Tamarind paper

Salt challenge: Mercy

My favorite part of stamping is probably the cardstock & papers! The richness of colors, the variety of prints, etc, absolutely amazes me. I don't want to refer to the print on this as being "background paper," because as you see, it's the print I wanted to feature. The colors are wonderfull, and the black is actually a velour or some similar type material, it's really wonderful! I thought about ribbon, I thought about other embellishments, I thought about layering the text, but I was loath to cover any of this beautiful paper. So while the text is the focal point - I love this scripture! - I made it narrow, and refrained from adding anything else. :-)

I'd love to see more participation on the Salt challenge blog; the women there really take a devotional approach to their challenges, and it's great to have scripture and other aspects of Christian living to focus on while card making! Come visit!

smARTworks challenge

The challenge over at smARTworks was from Giovana, for a card with real or faux stitching or ribbon. I chose faux ribbon: I meant to learn how to sew over winter break while my dd who sews taught me, but it didn't exactly happen. She started a piece of fabric for me, and I dutifully put in a couple of inches of stitching. The fabric scrap is still sitting there. :-)

I'd really been having a hard time getting card making done in the last couple of weeks, and yesterday was almost a total loss, until I posted on Gingerwood that I had "stamper's block." Their suggestions were great, and were enough to get me started last night. I hope I will remain in creative mode!

I had a couple of ribbon stamps from smARTworks, and embossed them last night with cranberry embossing powder. I tried using flocking, but that just made a mess; the stamp is too detailed, and my sticky embossing powder is dying. The shadow flower is actually green; it's hard to get light colors to show up on my camera the way they really appear. (Also, the flower is actually the same burgundy color as the stamped ribbon).

I finished the card this morning, barely on time to get ready for a family friend to come to over to work on her wedding invitations. Lots of fun, but quite a long time. :-) I was glad that she's close enough to our family not to mind all the clutter that we had to work in, lol!

09 birthday card

This is the card I made my husband this year. His birthday was Friday, but we still haven't celebrated it ... finding a day when at least two or three of the children are around is complex!

Birthday card

Hmmm...I scan all birthday cards and save them to a friends and family file. I don't want to use the same stamps twice in a row for the same person, or do a similar design, etc. Before making my husband's card, I went through my files ... and this is the last card I have on file ... from 2006! Well, at least it told me not to do a palm tree again! :-)

simple redo

This card was one of my first cards when I began cardmaking three or four years ago. Embarrassingly simple, but as I've shared before, I hated art almost my entire life, so I had not even the slightest skill or knowledge to pull from. I don't think the blog concept was around yet, and I did not have money for magazines. I did have a couple of friends with photo albums, Dini and Jacki, and since they were way beyond what I was capable of, it was almost discouraging to look at their cards!

I have what I call a "reject" box of cards like this that need to be altered or tossed, and once in a great while I manage to persuade myself to pull one out and make something better. The other day I wanted to make a card in just ten minutes before playing speed scrabble with my son, Tuesday was not going to allow any cardmaking time, so I decided I had the perfect incentive to remake an old card. Happily, I succeeded (I'm a REALLY slow card maker!) It's not much nicer; I thought the colors would look well for a "guy" card, so I didn't want to do much to it. I'm satisfied with how it turned out.

Reconstruction

Some months back I started pulling out cards that I really did not like, but didn't really want to keep working on. This is one of them. Opalite never scans or photographs really well, but frankly, this card didn't look any better than the photo. The butterfly was the worst part; I had used pearlescent powders, which normally have a nice sheen, but somehow failed to here.

I ended up keeping only background. I embossed the background image a few more times on mica cardstocks, and punched out the butterflies from it.