slight changes to placement of the sentiment and the card stock.  Hope you like these.

This is the second set I made.  I think these can be sent to either sex.  Love the My Mind's Eye paper.  I used a Wink of Stella pen to color in the champagne in the glasses and it made a nice effect.:

More Experimentation

As mentioned in my last post, I joined the Stretch Your Stamps 2 class recently and have been having some fun trying my hand at stamping.  The techniques shared in the classes are really wonderful and I can't wait to try more of them but, unfortunately, I didn't have much free time in the last two weeks so I only completed three cards.  Here are my two most recent attempts at Stretching my Stamps:

Paper Pieces Stamped Images -- Reindeer Fun:

 I stamped the reindeer on 3 different colors of paper, cut up the pieces, inked them and put them together.  I used a Wink of Stella pen to add some shimmer to the sweater details then popped him up to add some dimension.  I love this technique and will continue to play with it in the future.

Letter Stamping:

I like the technique but don't love the way I executed it.  I created a few words with tiny letter stamps (hugs, love) and then stamped them on the heart.  I didn't really have the right ink for this technique so it's hard to read the words.  The colors are a little odd too.  So let's just chalk this one up to experimentation and try again another day.  I do LOVE the sentiment stamp and how nice it looks embossed with black embossing powder.  I'll do more of that for sure.

I wish I had more time this week to play around with all the fantastic techniques I learned in the class but maybe I can squeeze some time in this weekend for stamping fun.

Thanks for visiting!

Stretch Your Stamps Class

Today's post is all about the online class I'm taking called Stretch Your Stamps 2.  I've never taken a class like this one so I think it will be an adventure in creativity.

I'm not really into stamping but I've been buying some here and there and trying to get comfortable using them.  I thought this class would help me become more comfortable with inks and stamps.

With today's first class, we played around with background stamps and distress inks.  I like the way the card turned out and will probably use this technique again sometime.

Can't wait for class tomorrow!

Mini Album for Cousin

I think I wrote a while ago about how much fun I've been having making mini albums.  I get so inspired watching You Tube videos of other people's minis and have learned so many new techniques.  I have especially enjoyed watching the beautiful videos and projects from My Sister's Scrapper.  Her tutorials are excellent and she does amazing work.  Today's project was done following her binding technique.

This mini was made to give as a gift to my cousin, Jackie, to celebrate her brand new grandson's birth.  I used two different Echo Park paper lines, A Boy's Life and All About A Boy.  I was surprised at how well these two lines go together and I loved the final project.  I used the 6x6 paper pads, some American Crafts black card stock, embellishments from the collections and some great chipboard stars from Um Wow Studios.  I made a video but I haven't edited it yet, so in the meantime, here are some photos.

New Projects to Share

It has been a very long time since I last added projects.  I guess that's what happens when you get busy.  Today I've added some Mother's Day cards I made for my Mom, sister and niece using some new stuff I picked up recently.

This one was made for my Mom.  I used the We R Memory Keepers Envelope Punch board and Fancy Pants Park Bench papers.  I also just got the Sizzix Triplits Flower dies and had such fun making all these layered flowers.  Needless to say, she loved the card.

This next card was made for my Sister.

I used Echo Park For the Record 2 paper, Prima flowers, Lawn Fawn stamp and die (leaves) and some old My Mind's Eye ribbon I had laying around.

These last two were for my niece and my sister in law:

 I'll try not to let too much time go by before adding more projects to my blog.  Thanks for visiting.