June Pop Up Card Making

The April card activity got postponed to May. Then, before I knew it, June arrived, and I scrambled to figure out our projects. I didn't actually take pictures of the cards till after the activity.

Our June card making activity was focused on pop up cards. While trying to figure out what projects would work well in a group setting, I made a variety of pop up cards, most of which just took too long to do more than one card in one night. These are the three cards that we ended up making:

These first two are the fronts of a baby card and a beach card. The baby card is a Silhouette Design Store cutting file. The beach card front was made using a Sizzix embossing folder and matching dies.

Below you can see the inside of each card. The crib is the pop up mechanism for the baby card. Again, I can take zero credit for it, since I just bought the file, cut it, and glued it together. I got lucky on finding the perfect paper in my stash that worked well for both the front and the inside.  It was a Colorbok Heidi Grace Designs paper called bgirl buggy. I also had the boy version and let them choose which color since they only had time to make one.

For the beach card, I stamped the water and sand layers, die cut the shell twice and pieced parts so that it looked more authentic, shaded with inks and daubers, then added a hint of glitter with clear Wink of Stella, especially on the die cut pearl inside. I used a simple box pop up mechanism made with a strip of paper instead of cutting slits and scoring the folds in the card base.

I had a few bee stamp sets, so when I found the BoBunny Bee-utiful You Collection in a pad at Tuesday Morning, I snapped it up. I love most of the papers, and they were perfect for this card. The bee stamp and honeycomb embossing border used on the card front were included with a Cardmaking & Papercraft magazine awhile back.

I used more papers from the Bee-utiful You pad for the inside, but the stamps used were from a different bee themed stamp set. This may have been everyone's favorite card to make that night.

For this one, I used the same simple paper strip box mechanism as the beach card.

Scooter Card

Awhile back, Heartfelt Creations came out with a wonderful product line called "Young at Heart." They also had a limited edition scooter stamp and die set, but I found out about it too late. They were sold out.

Recently on Facebook, an ad for Spellbinders came into my news feed. They had a small scooter die set for the May Small Stamp of the Month set.  I, who have never subscribed to anything, caved when I saw the scooter die set and card samples. A week later, I had that die set in hand, along with a couple of others I ordered.

When put together, it looks kind of like a paper piecing. I think it is super cute. The only downside is that you have to glue the pieces to your background, and I had trouble figuring out what background paper to use. I tried a couple of different ones which were just okay, before I finally decided to use the one below. It is from the Heartfelt Creations Wildwood Cottage paper pad.

I love the brick and the ivy background paper!

I typed my sentiment for the front of the card on the computer. I stamped the sentiment inside the card. It's from a Hero Arts set that I've had for a long time. I think this is the first time I have actually used any of the stamps from it. I thought it was perfect for this card.

The only thing that I wish Spellbinders had done different would be a silhouette of the completed design, so you could glue all the tiny pieces to that rather than background paper. I ended up using my Cameo to make a silhouette background. Now I can make a bunch of little scooters, in different colors, and then later figure out other backgrounds and stamps to use for additional cards.

Birdhouse Thank You

The day after I was in the ER, a friend brought dinner to my husband and me. She brought it in the basket shown in the photo, with the dish towel.

I needed to return the basket and towel, but I wanted to return them with more than just a card. I'd already started this birdhouse (template by Nicole Heady, link given previously). I stamped and added the bird and the flowers. I filled the birdhouse with Lindor Truffles (the weird looking silver blob in the hole). I had my husband return the basket, towel, with the sweets and thank you card. It's not the best photo, but I didn't have any energy left at that point to worry about lighting and set up for the picture.

I have pneumonia.

I had to postpone my card activity. I had most of it ready, too, but it had to be postponed because I ended up at the ER on Monday night of last week.

Thankfully, I am improving. I had a follow up visit with my doctor yesterday, and he is happy with my progress. Hopefully I'll be back to posting soon as long as I can muster the energy to actually make anything. Pneumonia is a 6 to 8 week recovery, but I should be doing a lot better in a week. I'm certainly better than a week ago.

Dealing with Scraps

When I finish a card or a scrapbook page, I always have scraps left over. I tend to throw them into an Iris bin. The problem is that my one Iris bin of scraps has turned into multiple bins. It was just easier to start with a new sheet of card stock and patterned paper than to go to the bins of scraps and dig through them.

I ended up cutting the card stock scraps into photo mats that are 4.25x6.25, card fronts that fit a 4.25x5.5 card, and card fronts that fit the same sized card but with a slight margin of the card exposed. I organized them by color. The scraps that were smaller were also organized by color and fit into quart sized bags. They can be used for die cuts for card making or scrapbooking.

I had a 5 inch tall stack of photo mats, and about the same sized stack of card fronts. However, some of those photo mats and card fronts were cut prior to our move. I added them all together. Hopefully now I will actually go to those first.

I still have to deal with the patterned paper scraps.

It should be a lot easier to use my scraps now. I hope it will speed up both card making and scrapbooking.

Here is a card that I made entirely from my scraps, except for the card base:

It was made prior to my cutting and organizing my scraps, and it was hard to find papers and card stock that went well together. I had pulled together several card kits two or three months ago from my scraps, but I had pulled the easiest and most obvious. Finding papers and card stock that coordinated was much harder after that, which surprised me. That more recent exercise in using leftovers is what actually gave me the incentive to finally deal with my scraps to make them easier to use. There is enough good material among them that I just can't bring myself to toss the scraps. Having seen how many card bases and photo mats I now have, I am glad that I didn't just through all the scraps away.

April Card Making Activity

I had seen a 3D basket weave embossing folder used for some cards on Pinterest. It turned out to be a Stampin' Up product, so I placed an order for it and a few other things.

I cut some card bases from kraft cardstock and embossed them with the basket weave folder. Embossing may not be the trendiest, but I love the look, especially for this card. I added some pansies that I made with the Heartfelt Creations Cheery Pansy stamp and die (from their Burst of Spring collection). I tried various ways of coloring the pansies, but my Copic markers gave the nicest results. The banner *might* be from a Karen Burniston die, but I'm not sure. I used a stamp from a super old clear stamp set.  The stamp was not the same shape as the banner, so I had to use a rather convoluted process to get it to stamp perfectly several times on several banners. It was a bit of a pain, but it worked.

I also found a cute picnic basket card among my Silhouette Design Store cutting files, used the embossing folder on it, and also used a stamp that I found awhile back either at a craft store or Tuesday Morning. The stamp came on a wood block, but like all my other wood mounted stamps, I had removed it, then painted Aleene's Tack-It-Over-and-Over on the back of it. The ants were originally right under the picnic phrase, but I took some scissors and carefully separated the ants from the phrase to make two stamps from it. I embossed the envelope flap with the basket weave, and stamped just the ants on the front of the envelope. The "lid" of the picnic basket is attached to the card that pulls out from the basket, as shown in the bottom photo.

They were both simple and relatively easy cards, and I am happy with how they turned out.

Cards Using Sketches

My card making group got together last night. I based this activity on making cards with sketches.

Sketches are not my strong point. I really struggle to use sketches, but we all gave it a go, and the gals seemed to like it. I made up some samples ahead of time to show (1st and 3rd photos), and I gave out pictures of the sketches (with the links where the sketches came from), and provided some papers they could use. They also brought their own papers.

I also had some stamps, dies, and embossing folders available for everyone to use if they wanted.

Here is the first link, and the cards that I made based on the sketch:

Card Sketch 1

Here is the second card sketch, and the cards I made based on it:

Card Sketch 2

 I should have taken photos of the cards that the gals made, but I did not think about it. One of the gals made 16 cards! She definitely got the most cards done last night. I only got two simple cards done, the ones shown in the middle photo. The paper was so pretty that it really didn't need much. Both cards were made with the same sheet of patterned paper.