The luggage is IN the building!

YAY!YAY!YAY! My luggage has returned and I am one happy chick! Except someone filled it with dirty clothes that I now have to wash. Dang, I was hoping that the airport would have taken care of that for me. NOSUCHLUCK! :)

I am doing the multi-task cleaning thing tonite (sorry for saying the "C" word), because I can't stand my pigsty of a house any more. Thankfully I have cards from a month ago in my blog file that I have not gotten around to posting! I found the cutest little birthday cake stamp by "Studio G" at Crafts Direct in St. Cloud, for $1.49! I think it actually is a wedding cake but I cut the 2 little love birdies off the top and replaced it with hearts and jewels.

I had just gotten my Eclectic Paperie order in that weekend, and ripped into my Cosmo Cricket Little Girls Biography Collection paper. I love these paper packs because they come with lots of little embellishments and journaling papers. I used the journaling papers for my focal images and stamped the cake right over the notebook paper lines. I cranked out the birthday cards that weekend with my Copics & my buck stamps!!

Trying not to let Northwest Ruffle my Feathers

I am home! And I am LUGGAGE-LESS! I thought this would be an appropriate card to post tonight, while I'm sitting here waiting for Northwest Airlines to deliver my luggage. Apparently my bag had a different itinerary than I did yesterday when I flew home, & it's now touring the country without me. I hope it brings me back some good souvenirs.

This is one of the brand spanking new Crafty Secrets sets that was just released at CHA, called "Bird Lovers". This set is SO interactive! So many of the stamps in this set coordinate together, so that you can come up with your own fun scenes. I love that it comes with both a small egg and an extra-large ginormous egg, for humorous cards. For this card I used a combination of Copic markers and watercoloring...the bird, egg & nest are colored with Copics, but I used an aquapen and soft sky ink , to give a fading/sky effect to the background. The papers are from Crafty's Radiant paper pad. The corners are punched out using my new SU photo corner punch. I love that thing!

I also wanted to give you a heads up that we have a new guest designer this month over at the Crafty Secrets Gallery! Michelle Kovack (Chelemom) is dazzling us with her beautiful eye candy!

Also, you have to check out the unbelievable box that Pam Hooten just posted to the gallery with the birdlovers set. I'm speechless!

Crafty Secrets Sweet Kids Cards

They're almost here! Sandy from Crafty Secrets just posted that she should be receiving the brand new "Sweet Kids", "Flourishes" and "Bird Lovers" sets in this Monday! I have been on a "Thank You" card kick lately, so the sweet kids set worked PERFECTLY with the "Thanks a bunch" sentiment!

I stamped the girl images with Brilliance Black Ink, heat set it and then colored in the images with my Copic markers.

The large swirl on these cards is from Crafty's "Flourishes" set. Here's the cool thing. Because they Copics give out such brilliantly bright color, it's easy to get them to show up, even on dark paper. I stamped the large swirl directly onto ruby red Stampin Up paper, and then just colored in the leaves and flowers with Copics.

At a make and take at CHA, Ranger was showing us how to doodle with their new opaque white Inksentials pens...so I used it here in a similar way. I doodled over the top of the swirl with the white pen to make the flowers and leaves just pop off the paper.



Well, I'm off to a meeting in Nashville, TN tonite so I'll be missing in action for a few days. Hope everyone has a wonderful, snow-free weekend! Did you guys know daylight savings time is March 9th? Spring is on the way!!!!



L.

A note of love!

Yippie! My SU order came tonite from my awesome demo!!! I'm sad to say it was mostly stocking up on cardstock, but I did get 2 of the new sell-a-bration sets with it! I had to order that cool photo corner punch too. I love using corners on my cards so much, that I HAD to make the splurge. I know this is something I will use a lot. This card was done using the Sale-a-Bration sets called "Merci" & "Lots-of-Thoughts". I cut the bottom thought off of the sentiment "Note of Love"....I think it's supposed to be a wedding sentiment because the bottom line of it says "happily ever after". Since I'm older than dirt & don't have many weddings going on anymore, I think I'll get more use out of it without that last line, so I can use it on all-occasion cards. Patterned paper is by "Tres Jolie", Ooh-la-la, Just perfect flowers. I doodled the outline of the card and the flower stems using swirly lines, then colored them in with Copic Markers.

Speed-Stamping, Lana-style!

Here are some more cards I did speed-stamping this weekend! These were based on a card Lana Lepinski did HERE. I finished close to 30 cards this weekend by cranking them out this way! This is an old Stampin Up set called "Sassy Stems"...I use it a lot for thank-you cards. I put the front of the card in my cuttlebug "textile" embossing folder, and then distresed the top with Creamy Caramel ink, to turn it brown. The paper is from Basic Grey's "Blush" line from last year. I didn't have the punch that makes a notebook paper type edge to the card, so I improvised and made my own with a crop-o-dile and a rectangle punch. Here's how I did it:



Set the guide on the side of your crop-o-dile to the depth that you want to punch the notebook holes. This will ensure that you get the holes in a straight line across your paper.






Punch a row of holes along the paper edge. (I eye-balled it, but you could use a ruler and mark off the increments if you wanted.)







Take the little flap that catches the punches off the back of your rectangle punch, so that you can see where the punch will line up.








Punch rectangles directly underneath the holes that you just punched. Continue across the paper.

Add the paper to your cards!

I must be on a bug kick.

This weekend, online friend Bevie Pearl issued a "speedstamping" challenge for a group of friends to replenish our card stashes! The challenge was to stamp quickly and get stuff done! I bumped the challenge up a notch and challenged each person to make at least 5 cards with 5 different simple layouts that I chose, for a total of 25 cards in 3 days. This layout was based on a card done by Carol Halvorson HERE. I chose cards that had minimal layers...although I love the look of cards that have tons of layering on them, for mass production it helps to use less layers so that you can quickly crank them out. I've loved these Papertrey ladybugs since I first got them in my hands. They make for QUICK cards! Stamp stamp, patterned paper, DONE! The patterned paper is by Cosmo Cricket, Jitterbug collection. I love that the flowers from this paper match the flowers in the Papertrey Little Lady set PERFECTLY! The patterned flowers are by Making Memories, "Chelsea's Place" patterns.

You can check out more speedstamping challenge cards on Lana Lepinski's blog & Kookie Kopp's, also!

The bugs are back in town!

ZOWIE, it's a double whammy Crafty Secrets Sketch challenge marathon for me! Darlene just posted the next card challenge over at the Crafty Secrets forum at Splitcoaststampers! This week the pinup girl is Carla (Stargirl) from Splitcoast! Her awesome layout & spring-themed card is our starting point for the challenge HERE! Come play with us if you love vintage & want to get your Crafty Secrets vintage mojo going!

The bugs here are celebrating around a big MUSHROOM....hey, I wonder if it's my Mom's mushroom from the cabin! Here I turned it yellow so it would match the green paper from Crafty's Earthy pad. I've always thought of this paper as Christmas/winter, but if you pair it up with yellow, BINGO! Spring! I drew the candles on the mushroom with a Copic Multiliner pen. At a Copic get-together that I attended at CHA, we had an opportunity to ask Marianne (from Copic) questions. I wanted to know what type of pen I could buy that would not bleed out with the Copic alcohol markers. Turns out they sell a pigment pen called a "multiliner", that is waterproof & copic proof. I got the .3 tip because it felt best to me, not too thick, not too thin. I used it this weekend for doodling and FINALLY get how to doodle ...you have to have the right tools! Ahem. I'm only about a year behind that trend. I also use this to fill in black areas of my image that didn't quite stamp off perfectly or dark enough (DUE TO USER ERROR, of course!)