May Joys Abound!

I needed to make a set of notecards (for me, that means cards without layers or embellishments), and this design worked perfectly for one! To make the background stripes, I used strips of rubber trimmed from a set of bookmark stamps. I love saving those scraps! These were unusually large, but small shapes are helpful too. You can make a homemade mosaic background stamp, form funkly letters, etc.

Joyful!

Another great collage set from smARTworks. I love anything with the word "joy" in it, and this little girl is darling! I wanted her to look like a little Latina, and I think it turned out well enough that way. I did edit the picture a little; the hair looked very patchy, and with the low-level photo editing program I have, I couldn't "fix" the hair without altering the overall color. I mention this also because I've realized just in the last few months (I made this several months ago), that I had been underusing my stamp-a-ma-jig. In the card set I made with this - my card sets are always without layers or embellishments - I would have had much better results stamping the girl image twice. With a stamp-a-majig, you just place the tool up to the stamp before removing it from the cardstock, then hold on carefully to it while you re-ink the stamp, then apply it again. This is very helpful with solid images, such as the hair on the little girl, and with clear stamps, which don't consistently give a crisp image. :-)

Anniversary

When I switch out a set of cards from a store, I go through what didn't sell to check for damage or cards that really never should have been for sale because of an un-noticed flaw or clash of color, etc. Sometimes it just isn't a card I feel good about, but left in because it was in a category I had too few cards for! In a recent set of cards, I realized I had not one, but two anniversary cards with "issues." Neither was slavagable, so I went to work on a couple of new ones. This one is very similar to a couple I made a month or two earlier for the other store. :-)

Wedding card

I have lots of pictures that haven't even made it to my "not yet posted" file, which has pictures that are edited and ready to post. I totally forgot about this card, which is odd because it's recently made ... I had several of the dove image colored in, but hadn't used them all, so it was a quick card to make. Of course, I take forever to make up my mind about embellishments, image placement, etc, so it probably took longer than it should have!