Spring cards in my mind....

Even tough it is the middle of the winter, I cannot help but creating spring themed cards already.

these 2 cards are using Six-sided sampler stamp set and the matching hexagon punch, the butterfly punch and some silver metallic thread. 

The colours on these cards are: Smokey Slate, Wisteria Wonder, Mint Macaroon and Pink Pirouette. The cards have exactly same pieces, but they are organized a bit differently.

Going global without getting lost

I love to travel! And I love everything related to travelling, like the new Stampin'Up! stamp set Going Global, the matching designer series pack and embossing folder.

The funny thing is, though, that I have hard time making any cards with these travel related stamp sets! I find them easy to use with scrapbooking, but for cards....

I guess I associate it for travel, and since I seldom make a card for anyone for 'bon voyage', I'm trying to associate them more with masculine cards.

The colours are Island Indigo, Soft Sky, Early Espresso and Calypso Coral.

I ruffeled some Early Espresso seam binding under the chevron ribbon and added a bit of lace on top. The sentiment is stamped with Early Espresso and mounted on top of a Calypso Coral punched out with washi tape punch.

The big dibber is from Going Global stamp set also, and I used Encore gold ink with golden embossing powder.

Sale-a-bration glitter tape - oh wow!

As of February 16th, Stampin'Up! added some new sale-a-bration items. These are available as long as supplies last and you can get them only by placing an order. Every $60 earns you one free sale-a-bration item.





I fell in love with this glitter tape!
The package contains 3 tape rolls: one golden, one silver and one white/clear, which you can actually ink with a sponge to any colour you want! Say what!!!???

In the first card I used the golden tape. The stamp set is Build a Birthday and the colours used are Bermuda Bay, Pumpkin Pie and Strawberry Slush.

The second card is using only clear/white glitter tape
The top one is inked with Pear Pizzazz, the second has no added ink and the bottom piece is inked with Smokey Slate.

The pattern paper is actually from last falls Holiday Catalogue, but to me it looked a bit like willow branches, which work perfectly for an easter card.

And you might ask, how did I get that sheep cut out so sharply?? I purchased a die matching this stamp set from Dave Guy. He makes dies to match Stampin'Up! stamps that don't have a die created by Stampin'Up!

The third card has no glitter tape, but is using the same stamp as the above one, it is from the spring Occasions catalogue and is called Easter Lamb. Again, the lamb is partly cut out with the framelit die by Dave Guy. And the flowers are from Sheltering Tree stamp set.

Work of Art - that's what this stamp set truly is!

You might have seen me use this stamp set fairly often. It's just that it is so versatile. I love the brush stroke look of the stamps!

The colours used in the card are So Saffron, Tangelo Twist, Lost Lagoon, Tip Top Taupe and Memento Mall Black ink.

This card was inspired by Marsha Lavoie and we made this at my friends party. My first draft was this rounded corner one (I personally don't care for the rounded corner look, but I happened to have the So Saffron layer pre-cut and pre-rounded, so I figured I'd use that and ended up rounding all the layers.)

So I decided to make a second version, same, but using straight corners and I also switched the orange layer into Tangelo Twist (the original was Pumpkin Pie, but I realized I don't have a new foam ink pad version of that same ink, so I needed to switch the colour)

The third version was made to display the new Thick Whisper White card stock. It's a really nice material to use as a card base without any layers.

Other stamp sets used in these cards are Sprinkles of Life (greeting) and Wetlands (birds).

Couple of new gadgets in my studio

As some of you might know, I'm working on starting my own online craft store in the next little while. Yes, I know that is very broad expression, but I have no exact launch date set. I still need to work on to create more items to display on my store (ETSY based). For this, I needed to get some new gadgets for my craft studio.

First, I needed a photo cube. A 15"x15" light box, where I can take better pictures. Okay, this limits the size of objects I can photograph but I'm working on a set up to take pictures of larger items than the cube allows (toddler dresses tend to be longer than 15"....), but the cube should house my nursery mobiles.

Foldio - foldable studio from Photojojo

The cube has 2 LED light strips at the top and the brightness is easily adjustable. The cube also comes with 4 back drops: white (shown in the picture), green, black and grey.

Some of the images in my previous posts have been taken in this cube. The light reduces shadows and gives a neutral background for the object. I love my new 'Foldio'.

An other gadget I needed, was a drill guide. For the life of me, I cannot drill straight holes in wood :-)
the drill always goes here and there. I did find a drill guide from Lee Valley, that would guide my existing power drill straight down, but that's all it would do for me. So I did some research and ended up ordering a Dremel 'mini drill' and a matching stand from Amazon.
Note: the prize of a smaller Dremel drill from HomeDepot would have been approx. the same price and the stand would have been double price. These shipped from Montreal for FREE!

The drawback with Dremel is that I can only drill small holes (at least I haven't been able to find larger drill bits for it yet), but I can make the holes (that are now straight!) larger with my regular drill. What Dremel gives more, is all the other features like cutting and sanding!

So give me few days, and I can display some items I have made with this Dremel :-)

I scream for ice cream!

Okay, my FAVOURITE treat is... you guessed it... ice cream! I love Italian Gelatto and I find Finnish ice cream is pretty close - Gelatto is milk based and also in Finland you get a much larger variety of milk based ice cream (rather than cream based).

So, to get back to crafting... I just loved making these two cards - both with ice cream ;-)

The colours on on the first one are Rose Red, Whisper White, Soft Suede and Crumb Cake. The patterned paper is from Love Blossoms Designer Series Paper Pack (from the new Occasions catalogue) and the stamp set is Sprinkles of Life. 
The Ice cream part is punch out with the matching punch set. I also used a little bit of 'the Wink of Stella' on the ice cream highlight spots to add some sparkle

The second card has definitely more layers. This card was cased from Carolyn King.

The colours on this one are Whisper White, Mint Macaroon, Pink Pirouette, Tip Top Taupe, Delightful Dijon and Cherry Cobbler. The stamp set again is Sprinkles of Life and the pattern papers are from Love Blossoms and Go Wild designer series Patterned paper stacks.
I also used the Happy Heart Embossing folder (on Whisper White card stock) and added some sparkle with the Wink of Stella)

Zoo Babies - My favourite kid's birthday card stamp!

I just love this stamp set!
I have here 3 different cards made by using this set.

The first card was inspired by Susan Hornand is also using the new Balloon Celebrations stamp set and matching punch.

The colours on this card are: So Saffron, Delightful Dijon, Smokey Slate, Bermuda Bay and Calypso Coral.

The 'fox' is actually a designer series paper from Sweet Li'l things




The second card was cased from Stasia Sloma and is using the Go Wild Designer Series Paper stack. 

The rhino is stamped using Tip Top Taupe and the zebra is stamped with Memento Black ink. The greeting is an Expressions Natural Elements embellishment inked with Tip Top Taupe.

The third card is also using Sweet Li'l things Designer Series Paper and the colours on this card are Island Indigo, Delightful Dijon, Blue Sky.

I stamped the giraffe with Delightful Dijon and the greeting with Island Indigo. Then I used my paper snips and cut roughly around the giraffe's head (be careful not to cut 'into the circle' (might help if you punch out the shape from vellum paper and use that as a template). 

Once you have a rough cut around the head, push the image through your punch (I used the 2-1/2" circle) and help the giraffes head through the centre, so that it does not get cut. Then punch out the shape. You can also do this with framelits - just lift the part you don't want to get cut on top of the framelit.