More is More

Just a quick post before I’m out the door to work.  I wanted to share a preview of one of the cards we’ll be making at my Stampin’ Up! Class this Friday night.  The very first thing on my list when I saw this new SU catty was the Medallion stamp and this is the first card I’ve created with it.

I used the clear emboss resist technique on glossy cardstock.  Medallion was stamped in Versamark and heat embossed with clear ep.  I sponged Melon Mambo ink in the center of the design and then brayered Pretty in Pink all over after masking the bottom strip with post it notes.  Card base is Melon Mambo layered with Basic Black cardstock.

Have you been keeping up with all the sneak peeks this week?  Both Our Craft Lounge and Taylored Expressions have tons of eye candy going on.  Thursday is release day for OCL and I believe I read that this release will be available at numerous retailers across the country. Looks like that have a ton of fun sets coming!  Tomorrow is release day for Taylored Expressions and I’ll be back in the morning with a release day project.  TE has two new sets coming out and I’m pretty sure you’re going to really like them – they’re both yummy!

Thanks for stopping by.

 Note:  This is my 2nd post today.  If you are looking for my TECC sample, please scroll down.  Thanks.

This is Day 2 of SCS Dare to Get Dirty ’09.  If you are a SCS Fan Club Member there are a whole host of challenges over 3 days for you to play along with Dirty Girls past and present – click here for all the info.  If you’re not yet a Fan Club Member now is the perfect time to join!  I am thrilled to be a sample maker for Deb Saaranen’s Texture Challenge today.

I made this card for my friend Darla who did so much work to help me paint my kitchen that gorgeous shade of red!  That kind of work is above and beyond the call of friendship so I wanted a special card.  I loved this SU Hostess set, Wings of Friendship, the moment I saw it.  The big bold images on this single stamp are easy to color with SU markers.  Here I used Brocade Blue, Certainly Celery, Ruby Red and So Saffron.  The color combo was inspired by my kitchen colors of red, yellow and blue.  The main image panel was covered with a piece of Sticky Sheet cut the same size as the panel and then covered with clear microbeads.  The microbeads give a wonderful texture and a special sparkle.  I have always loved this simple technique.  Other elements of texture include the cuttlebug embossed background (Floral Fantasy), the distressed edges on the Brocade Blue layer, the clear embossing over the sentiment and the stickles on the scallops around the sentiment.  I added just a bit of both silver and gold outlining with a Zig Painty Pen for that little extra touch.

Home improvement update:  My nearly 50 year old dining table and chairs came back from the refinisher today.  What was an ugly, damaged *french provincial* creamy finish is now a mahogany finish that looks brand new.  Now I just need to get fabric and cover the seat cushions.  The dining set is part of a whole house full of matching furniture that my great-grandmother purchased in the early 60’s.  Many of the pieces have been refinished over the years and this table and chairs were long overdue!  My drapes did not come back from the cleaners as scheduled.  Turns out they are *more complicated* than the guy thought and he needs more time.  No problem – I love having a sheet in my front window…..NOT!  Maybe I’ll go ahead and try to get some pictures for you over the weekend.  Yep – like I said this is going to be an ongoing process for awhile.  I’m going to need to carve out more stamping time!

Thanks for hanging with me.  Have a great weekend!

WooHoo!  We are back to our regular Friday sketches from Taylor!  You can find TECC74 on Taylor’s blog along with her sample and we’d love for you to come and play along!  Today I have a simple card that I had fun really just *playing* with! 

I’m sure it’s no surprise to most of you that my favorite new SU In Color is Melon Mambo.  I’ve been wanting to spend some time playing with the In Colors to find color combos I really like.  For today’s card I decided to work with Melon Mambo and create a color combo with some of the regular colors.  I always love combos of pink, yellow and green so that’s what I decided to work with here.  I ended up with Melon Mambo, Certainly Celery and So Saffron and I LOVE IT!  I wish the photo did it justice, but I think Melon Mambo is going to be one of those colors that I just can’t seem to photograph well.  I have the same problem with Rose Red.  This combo is so much prettier IRL.  I hope you’ll try it out for yourself.

ETA: I had to laugh myself as I was working on this post and hit save to preview it and saw how much the color combo on this card resembles my blog header.  DUH!  Guess I’m just drawn to these colors!  LOL!

The Melon panel is embossed with the Birds and Swirls Cuttlebug folder which works so nicely with this image from the SU set A Flower for All Seasons.  The image is stamped on shimmer white cardstock and watercolored with ink and an aquapainter.  Doodling around the edges is done with a Going Gray SU marker using the fine tip end. 

The sentiment is from the Designer Label set and is stamped twice (in Saffron and Melon) and cut apart and layered onto a celery punch.  This is one of those cards that just makes me grin.

Now let’s see what the rest of the Cupcake Crew has cooked up with today’s sketch:

Carpet installation is due any minute now.  You have no idea how excited I am about that.  We’ve needed new carpet for several years and we’ve chosen a pretty mossy green.  This weekend will be spent putting the house back together and then next week I can start the long process of sorting through all the *stuff* we boxed up to determine what stays and what goes.  It will be so wonderful to have this fresh start.  I promise to post some pictures soon.  Have a fantastic weekend!

Last night was my New Catty Kick Off Night and we had so much fun!  We made two very simple, but really cute cards.  Both were from ideas that other demonstrators had shared.  I’m so appreciative of everyone who shares their creativity on the web.  I always tell my customers that you don’t have to be super creative or original to enjoy stamping as a hobby – there are so many resources for inspiration!

The first card was one I had put into my favorites gallery at Splitcoaststampers and it was created by Dawn Olchefske (dostamping on SCS).  Here’s a link to the original.  Y’all know how much I love to add a pop of black to my cards, so that and the scallops were my tweaks to Dawn’s lovely design.

We actually made this card in a choice of Crushed Curry, Rich Razzleberry or Melon Mambo and we also decorated a white panel for inside the card.  Everyone had their choice of sentiments from Razzle Dazzle or Teeny Tiny Wishes and then could use the oval punches or the modern label punch.  Since the modern label punch only comes in one size, in order to layer it simply take the punched shape to be used as the matting layer and cut it in half horizontally and adhere the two halves to the back of the sentiment.

The second card we made was an idea I had seen in several places, but ultimately I got the pattern from Patty Bennett who credits a couple of other people for the idea.  I’m not one of those out of the box thinkers, so I love it when I see simple things like this!

This adorable dress is made from the scallop circle bigz die with the big shot and then just some simple trimming using Patty’s pattern.  We used various colors of textured cardstock.  I love that the In Colors come in 8.5 x 11 textured cardstock – such a nice option!  Designer paper is Razzleberry Lemonade – yummm! 

Just a quick post today as we need to box up stuff and get everything off the walls in anticipation of the painters getting started on Monday morning.  WooHoo!

Thanks for stopping by.  Hope you have a great weekend!

I had some time to play in my stamp room this morning and what better way to get back in the stampin’ swing of things than to play the SCS weekly Sketch Challenge?  So I printed out the sketch and grabbed some of my new SU In-Color cardstocks and Razzleberry Lemonade designer paper and went looking for a stamp set to fit in.  Cheers to You seemed to be just perfect!

I stamped the three fun drinks on glossy cardstock and colored them with my new In Color markers.  Isn’t it so cool that the In Colors are finally offered as markers?  The sentiment *sweet treats* is from Teeny Tiny Wishes.  I swear that set covers just about everything!  And from what I can tell so far, pretty much all of the sentiments fit into either an oval punch, word window punch or the new label punch.

Nothing fancy to explain here – just a fun, quick card.  Cardstock colors are Crushed Curry, Melon Mambo, Rich Razzleberry.

Home improvement continues as three friends came over last night and helped Curt tear out the carpet in the dining/room office.  They scrubbed the floor with Murphy’s Oil Soap – that stuff ROCKS! – and it looks fantastic.  No refinishing needed.  We are thrilled.  Although I love the look of wood floors, I am a plush carpet gal (I bet that doesn’t surprise you!) so this was a nice compromise.  We’ll have the wood in here and carpet in the rest of the house.  If you have any tips on caring for a wood floor I’m open to hearing them.  I do hope someday to replace the incredibly ugly kitchen vinyl flooring with wood as well.  Unfortunately that’s the one room in the house that doesn’t already have hardwood installed.  That’s not a project for this year.

Thanks for stopping by.

I held a small SU class this afternoon and will have a bigger class tomorrow evening.  While I’m waiting for Curt to arrive home from a business trip to Arizona, I thought I’d pop by and share one of the cards I designed for these classes.  When I was ordering supplies last month, I decided it would be fun to work with the 5″ x 3.5″ note cards on page 157 of the catalog.  Something I’ve been wanting to do for awhile now is create a card using the Sticky Sheets and clear microbeads.  I was thrilled when SU came out with the Sticky Sheets as I had previously purchased them from different sources to create beaded pens, cards and lots of other projects.

I wanted to use one of the 11 stamp sets I have that will be retiring at the end of the month.  I’ve always loved Wild About You and it seemed the perfect choice for this card.  The alligator (Kiwi) and bird (Tangerine) were stamped on Whisper White cardstock and then covered with a piece of Sticky Sheet that had been cut the same size as the cardstock.  Once the protective layer was removed the stamped piece went sticky side down into a tray of clear microbeads.  It’s hard to get a good photo, but this looks so neat-o in person!  Patterned paper is the Kiwi Kiss Patterns dsp and it’s layered onto Tangerine Tango that was punched with the scallop edge punch.  Super easy card with a WOW result!  I’ll be back in a day or two to share the rest of my class projects.

Please be sure to stop by tomorrow for Cupcake Friday and to play the TECC sketch along with us!

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I have another SUO card to share with you today. This one features Baja Breeze, Kiwi Kiss, Pink Pirouette and Vanilla to showcase the stamp set Friends 24-7.  The layout from this card comes from page 22 of the Stampin’ Up! catalog.  I added some Kiwi corduroy brads.  The huge scallop border is acheived with a 1/4″ circle punch.  I think this card is pretty self-explanatory.

One of my favorite tricks to teach new stampers (works great for seasoned stampers who need a kick in the mojo too!) is to find a card layout in the catalog (like this one from page 22), then find a color combo from somewhere else in the catalog (like this one from page 53) and then use a stamp set you have that’s not pictured on either of those pages.  This takes away a lot of the guess work in the design of your card, but still gives you something brand new and unique!  This is why our catalogs are called the Idea Book & Catalog!  🙂

Speaking of which….I placed my Demonstrator Sneak Peek Pre-order last night.  I’ve NEVER expedited shipping on an SU order before, but I did for this one.  I don’t know what got into me!  *giddies*  I’m going to need to read up on the SU rules (I can never keep it straight) about what can be shared before July 1st when the new IB&C goes live and what has to wait.  A note to my customers:  Remember that if you want the special pre-order price of $7 for a new catalog you must pay me by June 13th.  After that they will be the regular price of $10.

I’ve got to get ready for work.  Thanks for stopping by!