Lamentations 3:21-23

I love to make cards with this scripture!

Yet this I call to mind
and therefore I have hope:
Because of the LORD's great love we are not consumed,
for his compassions never fail.
They are new every morning;
great is your faithfulness.

The images are stamped with opalite inks. This ink looks wonderful, very shimmery and colorful, but does not photograph well.

smARTword challenge

The theme for this month's smARTword challenge is "Juvenile." I rarely make cards for children, but I do enjoy stamps of children, and this is one of my favorites!

I colored the frogs with markers, and the boys with chalks.

Happy September!

To know God is to trust Him. If one does not trust Him, it's because one does not truly know Him. :-)

This is a card design I have used often; it's one of my favorite designs.

I am trusting Him for grace to get through this semester; I'm returning to college after 15 years, I think. I never graduated, and so it's going to take me 2-3 years to finish. I'm taking 18 credits this semester, divided into two quarters of 9 credits each. It's a bit overwhelming, but I am thrilled to be doing it!

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!