PTI Challenge: Shaped Card

This week's Win it Wednesday challenge is to make a shaped card. I have a cricut, and so I played with a few premade cards before deciding to create a card myself. I wanted to make a violin card, and this is what I came up with. I designed the card via a violin image on cricut, and the text is from papertrey ink's Bold and Beautiful set.

PTI Challenge: Favorite Coloring Style

This week's Win it Wednesday challenge is favorite way to color images.  My favorite way to color images is not to! But, I can occasionally step out of my comfort zone and do some coloring. Generally, I choose images that do not need shading effects, in which case markers will be a choice.

Favorite Style Challenge

This week's PTI challenge is to make a card with our favorite style.  Call it lack of talent if you like, I am not an amazing card maker!  But really, although I often make cards a little less simple than this, I do not love cards that are covered in images, dies and embellishments, unless it is a wordless card.  For me, I want the text to stand out, and I just think a simpler card looks cleaner.

I prefer making cards for women, because they are more "fun" as I can do a bit more than on this card, which is meant for a male. My husband is actually more likely, aside from birthdays, to send a card to someone than I am, so I like to have a bunch for him to choose from.  I like this idea very much, but I should not have cut the angles on the outer strips as I did, I should have had them the same direction, I think.  But, I have more of the denim washi tape left, so I will make more this style.

Inspired By ...

This week's Win-it-Wednesday challenge is to make a card based on one's favorite source for inspiration. Pinterest is definitely my main source, but it's closely followed by PTI's own blog ... partly because I own a fair amount of their stamps, and also because their design team focuses on cards that the average stamper (like me!) can have reasonable expectation of recreating in our own way.  Many stamp companies, which I think is a mistake, fill their design team with designers who have the time, talent, and finances to create "super cards;" cards that most of us will not have the time or ability to put together, and we don't have a fortune to spend on a pound of die cut images, bling, and expensive coloring/embossing tools. I was literally asked to be on a design team once (I had not applied) because I created simpler cards! (I won't deny a tiny part of me was embarrassed to be firmly placed in the "average" category, lol)!

Anyway, for this challenge, I planned to go to my pinterest account for inspiration, but the next morning I looked at Laurie's Throwback Thursday card, and changed my mind. I loved how she embossed the silver and gold onto brown card stock!



Oh, wait ... my screen was still on night mode! It's not a brown card, it's a black card! But, even after turning off the nightshade and looking at the card, lovely in black, I decided I really wanted to pattern the card after what I first saw!