Cake-inspired birthday card

One fun way to find inspiration for your next card, scrapbook page or other project is to look at photos -- online, in magazines, in your own photo albums -- and focus on a color combination, a certain shape or some other element in the photo. That was the task at hand for one of our November Creative Crew challenges. In honor of National Cake Day on November 26, we had pictures of fancy cakes to use as inspiration for a project. The picture I used featured several black-and-white tiered cakes. So, you ask, how does that translate into a papercraft project? Well, here is the answer for me:

Supplies (all Stampin' Up!):
Stamps: Four You, Secret Garden, Gorgeous Grunge
Cardstock: Whisper White, Basic Black
Ink: Jet Black Stazon
Accessories: 1/8" Basic Black taffeta ribbon, Beautiful Wings Ebosslits die, Dimensionals, Mono Multi liquid glue, Glue Dots

Most black-and-white cakes have a white base with black embellishment, so I started this card with a Whisper White card base. I used three 3-3/4" x 1-1/2" pieces of Whisper White cardstock to create the look of tiers on the card front. The tiers, which are adhered to the card with Dimensionals, are decorated differently, but they are united by the colors and by the Basic Black ribbon along the left side. The ribbon is also reminiscent of the bands that are sometimes wrapped around the bottom of a cake tier. I stamped a birthday sentiment (which could easily be changed to fit a variety of occasions) on the bottom tier and added a few butterflies for a little more texture and a simple but elegant embellishment.


To continue the theme and to keep the card front from being too heavy, I also added a Whisper White layer (3-3/4" x 5") on the inside of the card. I stamped a sentiment on the layer, added one butterfly and attached it inside the card with Glue Dots.

Thanks for stopping by!

Getting back on track

October was definitely not my best month in terms of blog posts. In my defense, it was challenging to keep up with regular posts when I was gone two full weekends out of the month; the weekends are when I do most of my creating so I have things to post. But I'm going to try to get back on track in November, and I'll start by sharing one of the cards I made for the November Creative Crew challenges on Splitcoast Stampers (SCS).

Supplies (all Stampin' Up!):
Stamps: Tape It
Cardstock: Very Vanilla, Chocolate Chip, Crushed Curry
Ink: Chocolate Chip, Crushed Curry, Soft Sky, Sahara Sand
Accessories: Essentials Paper-Piercing Pack, paper-piercing tool and mat, Itty Bitty Shapes punch pack, Candy Dots - Brights, corner rounder, Mono Multi liquid glue, Dimensionals

For this challenge we had to use Sweater Weather Designer Series Paper or the colors Chocolate Chip, Crushed Curry, Sahara Sand, Soft Sky and Tangerine Tango together. This challenge was tricky for me because Tangerine Tango threw me off. It's a great color, but I struggled with it in this combo. So after playing around with different ideas, I decided to use just a tiny bit of it as an accent color.

The Tape It stamp set, which I really didn't think I would need when I first saw it in the Stampin' Up! catalog,  has become one of my favorites. It's so easy to use the stamps for a fun background or, as I did here, the focal images of a card. I "eyeballed" all the stamping on this card, so I'm pleased that they came out relatively straight and evenly spaced. I used the Essentials Paper-Piercing Pack to add the lines of piercing between the stamped images -- they definitely would have been crooked if I'd tried to do them freehand. For the last detail I added three punched Crushed Curry flowers with Tangerine Tango Candy Dots centers.

I'll post another one of my challenge cards tomorrow. Until then, if you're looking for more inspiration, check out the November Creative Crew gallery on SCS. Thanks for stopping by!

A finished project

I spent the weekend at my friend Lisa's house for a couple days of quality crafting time. We had a lot of fun, and I even finished a project: my Summer 2013 This and That journal. I'm a little late getting it done, since I had wanted to add mementos and write about events as they happened during the summer. I had all of the pictures and info together and ready to go, but as usual, there was never enough time. The craft weekend, though, was the perfect opportunity to focus on finishing my journal. Here are a few of the completed pages:

There's nothing like the satisfaction of completing a project. And it was fun to create a journal that was casual and imperfect, unlike my "regular" scrapbooks. For instance, I included a lot of receipts that I know will fade and become illegible, but that's OK. I'm not worried about my journal lasting for generations to come or becoming some sort of historical document. It will just be fun to look back at it in the coming years and remember a little about my life in 2013.

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A pair of thank yous

I've had a busy month, so it's been a little tricky finding the time A) to stamp and B) to share my creations here on my blog. Fingers crossed that I'll be able to get back to a more "normal" schedule in November. I did, however, manage to sit down after work today and make two one-layer cards with my new stamp set Another Thank You.

Supplies (all Stampin' Up!):
Stamps: Another Thank You
Cardstock: Pistachio Pudding, Baked Brown Sugar
Ink: Pistachio Pudding, Baked Brown Sugar
Accessories: Itty Bitty Shapes punch pack, corner rounder, pearls, Mono Multi liquid glue

Several years ago I made a card similar to this one, but back then I had to look through all my stamp sets to find the different "thank you" sentiments. It was much faster this time with all the stamps in the same set. And with the clear photopolymer stamps it was easier to determine which stamp would work best to fill the spaces.

For this card I stamped the largest image first, using Baked Brown Sugar ink so it really stood out as the focal point. Then I filled in the space around it with the other images, stamping them in Pistachio Pudding to create a background. I added a little embellishment to the card by adhering a few punched flowers with pearl centers to the empty spaces inside the loops created by the letters of the main image.

Supplies (all Stampin' Up! unless otherwise noted):
Stamps: Another Thank You
Cardstock: Naturals Ivory, Midnight Muse, textured Chocolate Chip
Ink: Chocolate Chip
Accessories: 5/16" neutral brads, washi tape (unknown)

My thank-you cards often have a feminine feel to them -- a lot of flowers and such -- so I've been trying to make an effort to create more masculine thank yous. For this card I stamped one of the larger "thank you" sentiments on the bottom right quadrant of the card base. I added a piece of washi tape and a strip of textured Chocolate Chip cardstock below the sentiment. To pull out the blue in the washi tape, I adhered a piece of Midnight Muse cardstock to the left of the sentiment. I wanted to include some embellishment, so I added three simple Chocolate Chip brads.



Thanks for stopping by!

Birthday monsters

In July Stampin' Up! had a contest to design a monster-themed stamp set. The winning stamp set, Monstermaniacs, was created by a Stampin' Up! demonstrator. It's a cute stamp set, and I thought it would be fun to use for a variety of occasions. I made my first card with it this week: a birthday card for one of my cousins' sons, who will be turning nine next week.

Supplies (all Stampin' Up! unless otherwise noted):
Stamps: Monstermaniacs, Yippee-Skippee!
Cardstock: Basic Gray, Whisper White, Real Red, Daffodil Delight, Wild Wasabi, Island Indigo
Ink: Jet Black StazOn, Real Red, Daffodil Delight, Wild Wasabi, Island Indigo
Accessories: Circles Collection Framelits dies, 3/4" circle punch, Square Lattice embossing folder, googly eyes (Inkadinkadoo), Mono Multi liquid glue, Dimensionals

I stamped and colored the image and then cut it out with one of the Circles Collection Framelits dies. For the background I wanted to play off the circle shape of the focal piece -- there are also several circles in the image itself -- so I used the Framelits dies again to make several circle frames in different sizes and colors. (This was really easy to do with the new magnetic platform for the Big Shot. Love it!) I adhered the circles to a 4" x 5-1/4" piece of Basic Gray cardstock then added some texture by embossing the whole piece with the Square Lattice embossing folder. I attached the layer to a Basic Gray card base and adhered the focal piece to the right side of the card.

To create the sentiment I used markers to ink the letters with different colors. I stamped the sentiment on a strip of Whisper White cardstock and used the 3/4" punch to round the ends of the strip. Then I used Dimensionals to adhere the sentiment so it overlapped the focal layer. I wanted to add a little embellishment to the card -- but nothing too frilly -- so I gave one of the monsters googly eyes. Googly eyes make everything more fun!

I stamped a birthday sentiment inside the card, and since I always like to include a hand-written message, I added a little note wishing the birthday boy a "monstrously" good birthday. (Another possibility I considered was "I hope your birthday is out of this world.") Thanks for stopping by!