An early start on Christmas

Every year, I admire the cute gift cards I see people posting on their blogs, and I never seem to have time around Christmas to make any. I'm too busy shopping and wrapping, and I'm stuck with boring store-bought tags. Not this year. Thanks to the good ladies at 52 Christmas Card  Throwdown, I've got some in the bag.

The 52CCT challenge this week is to use felt on a card.  I made a set of little gift cards featuring a snowman wearing a luxurious felt scarf.  I hand cute these scarves to fit, and I must say when you are working on that small of a scale, it is the very definition of "fussy cutting."

The layout for these cuties is the Little Tangles sketch #7.  It gave me a great opportunity to use some tiny scraps of Christmas paper that I have been hanging onto for a while. I seem to get particularly attached to Christmas prints for some reason.

Wedding card

I made a simple wedding card using the Little Tangles sketch for challenge #7. This is also for CAS-ual Friday CFC91, Hi-O-Silver (isn't that a great name for a challenge?.)

Silver and white always seems like a go-to combo for a wedding card.

The image is from an old Stampcraft stamp I have -- it is a cube with wedding images on four sides. I guess the idea never caught on...  The sentiment is from a Stampin Up set.

I dry embossed the silver strips just to add a little texture to the card. I also added tiny half-pearl on the stem of the champagne classes, because pearls also seem like a go-to embellie for wedding cards.

Black, white and yellow

I know that black, white and red is a "can't miss" color combo, but I am just now beginning to appreciate the possibilities of using black and white with yellow. I used that color combo for this card, which is for Victorine Originals Challenge #53, to stamp, emboss and embellish a card.

The stamps are from Autumn Leaves, inked in Colorbox Chalk yellow cadmium and Memento black.  The yellow panel is embossed with the Swiss Dot Folder.  For embellishment I used a border punch on the bottom of the flower panel mat, ribbon around the flower panel, and three half pearls.

Round we go

The challenge at CAS on Sunday (Challenge #2) is to create a circle card. I thought long and hard for a specific theme for a circle card (to go with a CD, perhaps?) but ended up combining it with the CAS challenge at Splitcoast this week, and going with a music theme.

The card is cut with Nesties, and there's a small brad so the top layer swings up or down to reveal the second layer.  I learned this trick from someone's blog, otherwise I would have been struggling on how to cut a circle and still keep a fold in the card.

I got to use lots of stuff that's been sitting in my stash on this. I've had the printed tape for ages; I picked it up at Hobby Lobby one year after Easter -- I pretty much cleared out their clearance section that day with lots of spring-y items.  The butterfly die cut is one I piked up at a consignment sale a while ago and just never got around to using until now.

All those pastel colors make me ready for spring. 

Add a little color

Using black, white and one color always seem to produce a crisp and attractive card, so I was excited to see that as the theme for CAS-ual Fridays challenge CFC90.  I took my inspiration from The Alley Way Stamps Be-Inspired challenge # 22, which uses this eye-catching photo for inspiration.

The black-and-white striped background that the fence creates and the green on the furniture really jumped out at me, so that's what I based the card on. I wanted to play with the idea of changing the neutrals to a bright color. Adding a little color to the sentiment -- by printing it out a second time on green paper and cutting out a few words -- added emphasis to the sentiment and added a little color balance to the card as well.

Sentiment and brush stamp are both digital freebies from The Alley Way Stamps.  The brush is colored with both marker (green) and pencil (black). The brush is raised up on pop dots.

One fish, two fish, red fish...

     Every time I see this sentiment, that little song from Finding Nemo keeps floating in my head: "just keep swimming, just keep swimming..."
     This card was done for The Alley Way Stamps' Be Inspired challenge #21. The inspiration photo probably should have sent me the Valentine's route, but I decided to focus more on color.  I like how the red just pops out there among the white and cookie-brown.  This school of fish seemed like a good choice -- after all, every school has someone who swims in a different color, doesn't it?
      The fish are colored with pencils, and I used glossy accents on the bubbles to give them a little dimension. Fish and sentiment are freebies you can get on the TAWS blog (follow link to challenge). There's a single fish, too -- in fact, Alley did the single fish and one of the users manipulated it into the school. Alley thought it was so cool, she shared that file as well.
 

You hoo

For the longest time, I used to buy random patterned paper just because it was pretty. Then I'd have the hardest time using it with any other paper, because they just didn't go together, so I never used more than one print per card. Finally I wised up to paper packs. Well, duh, huh?

This card uses four different patterns that all work together, thanks to the wonder of paper packs. I think this is an old Stampin Up set of papers -- I'm sure someone recognizes it.

The layout is the weekly sketch from 356 Cards (#34).  The owl is from Inkadinkadoo, and the sentiment is from Hero Arts (also from an owl set). Both are inked in Colorbox Chalk chestnut roan -- I stamped the sentiment several times, but it insisted on being light.  

Pun fun

While attending a rubber stamp show last weekend, I saw a cute card featuring bees and the sentiment "thanks a buzzillion." This isn't really a CASE, because I don't even remember what it looked like, but I did appropriate the sentiment -- I just printed it out.

This card uses Feeling Sketchy sketch #45. The bees are black-embossed, with the yellow stripe done in marker. I cut them out and popped them up in the corners. The alternating corners are punched with a rounder. Additionally, I added piercing around the edges of the sentiment panel. Obviously the piercing was done free-hand. I thought I could depend on the pattern to help me space out the pirecing, but it turns out in this gingham pattern, the white stripe is wider than the yellow. Who knew? There's also a little piercing detail in each corner.

All the supplies are from my stash. No idea who made the cute bee -- it's a UM, probably from some grab bag I've purchased.