Sweetly Shaking It Up on Your Birthday!

November is turning in to a challenging month to get back into the swing of crafting regularly... I've got six birthday cards to make for coworkers and friends this month!

So I'm back again (I know, twice on the same day! haha), this time with a birthday card that I had lots of fun creating! I love the recent wave of shaker cards so I decided to create one of my own for a coworker's birthday card this week featuring a Birdie Brown stamp from My Favorite Things:

Looking at it on this screen, the colors are kind of blah.  Here's another photo with more accurate color...

Aahhh, much better. Anyway, bad pics aside, This one is going to be one of my all-time favorites I think. I love the colors of this DCWV paper from their old Celebrations stack. And I really like my coloring on the image on this one. I have finally started to convince my inner cheapskate that the only way I am going to get good at coloring is to practice, even if it's "wasting" supplies. LOL  Another thing I will have to remember is that I have to recreate my light tent and take proper photos. =\

I used two sizes of a Spellbinders die to cut my window and a piece of acetate from some Spellbinders packaging. My image is part of this lovely Birdie Brown Sweet Birthday wishes stamp set. I absolutely loved coloring her - the hair turned out exactly as I wanted and that skirt... I actually managed to get a hint of the ruffles in her skirt. Yay!  I wanted to add white polkadots, but the white Signo pen I bought two years ago has thoroughly dried up, so I went for black, using a Glaze pen. I also used purple Wink of Stella on the bottom ruffle of her skirt and a mix of clear and purple on her dress and hair bows. I gave her patent leather shoes with the Glaze pen, too. I know, no self respecting girl wears a skirt and patent leather shoes together, but since she's a drawing, I figure no boys will be able to see any reflection up her skirt. LOL    Last, I glittered the top of her cupcake with my favorite Stardust Stickles. The color is off on these pictures as well, but they show you the shine and glitter. =)

For my shaker, I used the image of the cupcakes on a tiered stand that is included in the set. I colored up the top two tiers where the cupcakes didn't overlap each other with Copics to match the colors in the DCWV banners cardstock and cut them out before coating their icing in Stardust Stickles.  I used two layers of foam adhesive to make a pocket and threw in some purple and lime sequins and pink and blue glitter (all from Doodlebug Designs and with fun names like limeade, bubblegum and swimming pool) together with the cupcakes. Then I sat here at my crafting table and played with it for the next 15 minutes. =)

To finish off the front of the card, I used a Copic marker to get the right shade of purple on my little sentiment flag and heat embossed a sentiment from the stamp set in white.

For the inside of the card I used the leftover scalloped die cuts, a few more sequins and a larger cupcake and sentiment from the stamp set. Simple, but oh so cute!

This one was so fun, I may find myself making more shaker cards soon. I do know I had a hard time giving this particular card away. Do you ever have that problem?  Make a card you absolutely love and then have to send it on to another home? LOL  I suppose I'd be surrounded by cards eventually and have no room to make any more, so better to have crafted and given away then never to be able to craft at all. hee hee

For some more fun, I'll be shaking my way over to these challenge sites to enter this sweet birthday shaker card:
Artistic Inspirations - Challenge #116 Anything Goes/Happy Birthday
Craft Your Passions - Challenge #238 Bright and Sparkly
Crafty Sentiments Designs - Challenge #11 Make it Sparkle
Loves Rubberstamps Challenge - Challenge #125 Anything Goes
Creative Moments - Challenge #55 Anything Goes/Celebrations
Moving Along With the Times - Sparkle and/or Shine
Seize the Birthday - Birthday (Topping choice: Monochromatic Orange)
 Challenge Up Your Life - Challenge #1 Anything Goes
ShowCASe Your Style - Challenge #1 Tic-Tac-Toe  I used Emboss-Sequin-Sparkle, plus there's White, Diecut and Sentiment, too!
Addicted to Stamping - Challenge #91 Bling, Bling!
Papertake Weekly Challenge - Anything Goes

Then one more finished birthday to post... and four more to craft this month, so I'll be back soon!  Til then, happy crafting!

Christy

Anything Goes for Kids @ SAS4K: Saturated Canary Violet

Happy Saturday! We made it to the weekend - woot! woot! 

It's Send A Smile 4 Kids challenge day and another end-of-summer easy-peasy challenge for you... Anything Goes!  This challenge is also a bit special as we say goodbye and best wishes to teamie Shelby who is moving on to other adventures. Her fun style and super coloring will be missed... but we do have a new teamie waiting in the wings for her debut coming up soon! =) Our sponsors for this challenge are Robyns Fetish (5 digis to the winner) and Saturated Canary (2 digis for our second winner) and the DT had the difficult decision of picking which image to color up for today's DT post. That was a challenge in itself! LOL

I finally landed on Violet... and to be honest, I had intended to go with some lovely violet Copic colors, but when I was riffling through my papers, this pink and blue-green combination from the Glam Gal DCWV stack caught my eye. So violet is now dressed  pink and blue-green! =)

Oops, bit wonky, that photo.... LOL

I colored Violet with my Copics.. the BG70 series was a little too dark and cold than I needed so I ended up using a technique of scribbling BG11 and BG13 onto an acrylic block and then picking up those colors with my BG70 and BG72 markers to get a brighter blue-green that matched my background papers. Her hair's a bit of a mess... got a little carried away trying to get the streaky look I wanted. Too much fun flicking and feathering! LOL If you squint your eyes while looking at the card though, it looks pretty good. LOL I added Viva Decor pen pearly dots in silver (on the skirt) and opal everywhere else.

I added a nice coating of Crystal Stickles with its green and yellowy-pink glitter for her underskirt and the rosette in her hair and bit of Stardust Stickles on the second rosette that I printed and cut out for the top corner of the card. The heart border is an older Martha Stewart punch. I used a bit of pink grosgrain ribbon to cover the seam and added three of the punched out hearts with a dot of the pearl pen to the bottom corner.

So now it's your turn... read up on all the challenge details and see the super cards for kids my teamies have created over on the Send A Smile 4 Kids challenge blog, then go get creative! Can't wait to see what you come up with! =)

Til my next post, happy crafting!
Christy

SAS4K DT Card: Anything Goes for Kids - Sweet Spring Birthday Girl

Happy Saturday to you, my crafty friends!

I cannot tell you how glad I am to have survived to the weekend. Too bad it's only two days before it's back to the trenches. There has been so much going on at work lately that my boss is getting stressed out not having enough time to feel like he is on top of everything. Late yesterday I managed to capture him for enough time to plot out the next two weeks' schedule so I can cancel meetings and reschedule service so he has some time to work on the projects. Hopefully next week we'll be surfing the wave instead of being tumbled under it as it crashes into shore. LOL

Earlier this week I finished a card that I thought would be for today's post... and realized I'd used the wrong images! Apparently my boss's mental disorganization this week was catching. LOL So I got my hands on the really sweet images from Sylvia Zet's Wee Stamps, one of our two generous sponsors for our Send A Smile 4 Kids challenge... (it's an easy one!)... ANYTHING GOES! Yep, whip up any kind of card for a kid and you can enter it as the SAS4K challenge from now until June 1st! Randomly picked winners will get 3 digital stamps of their choice from Wee Stamps or Karen's Doodles, our fantastic sponsors for this challenge!

Even better... this challenge we will be linking up with Paper-Crafting Journey (my other DT!) so you'll be able to enter your creation in both challenges and have twice the fun! The PCJ challenge goes live Thursday, May 24... but you'll be able to backlink as long as you've also entered it in SAS4K, so you don't have to wait to post your cards at SAS4K! =)

On to my card for SAS4K... this is Suzi with Bunny...

Isn't she totally sweet? I love Sylvia Zet's images, but the hair has always put me off. LOL There are stamp images like Wee Stamps, Mo Manning and Make It Crafty that I love, but that I just haven't felt ready to tackle yet. My coloring is getting better and I'm hoping to have some time to practice lots and lots this summer when I can be outside while the pups play, the kitty lounges in the sun and I can color while ignoring the growing grass and the weedy edge of the backyard. LOL Since I was a bit hurried this time, I'm not altogether happy with her hair, but she'll do. And that face is so sweet, it distracts you from her hair. LOL

I colored her with a combination of Copics and ProMarkers. I tried my hand at one of my favorite Coops Tricks... shading darker on one side of the image and barely or not at all on the other side to get some depth. It lightened up a bit on my photo, so she doesn't quite pop off the page, but I like the effect and it does look better on the actual card, so I'll be practicing and borrowing that technique again. (thanks, Coops!)

I used Liquid Pearls to color the flowers in her basket. I got a little carried away and the white center dots spread a bit more than I would have liked, but I love the colors and the bit of shine.

I even did a BOW on this card, can you believe it? I used a pale greenish-yellow ribbon on my card and paired it with a Martha Stewart border punch... I can't remember its name right now, but I love the art deco shell design. A little elegance.

The papers are from the Spring Fling DCWV line... I picked up the 180-page pack of combined Spring Fling and Summer Days for less than 10 bucks. Not that I needed more papers. (Has anyone created a Paper-Addicts Anonymous group yet? I seriously need an intervention. LOL)  Paper hoarding aside, I love the rose design and found the perfect little WOC rose to match in my stash. The sentiment was done on the computer and I used one end of a Nestie Labels Eighteen to create a tag. The image panel was popped up on foam dots. (can't do a card without those!) Some Kaiser pearls, a little Distress Inking in Spun Sugar, Scattered Straw and Shabby Shutters on my edges and done!

My teamies over at SAS4K have created some really wonderful cards using not only Wee Stamp images but a few great Karen's Doodles, too, so get on over to the Send A Smile 4 Kids challenge post today! Can't wait to see what fantastic kids cards you create... and even better, you can choose to donate them to kids in hospital by following the guidelines here.

Zoe just ran away with the cat's jingle ball, so I'm off to get it back before the silly creature swallows it... in the meantime, happy crafting and I'll see you all soon!

Christy

SAS4K DT Card: Buttons and ribbons (and a bow if you're not me)

Hello again, my crafty friends! 

OK, so I've been crazy-super-busy the past few weeks and oddly hinting that I would share the why with you. Last week was National Medical Laboratory Professionals Week and as an admin, I'm on the Committee that plans and puts together all the celebrations. This year I had stepped down my commitments and was "only" assigned a few pre-Week tasks. These included both a Tshirt sale and... candygrams.

I suppose I have only myself to blame as several years ago I suggested it as a way to improve morale, get more people interested, and create a way to sort of "advertise" our week elsewhere in the hospital. Our Lab employees buy a card that they fill out on one side with the name and mailcode of the recipient, who may be anywhere in our health system, and the other side with a little message. Then a group of us get together and prep little white paper sacks of candy, fold em up, staple on the cards and mail out at the beginning of Lab Week. The most we'd ever done was about 800 altogether... mostly chocolates, but some hard/chewy candies and we even offer sugar free chocolates and sugar free non-chocolate candies for the diabetics among us.

This year.... this year we topped out at a jaw-dropping 1760! There was a BIG jump in the number of candygrams sent out to non-lab departments. I am soooooo lucky that this year I actually had a handful of volunteers because some years it has been just me, or me and one other person with her two kids. This year I had two adults and five kids (kids make great candybag filling slaves! LOL) most of the day and a few hours each from three other adults. Also fortunately it's very organized and well-thought out assembly line style which really keeps the pace up. We did 1400 in 8 hours and I did another 300 the next day and 60 more latecomers early in the week. None of them had ever helped before and one told me that she if never sees another little white bag full of candy again it will be too soon. LOL  If I can get a picture one of them took of the tables full of little white paper sacks standing at attention and being filled up with sweets, I'll share it... but what I can share with you is my photo of how much candy I bought on my first run to the store.

This is what $1000 worth of candy looks like:

And yes, I got many, many, many weird looks while shopping. Usually people selling candy buy the full bars and people assume they're at a stand or filling vending machines. But bags and bags and bags of miniatures really had them guessing. I had to make another trip to pick up sugar free items and more chocolates as we sold probably close to 1500 of those. So, with making flyers, candy shopping excursions, printing candygram cards, the TShirt sale, assisting with planning the educational lectures and helping with some other prep work, I was lucky to be home to let the dogs out to pee on a regular basis, poor pups.

Anyway, I am now free from Lab Week responsibilities and ready to get back to my normal crafty creativity. This week I got to spend some time coloring!

Send A Smile 4 Kids has a great challenge up today.... buttons and ribbons and/or bows!  I jumped on the "and/or" because I just don't seem to leave room in my imagination quite yet for bows when I'm thinking through my design... or I never have just the right ribbon I would want to use.

Our sponsors this week have generously granted us some great prizes for THREE randomly chosen winners:

$10 for Di's Digi Downloads

$20 for The Paper Shelter

$12 for A Day For Daisies

There's something about the angles in so many of her drawings that made me pick A Day for Daisies as the focus of my card for the challenge. I chose the image Puppy Love.

Although I am no Delphine or Coops, I have been practicing my coloring, although not as much as I'd like, and played a bit more with texture and light sources, which are two of the things I admire most about these very different card artists. I particularly worked on getting the sort of mottled look of some of the acid-washed, beat to death denims we have these days, but without any rips or tears. And I decided on a stronger light source this time and from a definite direction. If this little charmer's blond hair doesn't point you the right direction of my light source, I really failed. LOL I also see now why some Copics coloring champions also use pencils to deepen the darkest edges. Getting what should be dark crevices the right color is going to take (much) more practice, but I'm happy with what I've learned so far. One thing I'm not happy with is the errant gray mark on his ear that I had to kind of color over and blend in... I have some depth perception issues and I have to be more careful about how far away from the paper my pen tip is or "oops!" happens a lot. LOL

The papers are DCWV The Pet Stack. I love the bits of blue in all the earthy colors in this stack. I wish that DCWV did more smaller papers and brought the pattern down to scale. I used Walnut Distress Ink on all my edges. The buttons and the twine are from the candy stash that I won from Michelle O last year. I haven't really buttoned up much, but she sent a whole bunch of vintage buttons and I love the look with the colors of the DCWV papers. My ribbons are a mesh wired ribbon layered with a brown sheer, both from Berwick-Offray. A little puppy button from Jesse James adorns my sentiment and a few teeny pearls finish my other corners. My image is ... (you know what's coming) popped up on foam dots. I did use a stylus to just slightly round out my image a bit around the edges too.

My teamies have beribboned, buttoned and bowed up some fabulously gorgeous cards... head on over to Send A Smile 4 Kids Challenge to oooh and aaaah over them, then get to crafting and share your kid-friendly cards with us for a chance at those super prizes. Even better, follow the guidelines here and make a couple to send some cheer to a girl or boy of any age who's stuck in hospital on these gorgeous spring days! (And even if it's raining and the world is waterlogged, who wants to be stuck indoors at a hospital?)

Thanks for hanging in for this VLP (very looooong post) and have a crafty week! I will see you all soon!
Christy

PCJ DT Card: Vintage - A (Shabby Chic) Tasty Read

Good morning!

Another (even more) super-quick DT post for me... I have been so distracted by everything going on the last week or so I even spelled "busy" wrong in my last post. (My mother noticed. LOL) I think I meant to type "crazy busy" and just made it one word. LOL  Anyway, it's time again for a new challenge at Paper-Crafting Journey.

The DT had a choice of two great Elizabeth Bell images... I picked A Tasty Read. And then our fearless leader Lisa S. chose VINTAGE as the theme for this challenge. If you remember my very first PCJ DT card, you might also remember that vintage is not really my cup of tea... so I rolled my eyes once (ok, maybe twice) to get it out of my system and got to crafting. My finished card is more in the realm of shabby chic I think...

Again, my original plan got lost in the moment, but the soft green and pink are pretty IRL. And I love that lace ribbon, not to mention a chance to get back to using flowers on my card. =)

Be sure to check out all the challenge details and my teamies' fabulous Vintage/Shabby Chic creations at Paper-Crafting Journey and I will be back soon! And be prepared... after all these short posts, I have lots of chatter all bottled up! LOL

Happy Crafting!
Christy

SAS4K DT Card: For the Boys - Super Kid & Summer Monkey

Hey, everyone! This is going to be a shorter post than my usual... wait, who just yelled "woohoo!"???  Shush!  As I was saying... short post. I'll fill you in later on my buzy week, but I have about 30 minutes to get this done, so to the point I go...

It's time for a new challenge at Send A Smile 4 Kids! This challenge is all about cards FOR THE BOYS. Snips, snails, puppy dog tails...  or in my case a cape and the ol' undies-over-tights outfit and a monkey splish-splashing his way into summer. LOL Our sponsors this week are Karen's Doodles - offering 3 digis, Bugaboo Stamps - 7 digis, and the Stamp Shoppe - a $15 gift certificate.

My first card is a Karen's Doodle image.

I colored first and then fussed forever to find patterned papers. I finally came up with creating the black and white rays in Word. This is third attempt at coloring black and I really like how his outfit came out, at least the real life version (the pic is a little lighter than it looks IRL). Not perfect, but better than I expected, which is always a nice surprise. LOL Elements on this one are Star Nestabilities, EK Success Sticko glitter star and dot stickers, Christmas Red Stickles and a sentiment done on the computer. And my ever-present foam dots.

My second card was not what I started with for this challenge. A last-minute disaster as I was taking photographs on Wednesday involving a cup of tea and a rather large furry doofus I might have mentioned recently who has taken to popping her head out from under the craft table at random moments during my crafting. So... I had to color up a new Bugaboo image and create a whole new card at the last minute! Here's my second card...

I know, I just did a Christmas/winter card with a snowflake, crying over missing the best bits of winter. Ah, well, blame that on my Gemini horoscope as well. haha  If I had to do it over again, I might make the image bigger, but it still is cute! Elements for this one are a Bugaboo image (love this monkey!), an EK Success beachy border punch, I think the wave border punch is also EK Success, more of those EK Success Sticko dots, a blue foot paperclip from the Walmart office supply aisle, papers from DCWV, foam dots (for the image and under the sentiment (which was done in Word) and the painted wooden umbrella from my stash.

I will say I've been experimenting with my coloring a bit more and had a lot of fun with both these images this week. If your mojo isn't chomping at the bit to get started yet, click on over to the SAS4K blog and see what my teamies were up to and get your creative juices flowin'!

Th-Th-Th-Th-That's all, folks!  See you soon and 'til then...

Happy crafting!

Christy

PCJ Challenge DT Card: 3 or More Patterned Papers - Blue Winter

Ok, so it's still Thursday so I'm not technically late to post my Paper-Crafting Journey Challenge DT card... technically. LOL

I was tired last night and so I thought go to bed early, get up early! Noooooo problem. Um, yeah. Total state of denial. Once upon a time I might have gone the way of my father, for whom the crack of dawn is an actual sound... but after nearly four decades, I am clearly my mother's daughter when it comes to sleeping patterns. At least one of my older brothers is the same way. 2 a.m. is prime time. Our brains are hopping, our energy is up and... the rest of the world is dead asleep. Sigh. My brother did the smart thing long ago and moved to NYC, the infamous city that never sleeps. I, however, live in a small town where they roll up the sidewalks at dark. These days supermarkets and Wal-Mart stay open 24 hours while they stock shelves, but it's not like those are really happening places to hang out. Thank goodness for the internet. So getting up in the morning makes no sense to my biological clock. None whatsoever. And I still haven't recovered from the time change when they stole my hour! Even having gone to bed early, I slept through all the early alarms. The last alarm finally managed to wake me and I had no time to spare. Made it to work on time though! LOL Anyway... on to the challenge...

First up, our challenge has moved! The new address is http://papercraftbliss.com/thejourney! Check out the fresh green color and the funky font Lisa has used on the new site. =) And don't forget to follow using either Linky Followers or RSS feed to your Google Reader or other feed manager!

This fortnight our challenge is any paper craft using 3 or more patterned papers! Our sponsor is Robyn's Fetish and they are generously offering our winner FIVE digital stamp images!

I worked on a few different projects, but none of them were really coming together the way I wanted. I was a bit frustrated until I realized what the problem was... I miss glittery snowflakes! There, I said it. We had a blah winter with no snow, no snowmen, no happy days stuck inside during a mini-blizzard drinking hot cocoa and snuggled down with friends and family or at least the fur-kids watching movies, safe and warm at home. And I miss the fun of pre-Christmas crafting with all those glittered snowflakes everywhere. So... here is my first winter/Christmas card for 2012! LOL

I kept it super simple. The papers are all DCWV Winter Stack.  I used a lovely die cut set from Clear Dollar Stamps and layered my snowflake with foam dots over it. The snowflakes are Martha Stewart punches, liberally coated with Stardust and Waterfall Stickles and the gems are Recollections.

Very simple, but very satisfying. And I love blue. It's the color of happy skies and cool waters.  

My other teamies were much more focused this week and they have some really colorful inspiration for you. I particularly love Lisa W's creation this week. Such a great scene made out of patterned papers! You can check them all out at the new site here. Then get busy crafting and show us what you've got! =)

See you soon - happy crafting!

Christy

PCJ DT Card: Jellypark - Photo Inspiration

Greetings, crafters!  Yes, time is flying and it's already time for another challenge at Paper-Crafting Journey!

This week's challenge is a photo inspiration

Photo Source

and our sponsor is Jellypark, home of some really cute digital images!

Before I get to my card for this challenge, I want to mention Jellypark's special stamp collection. 100% of the proceeds from the 2012 sales of their special collection of Fundraising Stamps go to support Little Havens Children's Hospice in the UK. More details about this charitable project and Little Havens can be found at Jellypark here and you can visit the Litte Havens site here. Check them out - super cute stamps and a really great charity! =)

So... my card for this week. Jellypark provided a few images for the design team, but I thought they were so cute I went to check out their site and I fell in love with two of their images and was inspired to create this:

From the photo inspiration, I took the idea of cake (yum!) and originally the colors pink and blue as my main card colors. As my card developed, I ended up replacing the pink dp with a warm yellow, but I've got lots of pink touches, from the cupcake srapper to the pink pearls and the pink in the printed cardstock. All the printed cardstock is from the DCWV stack Sweet and I used a textured white cardstock as the 6"x6" card base.

I immediately saw this sweet little guy as baby brother to this darling little girl with her cupcake. He is part of the set Let's Fly Away that also includes a kite and a balloon. I flipped him in Word and sized him to stand next to his big sister. =) I also bought the Happy Birthday tag. The bunting is from this set.

I colored all my images with Copics. I wanted some texture to my cupcake icing, so I tried Adirondack acrylic paint dabber in Snow Cap. While it was wet I sprinkled a tiny bit of Doodleburg glitter in Bumblebee over it and I added Distress Stickles in Spun Sugar to what looks like a little gumdrop on top of the cupcake.

After I colored and fussy cut all my images, I tucked the birthday tag under the little boy's arm and tied a little bow on the tag with some twine. I did a little embossing, rubbing a large-balled stylus around the back to give a bit of a curve and dimension to the kids and popped them up on foam squares. Then I went a bit crazy with the pearls. I just got a bunch of Hero Arts pearls and I couldn't resist them! Last but not least I added a little silver "M" for Melissa, whose birthday was this week.

I also did a very simple inside using the bunting again and a small image of the Cake Shop. I did a quick coloring for the inside, not trying to be too careful or detailed, almost like an imcomplete watercolor. 

So, there's my Jellypark birthday card... I still love those two kids... so cute! I will definitely be visiting the Jellypark shop and creating some Jellypark magic again. =) 

In the meantime, why don't you head on over to Paper-Crafting Journey and see the other DT cards - they are FABULOUS! 

Have a great couple of days 'til the weekend and I'll see you soon!

Happy Crafting!

Christy