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.

 

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Sweet as Honey

Happy New Year!

Well, break is over for me and the kids so we will be getting our noses back to the grindstone once more. Although I love teaching, I do love my free time, especially having time to create! So I was commiserating with my kids about going back to school a little today. I decided I needed to make something cheerful to end our break and to start the new year.

I've been enjoying Laurel Seabrook's blog for quite awhile now and she has recently started a challenge blog called Inspired By. The Inspired By challenge #4 is to use the following invitation as a starting point.

I was inspired by the layout, texture, and the colors. Here's what I came up with.

Supplies used (all CTMH except for Nestabilities): (B1374) Bee Happy stamp set, Grey Wool Cardstock, White Daisy Cardstock, Corner Rounder, Black stamp pad, (Z2350) Sunflower marker, (Z2310) Buttercup marker, (Z2352) Sunny Yellow marker, Corner rounder to make scalloped edges, Houndstooth paper is from the retired Splendor paper pack, Nestabilities - Lacey Circles, Standard Circles (small and large)

One of the sentiments from this stamp set is, "Don't worry, bee happy," so now I have the Bobby McPherrin song going through my head!

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Thank You Hedgehogs

Here are some 4" x 4" cards made with the Splendor paper pack and July's cute stamp of the month. I love the cloud paper in this paper pack. I needed to make 14 of these fun little cards. The weather was so pleasant on Wednesday evening that I took my little hedgehogs to my son's soccer practice and sat in the bleachers coloring them. My daughter had her own stash of hedgehogs to color too! She loves it when I stamp extras of some of our open stamps for her to decorate and it keeps her busy. We used our clipboards (decorated, of course!) for support with some scrap paper clipped on to catch our stray marks around the edges of the hedgehogs.

Here's a closeup. The butterfly is paper pieced (stamped on the back of the green "grass" paper which is the same pattern but in Goldrush) . The little hedgehog is colored with a Desert Sand marker for his quills, a bit of Blush in the ears, and a light brown colored pencil for his body. The hedgehog piece is also lifted up a bit on foam tape (originally stamped on Colonial White cardstock and cut out). The green piece in the background is sponged on the edges with Cocoa ink.

Supplies used: (July SOTM) Happy Forever stamp set,  (D1361) Thank You stamp set, (Z2114) Cocoa stamp pad, (Z2318) Desert Sand marker, (Z2306) Blush marker, (X7124B) Splendor level 2 paper pack

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Thank You Cards with Family Ties - Children

We always seem to need Thank You cards! I created two versions of this card stamping the thank you sentiment on twill ribbon for the second. The backgrounds of the White Daisy pieces of cardstock that the "kids" are stamped on was made by masking and then sponging ink.

Supplies used: Family Ties - Children stamp set (C1345), Thank You stamp set (D1361), White Daisy cardstock (1385), Cocoa cardstock (X5642), Topiary stamp pad, Black stamp pad (Z2105), Heavenly Blue stamp pad (Z2126), Splendor Level 2 paper pack (X7124B), Twill ribbon (Z1099), Heavenly Blue marker (Z2326), Sunflower marker (Z2350), Topiary marker (Z2355), Moonstruck marker (Z2334), Bamboo marker (Z2303), Parchment marker (Z2342)

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