A little fishy

[Did you ever notice how colors sometimes change in a photograph? Case in point, this card. The scalloped circle is purple but it insists on being photographed blue. Not sure why, because the rest of the purple looks purple. ]

This cute little fish guy is for CPS 120 and Off the Wall 20. OTWC20 is a color challenge incorporating light blue, purple (hence the concern about purple) and white. You can see the inspiration photo below.

This fish is actually a pre-painted little wooden piece, mounted on a nestie. I used mini brads for his little breathing bubbles. Waves are from a little Zimprints stamp I've had forever -- I just thought that would be a fun way to do the lines the CPS sketch calls for (colors are Versamagic Sea Breeze and Rubber Stampede Metallic Purple.)

That's it, classic clean and simple.

Soaring with Etsy

The Etsy Inspired Challenge is celebrating 100 weeks. Wow! I started doing the challenge one Saturday when Ashley and I were both VSN hostesses at SCS, and I noticed her little tagline about the Etsy Inspired Challenge. I think it was like EIC15.

This week's shop is Cathy Walters, a photographer who makes really interesting pendants. I was inspired by her pendant called Soar, which features a hot air balloon. Those things fascinate me -- every once in a while one flies over my house, and several years ago, one made an emergency landing in a neighbor's yard. (That counts as big excitement in my neighborhood.)

This is a digistamp from Bird's Blog, colored with pencils and OMS. The buttons were added for the Ways to Use It Challenge this week at SCS, and the layout started to be the SCS sketch challenge for the week, but my image was too big and I had to eliminate some elements from the sketch. The papers are all by Making Memories.

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.

Bright for me, anyway

The SmArt-Word Challenge for July asks us to use "bright". Hmmm, bright colors are a little out of my comfort zone, so I've been pondering this challenge all month. As luck would have it, Kim's colors for this week's Off the Wall Craftiness Challenge (OTWC17) are bright pink, turquoise and purple (as you can see in the inspiration photo below).

Well, since I was prodded from two directions, I decided to have a go at it, but I counterbalanced the brights with a good bit of white to get more in my comfort zone. I CASEd a card at SCS by MariLynn (this week's Queen for the Day) and made it much more of a CAS than hers, in working on this card.

The fabulous pink butterfly came from a prize pack from Kim for winning a previous OTWC. (Thank you Kim!) It's from the Gilded Bee, an Etsy store. Once I decided to use the butterfly, it was fairly easy to add the other colors as accents/frames for my simple card. What do you think?

Quick and Easy

I made this card for this week's MotherMark's Teapot Tuesday Challenge. It's for a little girl in New Zealand, daughter of an SCS member, who had her tonsils out. She loves hearts, so I'm giving her hearts. That explains why this card is much more "cutesy" than I usually do.

This was a quicky, using the current Card Positioning System Sketch CPS176. I used an old SU image, and an acrylic heart I've had for ages. The blue and green on the heart matched the printed paper almost perfectly -- how lucky is that? The lacy ribbon is an adhesive paper ribbon I picked up at Tuesday Morning, and it is pretty cool stuff. (I saw it one day, resisted the urge to buy it, then went back the next day to pick it up. Since it was Tuesday Morning and I only saw one package of the stuff, I knew it wouldn't last long. I'm still mad at myself for passing up some highly-discounted border punches at TM, which were gone by the time I came back for them.)

Sea-glass inspired

The shop for Etsy Inspired Challenge #97 (EIC97) is called Mermaid's Tear Jewelry. Isn't that a wonderful name? The store specializes in jewelry made from sea glass, and I love this stuff because most of the color palette is blues and greens, my favorite colors.
I was inspired by this lovely necklace in shades of blue. It inspired me to use my favorite two-toned blue ribbon; which also has a silver element for the silver in the pretty pendant.
The layout is the CAS sketch for this week at SCS, and I incorporated the "sea" idea as well by stamping seashells on a sand-colored paper. A button and twine finish it off.

Gray and pink irises

This is my card for Off the Wall Craftiness challenge #16. The colors this time are pink and gray, which is a combo I love. Here's the inspiration photo on the right.

I used the colors to do a CASE at SCS honoring hobbydujour's work. I borrowed her layout and used a wide ribbon, which is kind of her trademark. She's also much better at tying wide ribbons than I am. Everything else is changed.

The iris stamp is one of the first I ever purchased. It's fun to pull it out every now and then and find new ways to use it. The two grays are actually two sides of double-sided printed paper, and they look much more gray in real life -- the photo made the colors a little off.