Etsy-inspired summer dress

This week's Etsy Inspired shop, EIC87 , is Lindsay Brackeen, who does absolutely adorable, whimsical prints for children's rooms. She has prints for each letter of the alphabet, and I was inspired by her pieced dress for the letter D. So I paperpieced this dress (for a slightly more mature figure than Lindsay's dress). The stamp is by Endless Creations, and it's highlighted by small gemstones at the neck and along the right side.

I used this week's SCS sketch challenge. The papers are from My Mind's Eye -- funnily enough, the name of the blue-flowered print (used on the horizontal strip) is "summer dress."

I finished it off with some paper piercing, although I've lost the plastic needlework grid (high-tech, high-class equipment!) I use for spacing and the guide I was using was harder to work with. It's metal and you can't see thru it, so the lines kind of ended up wonky.

Hummingbird

This week's Off the Wall Craftiness challenge OTWC6 is to use the colors turquoise and lime green. The inspiration piece was pictures of a peacock. I don't have any peacock stamps, so I used a hummingbird from Impression-Obsession.

The colors might be a little dark -- the ink is Stream by Ranger, and it's as close to turquoise as I could find. The ribbon, however, is perfect. It's lime green on one side and turquoise on the other. (My son is on the school robotics team, and we were at a competition -- some other team had used the ribbon on their handouts, and I scooped up a couple extra that were left after the event, because I like the ribbon. I consider it recycling.

The sketch is from this week's CAS challenge at SCS. Blue layer is embossed with the Swiss Dot folder, green layer has an edge cut with a decorative scissors.

Bear with me...

I do a couple of COTMs with various Yahoo groups, and the theme for one this month is "bears". You can use either wild bears or the teddy kind. I basically own one bear stamp -- of this cute koala. It's from the very first grab bag of unmounteds I ever purchased, the day I discovered UMs and realized how much I'd save if I started using them. I think it's by Impression Obsession.

I used this week's Card Positioning System sketch, CPS 165. The paper is also from long ago, and I don't know who makes it, either. Image is colored, very lightly, with pencils and OMS.

The card came out reasonably, cute, I think, even if I wouldn't have used the bear except I had to. As always the CPS sketch is a good one to keep in mind for the future.

Good Day Sunshine

This week's Etsy Inspired challenge EIC 86, takes us to an Etsy shop called Isabell's Umbrella -- I'm not really sure where the name came from, as Isabell sells notecards and other graphic items that are adorned with the cutest images. My inspiration was the "Send a Smile Note Card."

I used this cute sun by Michelle Perkett from a Faerie Song plate of her designs. The center is paper-pieced with a a piece from the Making Memories stack called Eliza (the blue gingham is from it, too.) The rest of the image is colored with pencils and OMS. Sentiment is computer generated. I got those big brads at a consigment sale last week and they seemed a good finishing touch.

I'd rather fall in chocolate

This week's Off the Wall Craftiness challenge #5 is to use dark brown ("chocolate") and red. I used chocolate images as well. This is from a Club Stamp set, and I love that sentiment -- yes, let me fall in chocolate!

It's pretty self explanatory. I love those itty, bitty pearls and I'm almost out of them.

The ink is Chestnut Roan chalk ink from Colorbox.

happy bird-day

This week's Etsy Inspired Challenge EIC85, is BEE Things, an Etsy shop that sells limited edition silk-screen prints. These are wonderful graphics on a number of subjects, but many of them were birds. I was inspired by this Bluejays notebook, although the bluejay sort of morphed into a bluebird in my card.

I used a bird from Inkadindadoo, and used CPS sketch 164 for the card. It's a 6 1/2 by 3 1/4 inch card, for a "regular letter" envy. Sentiment is from Endless Creations. I used a variety of markers to color the flowers (including the darker silk flower, which I colored with an SU marker).

Travel Off the Wall

There's a new challenge being held at the blog called Off the Wall Craftiness. The challenge for this week, OTWC3, is to create something with a travel theme. This took some craftiness on my part, as I don't really own any travel related stamps, such as planes or cars. I do, however, have a lot of postal/passport cancellation stamps, so I created a page stamped with several of those, kind of like a really well-used passport page. That's layered on top of a strip from a highway map (bonus points if you can figure out where that snip of map is from).

I found a cute little charm of a train that fit the theme, and this sentiment is somewhat travel-related.

I used CPS sketch 163 to create this card.

Postal/passport stamps are from Third Coast, sentiment is from All Night Media. I used several different color inks for the passport stamps and SU Forest Foliage for the main sentiment.