Snowflake Peace Card

Hi, Stampin' Friends! I didn't mean to take last month off, lol, but life is what it is. I feel like this year has been a big year of change for me. Without change, there cannot be butterflies, and I sure do love butterflies...I appreciate your patience with me, Stampin' Friends, as I work my way through this cocoon. Getting my paws inky again always feels so good!

This week's Atlantic Hearts Sketch Challenge sketch is a cute one! I love working with sketches - it's like coloring with your supplies. Today I combined the new Boutique papers with the Winter Flurries Thin Cuts. I did the snowflake using the Sugarplum Glitter paper and it cut like buttah! Don't get me wrong - I LOVE my Cricut machine, but it sure was nice to just pop out an intricate snowflake with no fuss. I mounted it on a stitched circle cut and topped it with some silver thread, a button from my stash, and a Sugarplum Glitter Gem.

The silver embellishing thread add such a nice subtle touch of sparkle. I used the zip strip to pop a sentiment onto this card, topping it with a single word from the Christmas Bingo stamp set. I added just a couple dots of glitter gel to finish off the design and balance that large sparkly snowflake. This is a great sketch for using up scraps for sure! I hope you'll pop over to Atlantic Hearts to play along this week!

Sawdust is Man Glitter Card

Ready to shake up my girlie, floral obsessed, glittery blog with another masculine card today? If not, look away! Never mind - I still found a way to add glitter!

So I'm making cards with Jack-Scrapbooking, and, duh, it has no card sentiments. I really like goofiness. Like super duper love punny or silly card sentiments. And if I don't have a funny card sentiment, I will make my own! That's one of the joys of stamping - complete and total control. this one I made with a retired set called Tiny Typewriter. I hoard save all my fonts forever and ever, because you never know when you'll need them again.

I used my Fuse tool to create a pocket for the "sawdust", which is a combo of brown, red distress, and white glitters with a big pinch of mica flakes. I kept the rest of the details simple, inspired by the clean and simple masculine card by Tracey McNeeley over at the MUSE Card Club challenge. I only added one tiny kraft element like Tracey's kraft stripe, but couldn't resist just a bit of penwork. This is about as clean and simple as my embellishment loving heart could manage!

Sparkling New Year Hop!

Welcome to the Blog Hops with Heart Sparkling New Year Hop! You might be arriving here from STEPHANIE'S BLOG. This month we are featuring any project with SPARKLE...so for me that meant glitter all the things!

I scored this sparkly gold heart in the Target Dollar spot for just $3. It was already glittery and gold, though my Target also had pink and mint colors too. I used strips of Shimmer Trim (and red glitter gel because somehow I'm out?) to create the rainbow band. The shimmer trim strips made it pretty easy to create even stripes. 

Then I pulled retired Fundamentals stickers and old chipboard resist letters from my overflowing box of letters I can't seem to let go of and added that sentiment. Instead of inking the resist letters I filled them in with sparkly diamond glitter gel. I coated the black plain letter stickers with Liquid Glass so they too could be as shiny as everything else on this wall decor piece. I'm linking this project up to the Heart 2 Heart Silver and Gold Challenge and the Paper Issues Stash Busters Challenge.

Next up on the hop is SHELLY'S BLOG. Be sure to stop by all these amazing blogs to soak up all the sparkly goodness!

Sweet Birthday Glitter Cupcake Card

So I know I've blogged a lot of cupcake cards this fall...but seriously there's always something new that makes me want to put a cupcake on it!

In this case I was working on this week's Freshly Made Sketches challenge. The main image was drawn as a circle, but I went with the Sweet Birthday cupcake, natch. I stamped the cuppie on a panel of white cardstock, then I die cut the image out of a separate panel of cardstock and layered that on top to inset the stamped image for a bit of depth. I used Shin Han alcohol markers to color some white cardstock for the stamped banner detail, trimming that colored paper to 1/4 inch and highlight the sentiment.

That black and white paper needed somethin' somethin', so I used glitter gel in a rainbow of colors to turn it from black and white to rainbow ombre. Then I used the same gels to fill in the dots of the cupcake liner, Since that wasn't enough glitter yet, I patted some transparent prisma glitter gel for sprinkles over the cuppie's top before adding the big wiggly eyes. I used some pink chalk to add a little color to his sweet cheeks. Happy Sparkly Monday, Stampin' Friends!

Merriest Christmas Card

I had such a good time this weekend! Between our Gilmore Girls extravaganza on Saturday and the holiday Card Buffet on Sunday, my friendship cup is overflowing. Today I sat down at my table and let the happy sparkle flow through...

This card is based on the new sketch over at Atlantic Hearts Sketch Challenge. I painted a panel of watercolor paper with wine and green paints. Then I sponged on some Extreme Glitter acrylic paint in gold. I layered on some Kraft CS and Enchantment Fundamentals. 

I stamped my sentiment (shh! That set is retired.) and embossed the MERRIEST word with gold glitter embossing powder. Stars and snowflakes were stamped and embossed using that same glittery powder. It's not the cleanest embossed look, but it sparkles so in the light! I ran some of that glitter acrylic paint around the edges of my card front before I glued it all together. My hands are a glittery, painty mess, but my heart is happy.  

Count Your Blessings Card

I feel like my photography skills have failed my card for this week's Atlantic Hearts Sketch Challenge.

It has so much sparkle and shine in real life. I took a bazillion pics, from all kinds of angles. I need a crash course in how to photograph glitter people. I was inspired in my color choices by this week's ColourQ challenge. I grabbed some of the new basics kraft dot, and some Cocoa textured cardstock to make the Lagoon and Sunset colors pop! This stamp set is called With You.

I sanded the cardstock, then painted on some Folk Art gold extreme glitter paste, which I then sprinkled with some chunky gold glitter. Can you see that sparkle? The ribbon is a subtle gold shimmer too, but my sad photography skills could get shimmery ribbon or some of the glitter but not both, and nothing like the real life bling. Does anyone know how to do this better? Am I lighting it too much? Not enough? Perhaps I needed to add MORE glitter! Probably not... 

In any case, check out the sketch over at Atlantic Hearts, and I hope you'll play along too!

Party Hats Sweet Birthday Card

I've been making a lot of cards lately using Sweet Birthday, but I hadn't yet inked the cute birthday hat. I fixed that problem right up yesterday when I was making cards for card buffet all day long. 

I was using the CASE this Sketch Challenge as inspiration, so at first I kept trying to only fit in two rows of hats. Eventually I gave into three rows and I'm a much happier cardmaker. I colored the hats very simply with turquoise and yellow Shin Han Markers, and mounted them onto some (retired) Wings sweet leaf patterned paper, using the color palette from this week's Color Throwdown.

I popped up the hats with thin foam tape. All the yellow bits on the hats got a layer of sparkly glitter gel, as did the sequins along the bottom of the sentiment. I used a journaling pen to outline the card and add a bit of zig zag detail to the sentiment banner. 

I managed to make six cards yesterday and cut sixty for the card buffet in September, all while my sweet hubby played with the boys and caught up our laundry pile. Now I'm ready to face the last week before school starts! Did you make anything this weekend? 

Life is Better with Friends Frame

One of my favorite parts of traveling with my team for Convention each year is the exchanging roomie gifts. I often make something for all my traveling ladies instead of just my roommates, because it's just too much fun!

This year we are in Orlando, so I went with a gold glittered Flamingo frame! You might remember me posting on Instagram a week ago about running out of gold glitter....now you can see why.

I used the new Tickled Pink stamp set, which has a coordinating set of Thin Cuts dies. I also gave up a bit of my wide gold stripe hoard from the May Happy Times special. That's how they know I really {heart} them! I can't wait to pass these out to my peeps today!

Real Sweet Happy Times Card

Hi, Stampin' Friends! I've been a little absent lately, partly because I've been sick with the allergies (boo!), and partly because I've been finishing up my stamp studio(yay!!). I'll have a post on the space later after I finish up the last bit here, and then I plan to get my craft on more often again!

Today I'm sharing my take on the new sketch over at Atlantic Hearts Sketch Challenge. This is the first time I cut into this adorable Happy Times paper, and I already want more! The stamps from my card are also part of the Happy Times special. I inked, rolled, and stamped the individual flower pieces, then assembled using thin foam tape. It was a good sick-on-the-couch project!

I added a giant gold glitter dot to my center flower and dabbed some tiny gold glitter gel dots around the completed floral spray. It would be real Sweet if you hopped over to AHSC to play along this week!

Scrap Much?! Heart This Man Layout

So last year, when we still lived in Spokane, Becky Higgins Hide and Seek came to our town! I went out and about with Max that day, hoping that I'd be close by to wherever the stash was announced. My husband thought I was mildly nutty, and told me he had a busy morning of meetings so he could not "help me cover downtown." Ahem. Of course, when the post went live, I was fifteen minutes away at Michaels on the east side (priorities), and the drop was like 2 blocks from his office. I texted him my wail of grief, then set off for downtown in case no one else in Spokane was a) a scrapbooker and b) an instagrammer. John hopped off his meeting to trot over to the park and nabbed the prize. Even better (perhaps not in his world view, but still..) he got to meet Stacy Julian, who said that she knew he must be a scrapping husband by the way he entered the park (in his engineer wear) headed in a beeline for the Big Red Wagon with no child in sight. That's him on the Becky Higgins Insta feed, and he graciously shared "his" prize with me! 

I used so many lines for this week's new Scrap Much? sketch. There's some Crate Paper Confetti in there, some Simple Stories Heart, a bit of Authentique Woodgrain, plus gold foiled dot and chevron washi tapes. That diagonal woodgrain with the hints of aqua is so gorgeous! I'm linking this page up to the Paper Issues Into the Woods Issue.

My new favorite gold BoBunny Glitter paste joined in the fun too - it looks fab against that textured black cardstock! The Simple Stories stickers look like gold glitter too. I trimmed that diamond motif out of a 4x6 card. I also added some gold and black Fundamentals stickers. I used white pigment ink to stamp tiny letters onto the black glitter circles to complete my title. I finished off with a scattering of the teensiest gold Pretty Pink Posh sequins. 

Here's the sketch - now go forth and create!

My Gilmore Girls BFF

This is another page I did in my Gilmore Girls Crush Book swap. This book is the Bluebird book, and a lot of the My Crush line is less than five bucks on my website right now.

I added a big swipe of gold BoBunny glitter paste under the pre-printed photo frame. Then I layered on my journaling strips (1/4" strips are my fav!) and lots of doo dads from Zoe, Penelope, and the City Limits Instalife cards. 

I used my flat brush to add gold glitter paste around the edge of the photo, and lined the photo edge with teensy tiny Pretty Pink Posh sequins. I bought these bitty guys in black and gold up in Seattle, and I needs all the colors now! I've got scrapper's remorse now (sob!). When in doubt....buy the sequins, ok? 

Day 314: January SOTM Blog Hop

Welcome to the January Stamp of the Month Blog Hop! This month we are featuring Beloved Bouquet, a gorgeous set of 14 images. I never can have too many flower stamps! You may be arriving here from NANCY'S BLOG. The complete hop list can be found here. Let's hop!

I was inspired for this project by a stunning layout I saw on Instagram by Jessy Christopher-Tham. She does amazing work, and I thought that the January SOTM would look lovely in place of the die cut flowers she used so beautifully. I used the stripe from La Vie en Rose, embossing with white powder the triangles from Crazy Good. I used Slate ink to stamp the floral spray (in a circle on the right) and the sentiments from the January SOTM. 

I got my 5x5 prints from Parabo Press, and they are so nice and thick! I trimmed the top of a gold PML overlay card into 1/4" strips so I could line two of the sides of my square print. Then I filled in the remaining two sides with so, so much gold glitter gel. Dude, it might still be slightly wet even next week. I patted some glitter gel over the white embossed triangles too, because more glitter is always good in my book. The flowers were stamped onto sanded colored cardstock. I inked only the outline images using the lightest color (like Canary or Whisper) and tapping on bolder colors here and there (Slate and Pomegranate). Then I sanded again and brushed on some Wink of Stella for extra shimmer.  

Next up on the hop is NINA'S BLOG. Don't forget that this lovely set of blooms is only available in the month of January, so contact your consultant or click here to pick your Beloved Bouquet  today!

My other January SOTM projects:
Thinking of You Card

Day 309: No Way Dude Congrats Card

I'm in the process of cleaning off my desk, hoping for a fresh start with the new year. While I was cleaning up I found this Crazy Good set that CTMH gave us at the Album Retreat...and I got a little distracted from my tidy time.

I still have the CAS(E) this Sketch challenge kicking around in my head, and this seemed like a perfect stamp set for that. I stamped the triangle background using Pear Ink, working from first to second generation for an ombre effect. I was only going to do a band across the middle but I couldn't stop, lol. Then I layered on the sentiments using black ink. I framed the card front with green shimmer trim and added a quick pen outline to the card front. 

I popped up a few of the sentiments with thin 3-d foam tape onto White Daisy cs banners which I edged with black journaling pen. Then I added some shimmer gel pen to the DUDE, and enamel glitter triangles to either side of the DUDE. 

This card is going into my card stash, which is seriously depleted since I sent almost everything I've made since July over to Jacobsen's Books in Hillsboro, Oregon. Tina has the cutest little book store and she's kind enough to carry my handmade cards there, so if you need a card, some books, or just a friendly smile, stop by there and check out her awesome shop. I order almost all my books through her instead of my beloved Amazon Prime, because she's so awesomesauce!

Day 303: Easy Glitter Monogram Gift Tags

I live in a house full of boys. When it comes to holiday traditions, the boys care deeply about Christmas cookies and visiting Santa to drop off their list of demands share their wish lists. No one but me wants to decorate for the holidays. No one but me is happy about the new jammies on Christmas Eve tradition. No one but me cares how the presents are wrapped.  

Since no one else cares, I tend to go very simple and utilitarian on most of the gift wrapping. It breaks my heart a bit, because I'd love to go all fancy on the wrapping doo dads, but since everything gets unwrapped in 3.2 seconds flat, it makes more sense to chill on the frills. Items are wrapped with an easily read tag to show who gets to tear off the paper. No bows, no ribbons, no carefully crafted pretty paper tags that they will scrunch into a ball. But the Santa present...now that gets a bit of care. Extra hooplah and ribbons and specially crafted tags...but not too much like my normal style, because we can't out Santa due to excessive CTMH stamp usage.  

This year I found these inexpensive monogram letters at Target. They are thicker than chipboard, but pretty lightweight. I wanted to jazz them up a bit, so I coated them with Paper Mod Podge and a thick, chunky silver glitter, with an extra layer of mod podge to seal in the glittery goodness. Now they are so fabulous and sparkly! Better yet, the boys can add them to the Christmas tree as ornaments once they are done with presents this year, because they love monogram holiday ornaments (or anything with their name/initial that they can claim only they have the right to hang on the tree). Only four more sleeps!

Day 265: Sharing the Story Album Retreat Layout

This was one of the simpler layouts we put together, but it had two really cool techniques.

First the title. We painted blue ombre watercolors onto a panel of watercolor paper, which then went behind the Cricut title cut into the base page. My friend Linnea used score tape to really stick down her title, and I think it looked a lot neater than my finished title. It was fun to freehand that ombre color panel though!

Secondly, we used these hexagon stamps in a fun way. Instead of stamping and fussy cutting six hexagons, we just snipped three of them, not really in half, more like 2/3 - 1/3 but the bottom line is we used the same three hexagons as embellishments on both pages, which I thought was really smart.

Also, here's my tip for cutting shimmer trim in half the long way with no fuss and bother. First snip your trim to any length up to twelve inches. Then use washi tape to hold the shimmer trim in place on your paper trimmer, centered with 1/4" on each side of the trimmer track. Trim down through the center, cutting right through the washi tape for perfect 1/4" strips of shimmer trim!

Day 141: Convention Contest Layout

Each year at convention there's a big Layout Contest. This year's theme was Make It From Your Heart. I thought long and hard about how I wanted to express that theme, before taking a little bit of everything I love and putting it into one layout.

For the background I cut and sanded strips of Black Cardstock, then created the bold black stripes. I had seen this pic of a wedding bouquet on Pinterest and I wanted to turn that into a scrapbook page. I used this 2011 layout from a now defunct blog as a sketch of sorts, since I basically wanted to create my own B&T bar filled with pics of the artwork that I've made from my heart. I used Blossom and Chalk It Up B&Ts for that picture bar.

I cut the title from Gold Glitter paper using the Artiste cartridge font. I popped up the bigger letters using the Thin 3-D foam tape - this is my favorite foam tape ever! The first time I got it was on accident, because I hadn't realized we were carrying two widths of foam tape, and now I can't live without it. I added a ton of hand stitching in Gold thread using our Stitch Ruler.

I struggled with journaling this page a bit. It's hard to put into words why you love what you do sometimes. For me, I make things not just because it's fun, or glitter is cool, but because this craft allows me to spend time reflecting on the good in my life. Family. Friends. Love. Joy. Happiness. My life isn't perfect, but it's perfect for me. This craft renews my heart and makes me a better mom, wife, sister, and friend. It's like counting your blessings every time I make a page.  

Of course, I also find the process of creating pretty things from nothing but some white paper, ink, and water pretty fascinating. You can check out my Rolled Flower Tutorial for the lowdown on how I did these watercolor paper flowers. I find it so satisfying to create something from simple materials. 

Finally, instead of a banner I actually added my business card to this side of the layout. I usually put my class schedule on the back, but after my move I haven't started a regular schedule again yet. So this time I chose a quote.

I won't lie - this layout took me a while to finish. It was a labor of love, pure and simple.