Chevron Happy Birthday

Every year, a few of my college friends and I get together and we celebrate our birthdays. We have one December birthday, two January birthdays, and one September birthday but we usually aim to meet sometime between January-March. We all have work, school, extra-curricular, and/or family obligations plus one of us drives from out of town, so you can just imagine how difficult it is to find a Saturday that accomodates all of our schedules. Well, this past Saturday was our day. We went to see a play, had dinner at a nice restaurant, and then came back here to exchange presents, have cake and do a little beading!  

 

I opted to make the same style birthday card for each of them. I was really intrigued with this sketch from the Clean and Simple Stamping Blog.

I really love the example which uses the negative space for the word and wanted to try that out. The sketch was from the 15th but I hadn't had a chance to play with it because I've had tennis elbow (from stirring sand, alum, and cornstarch together in a pot on the stove to make treasure rocks for my preschoolers -- how do I explain that to people?!) and I have had to rest my arm. But there's nothing that motivates me like a deadline so I worked on Saturday morning...yes the morning before we were to meet! I used my Cricut Art Philosophy cartridge to make quick work of cutting the letters out of my Lagoon (teal) cardstock and got three panels with the word, "HAPPY," cut out of them, lickedy-split! It's difficult to see but the paper backing the, "HAPPY," panel is a lighter blue houndstooth pattern from a long retired CTMH paper called Splendor. I added the little flower from the Card word Puzzle set stamped on honey for a little pop (and I popped it up with foam tape)!

 

 

Supplies Used (All CTMH)--

Patterned Paper: For Always (love that chevron pattern) and a scrap of blue houndstooth from the retired set called Splendor (used behind the HAPPY)

Cardstock: Lagoon, Honey, White Daisy, Black

Stamp pad: Archival Black

Stamp sets: Card Word Puzzle and Card Chatter-Birthday (I cut Birthday... off of the rest of it's sentiment-you could just mask it too)

Embellishments: Baker's Twine Neutral Assortment, Opaques Licorice Adhesive Gems, foam tape

 

I have also been wanting to play along with the Heart2Heart challenges but my arm has been bugging me too much. I was so happy to see that this week's chalenge is for  CAS-Clean and Simple. Yay! So I'm linking this post up to this week's challenge at H2H.

 

Pin It

Gingerbread House Thank You

I had seen many great examples by other CTMH consultants of using the Around the Block stamp set as a gingerbread house when this stamp set was first released, but I never tried it out until now. What a fun look! The striped paper from Mistletoe reminded me of peppermint so that's what I decided to use. At preschool, we've been reading Gingerbread Baby by Jan Brett and the kids had an enormous cardboard box decorated as a gingerbread house that they could play in. When they would go inside, they said that they were gingerbread babies! So cute! My students gave me a tote bag with their handprints and names on it, so naturally, I thought gingerbread house thank you cards would be perfect to send out to them.

Supplies Used: (D1377) Around the Block stamp set, (D1361) Thank You stamp set, (X7130B) Mistletoe Level 2 paper pack, (X5644) Brown Bag cardstock, (Z1336) Opaques Pearl Adhesive Gems, (Z1326) Sparkles Red, Pink, & Purple Assortment, (Z673) White Daisy embossing powder, (Z891) Versamark Ink Pad, Nestabilities

Pin It

Olivia Fall Themed My Creations All Sorts Mini Album

The 2010 Autumn/Winter Idea Book is here! Click on the link at the right to take a look!

I used one of my favorite new paper packs, Olivia, and the All Sorts Mini Album, to make a little fall themed scrapbook. The pictures will be added later but most pages will easily fit a vertically oriented 4" x 6" photo. I can crop horizontally oriented ones or just print them in a smaller size.  I used a lot of our new Mocha Opaques (look at the middles of the little paper flowers, the Filigree Charms, and the edges of some of the scalloped pages). I used a tape runner to hold the paper to the album but added Liquid Glass in a lot of places such as some of the edges and to hold the Filigree Charms in place. I colored the Dimensional Elements which spell out "Fall" on the front cover with a Bamboo marker and then sponged Sunset and Chocolate ink onto it. Most of the edges of the papers were distressed with Chocolate ink.

I really tried to use up some of my embellishments (which is difficult for my hoarding sensibilities!). I even used up some of my Just Blooms Leaves which were retired awhile back but I've been holding onto for some special occasion! I will be ordering some of the new mini medley packs and will probably add more items (perhaps some plain cardstock pages or Flip Flaps) and even some rub ons later on, maybe after adding my pictures, but I wanted to post this now so you could see the pretty Olivia paper.

Supplies used: (Z1224) My Creations All Sorts Mini Album, (Z1269) Filigree Charms, (Z1333) Mocha Opaques, (X7128B) Olivia Level 2 paper pack, (D1371) Many Thanks stamp set, (Z2104) Barn Red stamp pad, (Z2191) Sunset stamp pad, (Z2155) Topiary stamp pad, (Z2111) Chocolate stamp pad, (Z2114) Cocoa stamp pad, (Z2303) Bamboo marker, (Z1048) Dimensional Elements Simple Alphabet (Lowercase), (Z1047) Dimensional Elements Simple Alphabet (Uppercase), (Z280) Natural Hemp, (Z679) Liquid glassPin It