Upon the first day

I love these images from Eureka! All the images are gold embossed, and the background is inked with a Big and Juicy pad from Ranger.

The cross

I haven't made any Easter Cards this year; I don't send any personally, and I had some left from the years I sold cards at a store in PA, so I didn't need any for the stores in which I am selling cards now. But, I didn't want to let the week go by without acknowledging this most precious of day of remembrance. This is a card I made a couple of years ago.

love cats

I made a cat journal a few months ago, and the first cat circle I made was too orange for what I was doing, so I set it aside to make a card later. :-)

Anniversary card

I made this anniversary card, but had real trouble with the diamond glaze I used to attach the dew drops. The wallpaper was too slick for it, and my buttons slid around as I tried to attach them. In the evening light, when I viewed the card after it dried, it didn't seem to be an issue. But in the daylight, the glue smears were clearly visible, and meant the card was useless. I set it aside for a couple of days, and then decided to see if I could salvage it. I pulled off the dew drops, and looked through my ribbon scraps bag. I pulled out the ribbon that you see on the card, and the two knots were already there. Just for the fun of it, I layed the ribbon across the card, and to my surprise, I thought the knots actually added something. So, here it is!

Wallpaper wedding card

I try to get to the local Sherwin Williams every couple of months to see if I can get any of the expired wallpaper sample books (I'm often too late, sigh). Last summer I got the most gorgeous sample book I have yet to see ... it made me want to wallpaper my house! It's been excellent for elegant journals, and for formal cards like this.

Spanish Wedding cards

The text in English is "May the Lord bless you on your wedding day." The top card background is white embossing on vellum. The text on both is gold embossed.

Trivia for the day: in Cuba, weddings are done in an office, by a communist official. Christians often will have two celebrations, the state one, and a church one.

Always

This is a remake from a card I made last year. The faux pearls really look nice; the photo makes them look like cheap plastic (well, I suppose they are cheap plastic, lol, but they don't actually look so obviously fake!)

Baby cards

Stamps that need coloring often sit in my binders unused for years, as is the case with this stamp. I finally decided it was time to use it!

smARTword challenge: monochromatic

This smARTword challenge card almost did not happen ... it took me four days to make the background! Obviously I wasn't working on it for hours every day, I just took awhile to find the shades I wanted (didn't actually succeed; most of my die ink pads, at least pinks, are ancient Stampin Up, and I've learned that eventually a stamp pad reaches a point of not even being re-inkable. :-/ And then I just kept having interruptions. Some were fun, like unexpected company, or the smARTworks 50% off sale (I have an amazing ability to spend hours making decisions on what stamps to purchase, lol! I think I have the old catalog nearly memorized!). Others were just "life;" at any rate, once I've been interrupted a certain number of times on a project, I lose interest in it, and then progress really slows. I finally just put it aside and worked on other projects that needed to get done for business.

Today I pulled out the 8.5 x 11 sheet I'd made (I like to do backgrounds this way, especially if using time consuming images; it's so much more worth the time and effort to have four cards to make from it!) and got to work. I had had some doubts about the shades of pink I used, but last week when out of town visiting a friend, I passed a house that had these exact same (or so it appeared) shades of pink! It was really startling to see it!

The daisy image under the text has four "holes" in the center for a button look. I smudged some ink of the same color onto the center to "erase" them before adding the text.

Amazing sale!

Susan Trask of smARTworks is redoing how she sells her stamps. Instead of individual stamps and small sets, she will be selling all in quarter, half, and whole sheets. For the rest of this month, a huge number of those individual stamps and small set are 50% off! Some are sold out already, so I encourage you to go check it out quickly! I've gotten several sets I've been really wanting...

LOL!

I love, love, love this smARTworks set! I was asked a month ago to make a small journal for a baby gift. This is the mother's fourth child, and the children are all very close in age. The oldest of my four children had just turned four years old a month before my last child was born, and I remember the utter exhaustion of it all. I figured this momma needed a reminder to laugh! Being pressed for time, and remembering this card (above) that I had made a couple of months ago - and as usual, I had created a couple of extras of the main images - I created the journal cover from the same design.

Roses, roses, roses!

I love roses! These are three cards I have sent into smARTworks; every month you can send in a single card and receive two "smARTbucks," redeemable with your next order. Or, you can save them up to select one of smARTworks full sheets available ONLY with smARTbucks! There are also other ways to earn them. I love opportunities like this; blog contests are fun, but can be disheartening if you never or rarely win them.

Anyway...
all three cards use the same stamp not only as the main image, but as a background stamp. The black background card is colored with opalite inks. As you can see, it and the similar card in pink were gold embossed, and then ink applied right over the embossed image.

Names of Jesus

I made this set of notecards (my notecard sets are all non-layered cards without embellishments) last fall.


As I do more frequently than I care to admit, I stamped a couple of the card fronts crookedly. But, that just meant I had panels for another cards, such as this.

...the joy and rejoicing of my heart

I love this scripture! There is so much to it! For many, the Word of God is not joy and rejoicing, but boredom, or confusion, or just old history and religion. But for those who are called by His name, those who know Him as Lord, it is truly a joy to have His Word, to read of His promises, His grace, His love... Whether we are on the mountain top, or in the valley, His Word is life, and it is Joy.

I haven't worked with cork in ages, so I can't tell you what ink I used, but I can tell you that most inks will need to be heat embossed on cork, even Stazon did not dry otherwise. The camera (ok, the photographer!) did not capture the real look of this card, it looks (hmmm... what's a word that means elegant in a masculine way????) .... well, better in real life!

Another quilt card

My mother is an amazing quilter, though at this point in time she is unable to do the actual quilting, just the piecing (and designing). None of her three daughters quilt, though my oldest daughter enjoys making basic quilts. Anyway, making quilt cards is my way of connecting in a very limited, basic way to that!

French Thank you

I discovered something by accident in photographing cards. The colors of the papers used in this card usually show up steel gray in a photo. However, I had the "wrong" setting on the camera, and the resulting picture looked completely blue, even the background, which is more of a white with minute blue speckles, was a very strong light blue. I used Picassa photo editor, and it restored the photo to almost exactly to its natural colors!

This is what I call a "quilt card," made with strips of various papers then sent through my cuttlebug for texturing.