Babies are A Wonderful Reason for a Card

A friend of mine recently announced that there is a new baby at their house! I only own one baby themed stamp set and quite frankly I have not been drawn to it lately, so I decided to see what I could come up with using non baby themed sets. Since "baby" is a girl, I grabbed the Stampin' Up! set, Flight of the Butterfly. The patterned paper is not Stampin' Up! and I honestly cannot remember who makes it or where I got it! The rest of the card is pretty simple. Everything is from Stampin' Up! except the patterned paper and the cute green bling near the sentiment (which comes from the GREAT new set "Teeny Tiny Wishes"). There is that Modern Label punch again...are you sick of it yet?

Quick Swap

I needed a quick swap recently so I whipped this simple one up. I was hoping to come up with a cute card that would be easy for demo's to use to show their customers. This uses the new set Falling Leaves and the new In Color Bermuda Bay. I also used Chocolate Chip Craft ink and heat embossed with with clearn embossing powder. It seems to add a bit of something extra special when it is heat embossed. I used various sizes of circle punches to punch out the circle image. I stamped that image 2 different times, once in Olive and once in Chocolate Chip craft, embossed the chocolate chip and then popped it up with dimensionals.

Another Gift Frame

My friend who is moving has a daughter who is friends with all three of my girls. Hannah is wonderful because she can play with a 10, 7 and 5 year old and never once will you hear, "You're a baby, go away." She genuinely likes all three of them. When I told the girls that our friends would be moving away, the two older girls cried as much as I have. The youngest had a very wise outlook on things for a 5 year old and said, "It's not like someone we love is dying or something." Though, now that she has processed that we won't see them at church every Sunday and that they are really leaving, she does have moments where she will declare how much they will be missed.

I wanted a gift for Hannah that she would be able to remember my girls by. What better gift than a picture frame? I know that a picture frame for an almost 9 year old is not usually very exciting, but she'll appreciate it when she is snug in her new bedroom and missing Michigan! We went to Hobby Lobby and the girls chose this adorable frame. We really wanted it to say "Friends" somewhere, so we snatched it up, took it home and mom added a few things - Rose Red grosgrain ribbon across the top and "Friends" stamped with my retired Whimsical Alphabet set from Stampin Up!.

I think it will look great with a picture of all the girls that was taken Tuesday night when we had a small cookout with a few families, don't you?

Peep Card

Here is the card I made to go with the gift in the previous post. I should have made it to match the gift, but the set was on loan to me and I didn't even think about it until after the set was returned to its rightful owner. I LOVE this paper from My Minds Eye. It is from the Out and About collection. I love that it pairs Soft Sky and Ruby Red (or Riding hood Red). I've always loved pale blue with red. This stamp set is Cheep Talk and one that I had put off purchasing for quite awhile. I chose it a few months ago as one of the sets I earned for free with my Sale-a-Bration sales and have really enjoyed playing with it. I hope you have a great day!

Peep Gift

A very close friend of mine will be moving soon from just 20 minutes away, to over 16 hours away. It has been a quick development and one that has me just a wee bit emotional. Her husband has been offered a job in a different state and after being without work since January, they have decided to go where the work is. The evening she called to let me know that they were accepting the job, I knew I had to get started on a special project for her.

Both of us LOVE birds, there is nothing more delightful to me than to sit in my living room window bird watching and I know that my pal feels the same. We are both country decorators so I wanted to make something that would go with her decor.

There are 4 of us who are very close and we affectionately refer to our pals as our "peeps". So this project is for her to hang in her new house and when she looks at it, she'll be thinking of her peeps. The project uses the Stampin' Up! set, Season of Friendship and various supplies from Stampin' Up! Most of the papers have been recently discontinued (Riding Hood Red, Baja Breeze, Pink Pirouette). Each square is representative of a different season and each season has a single bird represented...each is different, to represent our four peeps. This is one of those projects that popped into my head and then just came together perfectly. I had such fun making it!

Dasher in August

This past Friday I headed out to the other side of the state with some stamping friends to enjoy a day of stamping and a night away from the house. If someone would have told me 7 years ago that I would have been getting together with people I had only met online and staying at their homes and chatting till the wee hours of the night, I would have told them they were crazy! A couple years ago my pal Lorien and I attended a Splitcoaststampers event in Lansing, Michigan and then she started helping to organize subsequent Mingler Events. At these events I have met the must fun girls and really have enjoyed spending my stamping time with them. At the event this past weekend there were only 8 of us, but it was perfect. The only sad thing was that Emma had to leave early so we weren't able to enjoy her English humor for as long as I would have liked. Each of us created a swap and a make and take. Can you believe I forgot to take a photo of my swap (that could be because I was creating it at midnight the night before we were supposed to leave!) This is my make and take. I wanted something that was simple enough for the demonstrators that were there to possibly use during the Christmas season as a make and take with their customers. On my sample Dasher is stamped using Chocolate Chip craft ink and then heat embossed with clear embossing powder. The embossed background is the new Finial Press embossing folder from Stampin' Up! (which I LOVE). I dragged some Chocolate Chip ink across the embossed areas to give it more depth. Are you LOVING the new Modern Label punch? I am! The kicker on this card is that the red Modern Label is from the Movers and Shapers die that my friend Nicole shared with me a couple weeks ago. The new punch matts perfectly on the Movers and Shapers die!

Happy Birthday Butterfly

I made this quick and easy card for my aunt's birthday last week. The paper is retired now, the Bella Rose DSP is one of my favorites. The butterfly in the center is the Big Shot die, Beautiful Butterflies, which of course is mounted on dimensionals. The only stamping on this card is the "Birthday" at the bottom corner, it comes from the set Fundamental Phrases and is certainly a fundamental set in my book! "Birthday" is mounted on a punched Modern Label shape which I LOVE right now. I've been stamping a lot lately but can't share them with you till September so I'll be working on a few things this week (hopefully) that I can share!