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.