Mother's Day 2015

Here's a quick card I created for Mother's Day...

The bicycle is embossed and painted with a watercolor pen.  I'm still partial to clean & simple cards, as you can tell.  All supplies are old CTMH - I haven't bought anything since my consultant days, and I'm determined to use a bunch of things up before I make new purchases.

It's nice to be back in the papercrafting world!

H2H - Polka Dots & Stripes

This week at Heart 2 Heart we're playing with polka dots & stripes.  My first thought was the Dotty For You paper pack - of course!  I took a moment to look at the inspiration projects, and found the inspiration for a Mother's Day card.

This is the specific item I based my creation on: 

I liked the circles on the layout and how the title worked with it.  So I pulled out my 1.25" circle punch and used it to punch out pieces of patterned paper.  Then I had the Cricut crank out a bunch of 1.5" Colonial white circles.

I spent FOREVER laying out the circles to get them to look just the way I wanted them to.  It was a lot trickier than I expected!  Some arrangements just did *not* look right.

To embellish I used a few brads & buttons and a pair of flowers.

I really like the original inspiration layout, and might give that a try sometime, too.  At least I won't have to mess around with the circles again - Close To My Heart has them perfectly arranged and it would be easy enough just to duplicate what they did.

A little dotty, a little stripey...hope you enjoy it!

H2H - April Showers Bring May Flowers

This week at Heart 2 Heart we're playing around with flowers!  I have so many flower stamps and there are so many possibilities with the Art Philosophy Cricut cartridge, that I didn't know where to begin.  I've been seeing a lot of "rainbow" creations lately, and that provided the inspiration for my card.

I started by stamping the same flower from the Card Word Puzzle Stamp Set 5 times and cutting them all out.  I knew I wanted to cut the front of the card a little short and let the flower petals hang over the edge. Next I pulled out that popular Dotty For You Paper Packet and created the vertical bars.

I pulled out some of my older stamp sets to create the sentiment, which I stamped on a shape from the Art Philosophy Cricut cartridge.  One Mother's Day card down, one to go!  I hope you decide to join in the fun of this week's challenge at H2H!

Happy Mother's Day

Here are some photos of the most beautiful Mother's Day card ever.  Handmade cards really are the best, aren't they?

 

Dragonfly Mother's Day Card

I made this card for my Mom for Mother's Day.  She's a quilter, and a fan of dragonflies.  This card sort of incorporates the two.  The dragonfly was cut from the Stamping Cricut cartridge.  To give it a "quilty" sort of feel, I added the stitches around the edges with marker.  Behind the cut-out, I used a technique called "Iris Folding", where you layer strips of folded paper working from the edges of the design into the center.  It sort of gives the paper a quilted look.

You can find out the details of this technique at the bottom of this post.  Layering all that folded paper does add a little bulk, but not as much as I feared.  I covered the back side (which is on the inside of the card) with the butterfly B&T paper from the Wings Paper Pack.  I think the "busy"ness of the paper conceals the thickness of those folds really well.  You don't even notice it!

To finish off the front, I made an accordian flower and paired it with some Just Blooms flowers.  The tag is something I created using the Unity stamp set for the background and the Tiny Typewriter alphabet to write "Mom".

I wasn't a huge fan of the Wings paper before this, but the green and black seemed perfect for this card. 

Edited to add:  Paper Cutz Challenge link & H2H link.

Info on the Iris Folding Technique follows.  

Recycle, Reuse, Repurpose...

This is an interesting challenge at H2H this week.  Basically you're supposed to craft with something that you'd normally just throw away.  At first I had a mental block with this, and decided to work on next week's challenge instead (which I can't wait to share!).  Eventually inspiration hit.  Here's a clue as to what I used:

Recognize it?  My recycled item is the chipboard sheet that holds chipboard embellishments before you punch them out and use them.  I think this particular sheet is the Pizazz Irresistibles.  I started with a piece of White Daisy cardstock and heat embossed in white an image of random stamping from Playful Flourishes.

Next I took the chipboard sheet and used it like a stencil on top of the embossing.  I sponged flowers and leaves in Hollyhock, Smokey Plum, and Pear.  It looked like this when I was finished.

If you ever decide to try this, have some scraps of cardstock handy to mask around the image you are sponging.  The images on the chipboard sheet are really close together, and it's easy to inadvertently sponge the image next to the one you intended to sponge.  To finish turning trash to treasure, I used some Pear and Hollyhock scraps from my last card to finish trimming out this one.  On top of the ribbon are two purple Sparkles.  The sentiment is attached with dimensional adhesive.

This turned out to be a lot of fun.  I like the watercolor-y look to the background I created.  Thanks again for the inspiration, H2H!