Easter fun

Easter is coming so late this year, the weather where I livewill be summer-like rather than spring-like. Here's a quick and simple Easter card.

The design is the current sketch from Card Positoning Systems, (CPS214). The sketch calls for do-dads betwen the diamonds, and it was a perfect chance to pull out my almost-new butterfly punch (rescued from my local Big Lots, where the stamping/scrapping supplies seem to be routinely abused by shoppers so I rarely find anything useful.)

The card was inspired by the current Off The Wall Craftiness (OTWC51) challenge. As you can see from the photo at right, those colorful Peeps are the color inspiration.

Supply list.

Stamps -- bunny from Stampin' Up; sentiment from Purple Onion Designs

Punch -- McGill.

Ink -- I inked the stamps with a marker to match the butterflies.

Have a happy Easter.

May Day

The theme for the card of the month swap I'm in is May Day. Once again, I found myself turning to the trusty "image search" at Yahoo to complete a COTM card. I turned up a sweet line drawing of girls at a May Pole. With a little cropping to focus on the girls in front, I think it makes a pretty good image.

Colors for this card are for Victorine Originals Challenge #11 -- green/purple and white. (Green and purple is my favorite color combo, so that was easy.)

Magical Monday Challenge (Paper Cupcakes) is to incorporate fabric and stitching into the card. The bow is made of tulle and gives the card a light, frilly touch. I put stitching around the purple layer, which actually looks like a fabric print. (True, it's faux stitching, but it looks pretty realistic to me, including the fact I didn't get it straight, just like I never get real seams straight.)

Sketch is this week's SCS sketch challenge layout.

Pastel pleasures

I love pastels. They're pretty and easy to work with, so I'm always happy to use them. This three-fer card uses the lovely pastels for this week's Off the Wall Craftiness Challnge (OTWC50) -- see the inspiration photo below.

It's also for this week's Etsy Inspired Challenge (EIC134), Think Fast Designs, a shop that sells both jewelry and fabric items. I loved this vintage-looking quilt that incorporates these pastel spring colors and also features a mix of prints with polka-dots, inspiring my dotted panel.

Finally, this card incorporates this week's Mojo Monday Sketch (MOJO186).

Supplies: Stamp by Inkadinkadoo; sentiment computer generated. Striped paper is by Heidi Grace. Yellow ribbon is by Martha Stewart; plaid ribbon is from Michael's. Nesties, Swiss Dot embossing folder and border punch also used.

Going Round and Round

This week's Etsy Inspired Challenge (EIC132) store is called Fresh Metal Jewelry and it features beautiful jewelry not of metal but of fabric. Really, these are quite equisite with hand-sewn flowers in a variety of different colors.

Since blue is my favorite color, it's no surprise I was drawn to this Blue Blossom necklace as my inspiration piece.

I decided to try a round card, so I just cut two of the largest scalloped circle die I own, and used a mini brad so the pieces will swing to the left and right to open the card. The flowers are clear-embossed to give a little of that tone-on-tone look of the inspiration piece.

Flower stamps -- Autumn Leaves

Sentiment: CTMH

Ink: Versamark and Memento Place

Accessories: Clear EP, McGill butterfly punch, mini half-pearls, mini-brad, and scalloped nesties.

Maybe I'm overthinking it

At first, I thought the color combo for the current Off the Wall Craftiness Challenge (OTWC49) was a little odd -- red, green and yellow (see inspiration photo below). Then I started looking around, and I saw the colors everywhere. Seriously, I was flooded with ideas that were all too complex and didn't work out.

I finally settled on this layout, courtesy of week's CAS challenge at SCS. And it also qualifies for the current Victorine Originals Challenge (#10) to use a circle on your card.

Ink: Kiwi Kiss

Dragonfly: Inkadinkadoo

Sentiment: Impression Obsession.

Supplies/tools Nesties and eyelet punch in two sizes to make the little flight path for the dragonfly.

Monochromatic music

I made this card for three challenges - the Sketch Challenge and Teapot Tuesday at SCS and Magical Monday. Teapot Tuesday's destination for this week's cards is a pre-teen girl who is undergoing treatment for cancer. Among her favorite things are music and the color blue, so it was pretty easy to decide the direction to go in. Magical Monday's challenge is to create a monochromatic card, so I kept it all blue.

The stamps are all from Club Stamp, including the sheet music, which is actually only a few lines that I stamped over and over down the page. The ink is Colorbox Chalk Prussian Blue. The finishing touch is silk flowers, which started out white. Sometime in the past I had sponged blue ink on them and that worked perfectly for the monochromatic theme.

Mixed media? Me? Really?

This week's featured store for the Etsy Inspired Challenge (EIC129) is called Desired Things, and it's a shop full of mixed media items such as jewelry. The artist uses fabric, beads, shrink plastic and other media, along with paint, stamping and other decorative items to create some very appealing and unusual necklaces, bracelets and pins.

Well, collage doesn't come easily to me, but this shop really inspired me to try something that is just the tiniest bit different. Using this lovely broach as inspiration, I started by brayering pink and lavender ink on glossy paper, then siver embossed the dragonflies. The purple panel is embossed with a script folder. The black strip is a piece of screening material left over from when we changed out the screens on the porch (I guess that's the "mixed media" part).

I used the layout from this week's Card Positioning System sketch (CPS208).

Dragonflies from Inkadinkadoo; sentiment from Impression-Obsession.