It's vimful!

The theme for a COTM I'm in this month is "at the movies." Having no appropriate stamps, I did a search for "vintage movie posters" and then searched movies from the 30s at the site I ended up at. I was looking for black and white posters, and figured movies in the 3os were B&W, so posters would be too. Actually, about 99 percent that I found were in full color. This poster for "Putting On the Ritz" was the closest I could find. When I tried changing it to all B&W however, it was really boring, so I printed it out in the original coloration.

(The writer part of me has to point out the wonderful wording on this poster -- "The Idol of Broadway in a tuneful song & dance extravaganza. Dynamic! Vimful! Glorious!" "Vimful" seems to have totally left the lexicon in the past 75 years, if it ever was a common word. "Vim" itself is rarely used, and only as part of the quaint expression "vim and vigor." ) Hmm, I would have guessed the star would be Fred Astaire, too.

Card is made using Card Positioning System Sketch 203 (CPS203). For RESQ68, it has all sorts of lines, including a line of half-pearls, a line of piercing along the edge where the two papers meet, and of course the line of stylized whatever you want to call those deco-style decorations on the paper (from Making Memories).

Birds on the Brain

Seems like I've done a lot of bird cards lately -- maybe I'm longing for spring. This card is for this week's Off the Wall Craftiness Challenge (OTCW42) and also for this week's RES-Q challenge (RESQ67). I cased a card for this week's Queen for the Day challenge at SCS for the layout.

The orange and blue color scheme is the challenge at OTWC this week (see the inspiration photo at right). RESQ's challenge this week is dry embossing.

As I was working on the card, my husband reminded me that his sister, a singer, was having a birthday, so happily I could turn it into a birthday card for her.

Details -- bird stamp and sentiment from SmArtWorks; sheet music is unknown. Ink is Ranger "Stream" color. Ribbon from Target.

The hummingbirds have arrived

Combining several challenges here into one card. The color scheme comes from Off the Wall Challenge 19 OTWC19 (see inspiration photo at right). The color combo was pale pink, pale yellow and a limeish green (I had to substitute SU Kiwi Kiss for lime).

I combined that with this month's SmArt Word Challenge, which is "bird." I chose to do a hummingbird in celebration that we have a ruby-throated hummingbird coming to our hummingbird feeder. This is the first year we've had one actually come to our feeder (probably because I actually got it out at the right time of year for once.)

Finally, the RESQ challenge for this week was "tape it up." The lacy strip running is actually a fancy adhesive strip.

The details -- stamps by Impression-Obsession; Inks are SU Kiwi Kiss and Stampcraft Baby Pink; accessories are nesties, lacy strip, Swiss Dot embossing folder, and black half pearls in two sizes.

Diamonds and Butterflies

This card doesn't really look like my typical card, but I like the way it came out. It's the result of combining three different challenges.

Etsy Inspired Challenge EIC93 is a shop called White Birch Designs, which sells lovely jewelry, mostly made from beads. I was inspired by this one called Black and White Flower Necklace. I loved the combo of black, white and silver, especially the bold diamond shapes. That was pretty much the guiding element in putting the card together.

I used the sketch from Card Positioning Systems, CPS 172. And for RES-Q Challenge RESQ50 -- a celebration of getting to the 50th challnge (we had a choice of several old challenges to choose from), -- I chose adding a felt embellishment, because I thought the pink butterfly brought some real life and contrast to the card.

I used two different diamond stamps -- the one embossed in silver on the left is from DRS; the one on the right is from Studio G. The sentiment is from SU. Other ingredients: silver brads, silver metallic paper and nesties.