Blog Hop! Chirstmas Cards and Tags in 10 Minutes or Less

What a fun challenge this month! Most of my cards are pretty speedy anyway, so I knew this would be fun, except for not having any Christmas stamps. Time to place an order! I went with two very versatile sets that gave me the most bang for my buck: Vintage Santa and Flourish Trees of Hope. I just love all the trees and prases in Trees of Hope. I figure I will get more use of this set than just for Christmas. With Vintage Santa, all the Christmas greetings drew me to the set along with the snow flakes. I can leave them in a trio or cut them to have individual flakes. Finally, this is just one, cool Santa! For the blog hope, I've come up with five new projects, some cards and a gift tag.

VIntage Santa, Inspiration Avenue

First up, a very simple Christmas card. Some green Bazzill, a bit of Reece SWIC paper and a couple stamps. I added a hint of glitter to the tree with my stardust gelly.

Santa is pretty good on his own, so again a simply stamped card with a hint of color from Reece, a touch of sparkle to the snow flakes. I love doing cards that are not your typical folded half sheet.

I found myself using too much green, so the snow flakes drew me to blue. I really had a lot of fun mixing these two sets.

A fun gift card. I was inspired by a card from Laurie over at Soapbox Creations. I really liked the punched out santa here.

Finally, this card was a bit more complicated, but with a stamp positioner went very quickly. I used one of the trees to create my background pattern. (One of my first thoughts in seeing this set.) I cut out my kraft square, then took a pencil to quarter it off and find the center so I could position my stamp easier.

Please enjoy these other blogs for many more ideas and lots of great inspiration!
Laurie W

Teresa

Diane

Jen

Rita

Shirley

Julie

Kim

Laurie U

Kay

Melisa

Stacy

Halloween: All About the Treats!

Halloween has come and gone, but I wanted to share some of the treats I made this year. I had a lot of fun playing a various treat covers, my favorites though were the ghosts. This is a pretty old idea, but rather than using tissues or tissue paper, I find coffee filters to be oh so easy to use. They're already cut to size, inks don't tend to bleed very badly and they're cheap. I made about 150 of these little guys this year for hubby's classes. Their team has a cow theme so I had to make my little boos have a moo theme.

Next, I used one of the black and white digital papers and shrunk to just fit a mini candy. This worked great to still maintain the detail of the paper. I then had fun with the skulls, dressing them up with my Spica and Stardust gelly pen.

And what holiday isn't complete with popcorn? This is an easy gift wrap to do and oh so versatile. It makes for great teacher gifts.

Fall Blog Hop

Time for another blog hop! This one has a fall theme. I wanted to do something a little different with this and try to use some untraditional fall images for my first card. (Didn't really have a choice since I don't have any fall specific images and I wanted to take a break from Halloween and challenge myself.) Here, I used Miss Moxie papers and Hat's Off stamp set. I LOVE the colors in this paper kit and it's become a favorite.

Now back to Halloween, here are a couple fun ones, and again, a little untraditional. I've been having fun doing different sized cards and this first is a #10. When I first saw the spider in Spookalicious, I thought of Fun Flock. This is a great accessory and fun to use, especially when you have sticky embossing powder to use. It really helps keep the image neat and controled, as opposed to using a glue stick/wet glue. I used my stardust gelly for the web and colored the images with Prisma Pencils.

This final card has a boo of it's own and was inspired by some Tootsie Pop ghost treats that I'm making. I used a coffee filter and cotton balls to create the cute little ghostie and stamped the head of the skeleton from Spookalicious for the face.

Please enjoy these other Angles' blogs and their fall creations!

Barb
Rita

Kim

Angela

Laurie

Shirley

Jen

Trudy

Teresa

Diane

Bridget

Suzanne

Stacy

Inspiration Avenue Swap

It's really been to be an active stamper again and although I haven't held any Funshops, to be active in the demo community as well. I recently did another swap, this one for the new images in Inspiration Avenue. I LOVE the new Halloween images, and even have them all now too--shame on me! So my cards for this swap were naturally going to be Halloween themed. I wanted to do something different and fun for my first card so created a little scene:

I used my Bazzilll mono cardstocks and punches for the base and circles. I cut out the coffin and stamped the cat on it with Memento black, then inked the edges with a duster. To fill in the image, I colored with a warm gray Copic and colored the eyes and nose with Souffle gel pens. I thought it still needed more and added the clouds and moon to the Versamark frost stamped star background. The moon was colored with my stardust gelly to give it some sparkle--Love that pen!

Stamp Sets: Spookalicious and Glitter Gobblins, hostess backgrounds

My second card was a little simpler.

Keeping with the Halloween colors and stamped the backgrounds with versamark. Since the verse stamp has a lot of solid space, I actually stamped this on the backside of the Bazzill to get a cleaner stamped image, then punched it with my scallop punch and mounted it with pop dots. I purchased some scrappers floss for the first time and used it too. It makes for a fun accent.

Stamp Sets: Spookalicious and Glitter Goblins

I can't wait for m swapped cards to get returned to me and see what all the other ladies have done. Should be fun! It also won't be long before the new Serendipity is out either, only a couple more months!

Halloween Smash!

I love Halloween. The colors, the characters. I have been busy these past few days really stamping up a storm with my two favorite new sets: Spookalicious and Glitter Goblins. Both these sets can be found in the new Fall Magalogue. I have also been playing with TAC's digital papers. These came out over the summer in black and white. And, while I like black and white, I've been having fun in Photoshop changing the colors. That was actually the first thing I did when downloaded these, was play with the colors. It's not that difficult and you can get so many different combinations and looks. I use the hue and saturation adjustment most of the time, but have also experimented with various gradients.

This was a simple card using the digital background colored in orange and adding a stamp from Glitter Goblins. I cut out the circle free-hand and mounted it to a punched scalloped circle.

Fun card using Spookalicious! As soon as I saw the spider, I knew I wanted to flock it. Fun Flock is a fuzz that has been around for many years now--I still have some jars that are probably close to 20 years old! It's still available though, and I added black to my collection through TAC. To get the flock just right, my favorite adhesivie is Sticky Embossing Powder. This is like regular embossing powder, but when melted, comes a glue. It's perfect for the detail that I just can't get with a regular glue. I made the web with my Stardust Gelly and colored the images with Prisma colored pencils.


I've been trying to get away from "normal" cards lately, experimenting with different sizes and shapes. This card and envelope set comes from a template I've had for years--with all this stamping lately, I've been digging up some real oldies of mine! The envelope was made with the black and white digital paper and stamped. Pumpkins have been colored with Copics. This card was inspired by a window card by Barb Foster.

A fairly simple card. I used the black and white digital paper for this too, but added a color gradiant to it in fun Halloween colors. The colors are very rich and I think this may need some more playing.

I had a lot of fun doing this card, which was inspired by a digital creation at Peppermint Creative. Now, I'm almost positive I've seen a card similiar to this in design too, but can't find it at the moment. I probably would have used the digital paper for this, but my printer was out of ink and I realized I could easily recreate the design using my scraps and 1" circle punch. To give it some "glitter" I outlined the circle and "ghosts" with my Stardust pen.

Happy World Card Day

I spent the day making a few cards. It's been awhile since I made some cards just to make some cards. I also went with some uncommon colors for me--pink. I am so not a pink person, but for some reason, I enjoy crafting with it. Here are a few of my creations from the day. For the Asian cards, I got out some of my Origami papers. Some of these papers, I've had for years, but was afraid to use them for fear to running out. Now that I live in the land of Origami paper, It's been nice to have no worries about ever running out of papers.

In searching the galleries looking for inspiration I came across a hybrid project that I immediately fell in love with, a pumpkin template from The Digichick. I haven't visited this site in many months, but what a pleasent surprise! It has had a facelift and had some fantastic project templates that I am anxious to try.


For the pumpkin, I changed the color of TAC's black and white digital papers to a nice orange and printed on HP Everyday Matte. After rough cutting, I ran the paper through the Xyron then mounted it on some thicker cardstock to give it some more support. Although I wasn't initially happy with the construction, I got it to fit together and finished it off with some ribbon and a tag.

Let's Get Ready to Make Some Cards!

Did you know? I didn't until last week. But, Saturday, October 3 is World Card Making Day! Who knew that this day has been celebrated the first Saturnday in October since 2007? I haven't anything planned as of yet, but think it'll be a great chance to take a day and get some stamping and crafting done. It's been awhile since I just sat down to make cards for the sake of making cards. (Maybe I'll even order some new stamps as part of the celebration.) It's been so nice to get my ink and paper out again. To cut those stamps out and be creative away from the computer. However, in doing so, I realize that there are some stamps I'm missing, away in storage until who knows when. Or if I only had that "one" image to complete a card. Have fun celebrating the day. Make a couple birthday cards, thank you cards or get a jump start on those holiday greetings.