Easter Card

I wanted to use my new stamps by Verve and make an Easter card. I love the Swiss dot Cuttlebug embossing folder on white card stock. It just looks good together. Then I needed a color that would work with the cross and I didn't want to make a black or brown card so olive/kiwi worked well. I used the Nestabilities dies for the ovals and the Stampin' Up dies for the flowers. The branches are the NS punch. The ribbon is SU also and the little pearls are just from Archiver's or somewhere like that. I think I will make a few more similar to send out this year :)

The Flower Fields

Welcome to the Flower Fields!



We went to the Flower Fields near Carlsbad, CA. What a beautiful place! 55 acres of flowers. It is a Ranunuculus farm (yes that is how it is spelled!), rows and rows of colors in the Spring. There is also a maze made of sweet peas, very pretty shades of pink and purple. It was a foggy morning on the coast, we could barely see the ocean, if at all. It wasn't too hot though so that was a plus!



They just keep going and going off into the distance.



Dew on the sweet peas.



Part of the garden.



A close up of these gorgeous flowers, just beautiful and so many colors! They are about 4-5 inches across.

Pictures From My Trip - Anacapa Island

We took a trip to Anacapa Island, part of the Channel Islands off the coast of California. We took a ferry over from Oxnard, it is about a one hour trip each way. When you get there you come into a little cove and climb straight up the cliff on 150 or so steps made of metal. It is part of the National Park system and there are park rangers and a ranger station there taking care of the island, however there are no homes or other structures. Pack in and pack out if you want to eat or drink. There are trails and paths so it is easy to hike around. I will blog the other places we went tomorrow but this deserves a whole blog post to itself.



View of the island from the boat as we left Oxnard.

 

This is the view on the end of Anacapa, the Southern most of the Channel Islands. It is called Inspiration Point. I believe the rest of these are all part of Anacapa and the other islands are further away.



The island is covered with these strange flowers, they are like a bush or tree. Some are a foot tall and others are as much as 5 feet tall. I looked them up and they are called the tree sunflower, or coreopsis, a plant found only on the Channel Islands and a few isolated areas on the coast. We were fortunate to see it bloom as it only blooms in the Spring.



This is how most of the island is, these flower trees with seagulls nesting on and in them.



The birds. No, not the movie but it sure felt like it! They were nesting and all they do is stare at you and squawk. It was quite funny after a while, they were everywhere. The paths wind through the plants.



This is the other flower abundant on the island, Iceplant.



The cliffs along the island are very steep and sheer.



If you do get close enough to the edge you can see the Sea Lions and Seals basking in the sun on the rocks.



We saw a huge pod of Risso's Dolphins as we left the island. It was a nice trip and very interesting. I really enjoyed it and I think my friends did too.

Simple Birthday

Still continuing in the Survivor card clean and simple theme! And the butterfly kick! This is certainly celery and so saffron. Doesn't look like it to me on my laptop but maybe you can tell. I used the lace border punch at the bottom - just love how that looks! The butterflies are punched from designer paper and the sun is the die set from SU made by Sizzlets. I hope you like it! I should be home later today and will tell you how my trip to SoCal (that is Southern California in case you are wondering) was tomorrow if things aren't totally insane around the house. I sure hope this auto posting worked! It has in the past so I expect it did :)

Seashells

So what do you think of this? Kind of different, on the clean and simple CASE you-know-what kick. I am kind of liking it, not sure. I think I needed to sponge the edges of the shell area or something. Maybe I should have made the white area narrower. Anyway it was fun distressing all those layers of card stock!

Very Simple Easter Card

As you may know I had to make 9 cards for Survivor so they are all CASEd in one form or another and all clean and simple. This one is pretty straight forward, I used the lace punch, the swiss dots embossing folder, the baroque motifs stamp, the butterfly punch, some pearls and a flower punch. OK that was boring! Not sure how to make this more interesting but it is fairly simple and a pretty lavender and lilac color I had out from another card.

My attempt at Scoring a Frame

When I CASEd this card it had a nice neat and tidy score box around the image mat. I do not have a scor-pal or scor-it so I used my handy dandy Fiskars trimmer with scoring blade. Well it didn't come out as pretty and tidy as I would like but it did come out. Not sure I will do it again though! Here is yet another Survivor swap card with the clean and simple look. I hope you aren't getting bored with these, I did nine on one afternoon! Sure beats the three hours it takes to do a Tilda card. The stamps are from the first StampTV kit I got from GinaK. Very pretty kit :)

Pretty Blue Flowers

Yes, another clean and simple card.... sorry! Hope you are enjoying the variety though. This is the new textured designer paper from Stampin' Up, I absolutely love this paper set! Of course, it is blue :) I love this card too, easy to make and so pretty. The stamp is one I have used over and over, just an easy but good looking flower when stamped. Not much to tell you about it, so that's all for today.

Red and White

And green! At least this doesn't look Christmassy. This is a nice striking color combo! This is another one I made for my Survivor swap cards. It is quite bright on here isn't it? Not quite as bright in person but I did use Real Red and Kiwi Kiss. The ribbon is the Kiwi Kiss striped ribbon and I do like it. I got it in a swap which was nice. I liked the idea of the grass on the card I CASEd but in this one I put the butterflies. Hers had flowers which looked real nice. I am obsessed with my butterfly punches right now so bare with me :) There will be more to come this week.

Spring Flowers

This is the first in a series of Survivor cards I had to make. I have had a Survivor voted off in each of the last three weeks and thought I would catch up and make my three cards per person. That is 9 cards and I needed to do quick, which for me is CASEing and clean and simple! So while I am gone to California this week and into part of next week I have set up posts to automatically post several days of these cards. Didn't want you to miss me :) LOL! This one uses the GinaK Stamp TV first kit. I love the pink paper and this stamp is a beauty. I used a tiny bit of Stickles on it if you can see the sparkles. The rose ribbon is a crushed velvet, I only had about 12 inches of it and it looks so good on this card! I wish I could find more, it came in a clearance scrapbook kit I picked up a while back. That's it!

Bunny Tilda

Oh I loveeeeeeeeee this Tilda! She is so darn adorable! A nice SCSer sent her to me and it wasn't even a WishRAK. I also love this new designer paper from Stampin' Up. I got my order in a couple days ago with three new paper packs and I tore right into them :) I colored her to match the Lovely Lilac and Lavender Lace of this paper with my water color crayons. They work so well for me, I really like them but they are muted and soft. Well unless you put on a bunch of layers of color. (The Copic debate is brewing in my head yet again.) The white edge is a CASE and I just love how it looks on this card. It is the new border punch from SU. No, I am not a demo but my friend is :) The Easter Blessings is one of the new die sets from them that is a Sizzlet die. It worked in my Cuttlebug just fine. The only thing I don't like about this card is the flower on the patterned paper takes over the focal point. Oh well, it is still pretty :)

March BVC09

This is my edition of the Bible Verse Challenge for March. I took the picture of it on the stand so I could show everyone what I meant about being able to flip them over and display different ones. My friend brought over this awesome stamp set by Our Daily Bread Designs and I had visions of all kinds of things to make! I have got to get this set :) Anyway I stamped it on Basic Grey Urban Couture paper, cut it in an oval shape, distressed and sponged the edges. The chocolate piece is embossed with a Cuttlebug folder and the big background is also from the BG set. I have done blue twice so I thought I should do a different color this month! I have been sick on and off this week so it hasn't been a very productive week for me, I have had to catch up with home stuff and also had other things outside the home so this is it! Hopefully my head will quit aching and being stuffed up :)

Magnolia Swap Card

I participated in a swap on Splitcoast for Magnolia card kits. It includes 3 stamped images of a Magnolia Stamp (Tilda), 2 pieces of designer paper, embellishments, ribbon and any little extra thing you might want to add. It was for a total of 5 kits and this is the first one I pulled out to do. It was put together by Lisa Cook, she didn't give her SCS name. I did this at the scrapbook night at my church where I was helping others learn to make cards and in between I put it together. I am thinking now that I am home with it that I might add some liquid applique to the icing :)

I used water color pencils and had a heck of a time blending and getting the right colors - it was the easiest thing to carry to the crop but I am just not liking them. Back to watercolor wonder crayons! There is no color in the Stampin' Up pencils kit that matches skin. No matter what color skin you want there just isn't one so this is a mix of yellow and pink on her face and legs blended to death! Talk about hard oh and the hair, eeek I did it blond which in the pencil kit is one of three shades of yellow, well it was decidedly yellow so I added a bunch of brown to make it look more natural and now it is brown hair. You see my dislike of these pencils?! I guess they are fine for flowers. Well enough complaining, I really like the card. I had no sketch or anything to go by so this is all from my lil ol head :) Also I want to mention the card uses everything in the kit and no extras :) Cool idea these kits! Thank you Jessica for putting this swap together!

An Award

I received this blogging award called 'One Lovely Blog Award' from one of my Splitcoast Stamper friends, thank you very much Jessica! She has a fabulous blog with her wonderful card creations here.

Rules of this award:

1. Add the logo to your blog.
2. Link to the person from whom you received this award.
3. Nominate 7 or more blogs.
4. Leave a message on their blog, letting them know they are “One Lovely Blog”

So here are my nominees:

Cheryl
Donna
Michelle
Mindi
Tracy

My Sister's Birthday Card

OK she should have received it by now so here it is. I used a Penny Black flower stamp called Sweet Pleasure. I colored it two tone with markers before stamping so it looks like it has more depth. I used some really nice ribbon and of course punched a butterfly as I am loving that look! I also used the Nestabilities die for the focal image as it gives it a nice look with the layers. Unfortunately that die has too big of spaces between sizes to use layered on a card. They are close to 3/8 apart and get too big rather quickly. I really love this, it is beautiful blue and elegant :) Hope she liked too!

I just love the whimsical charm Rachelle Anne Miller creates in her stamps. This is one of my absolute favorites, called peek-a-boo. I thought it was a kitty but someone else thinks it's a bunny, what do you think? I made the first card for someone as a thank you note and loved it so much I made a second one. Now I don't know which to keep and which one to send LOL! I used this weeks sketch from Splitcoast. Anyway I had a lot of fun coloring it with my water color wonder set but once again am thinking about getting Prismacolor pencils. I just watched Gina K's tutorial on StampTV for using odorless mineral spirits and now know why they didn't work for me. I have water color pencils! Not wax based ones. So anyway I just want brighter color than the watercolor crayons give (it takes too long to get it darker with layers) and I don't want to buy Copics because in order to get enough colors to look good you have to spend $200. Sooo we will see :) Which colored card do you like better? I can't decide!

Now on to something else, I was tagged by Mindi in her blog and now I am to go to my 6th folder in my pictures and get the 6th picture and share it! This is too funny because it is where I was messing with this web-site called yearbookyourself.com that you can insert your picture into the picture of hairstyles from all the different decades just to see what one would look like in the old days or new days if you are older LOL! So this is what my son Brian would look like if he grew up in the 1950's. I did all of us but this is the 6th one so I am following along. It's hilarious! Now I am supposed to tag 6 people but I don't know my blogger friends well enough to tag them with this so I will leave it up to you to play along :)

Birthday Card and Snow Pics

I made this card for my sister for her birthday. But then I didn't feel it was good enough so I made her another that I will post after she receives it. I was just not happy with the coloring I did on the bird. It just doesn't look good enough. See, my sister is a "real" artist. She went to RISD - Rhode Island School of Design. She is talented in many things - she used to make beautiful porcelain dolls, she can sew anything and makes beautiful pillows, curtains, clothes etc. and as a side note made me the world's coolest purse when I was a teenager- out of a pair of patched up denim jeans! She also weaves incredible blankets, with this GIANT loom (I think that is what it is called?) with thousands of threads and of course she can weave many other things, she used to paint and I think she still does needlework. At one time she was an interior decorator and well as you can see many things. I am just not as talented as her but I have the craft bug :) So anyway she loves blue and I am happy with that part of the card anyways LOL! I am happy with the card I did end up sending to her though.

Now for the snow. These are just two pictures this time of the snow, we had two days of rain first, maybe that is why it piled up and sat on the branches so pretty. It was a scene from a Christmas card :)

New Stamp TV stamps

Oh my, it is 'raw' today. Cold, windy, rainy and dreary miserable. Yes, March is coming in like a lion this year! We are expecting 3-5 inches of snow overnight into tomorrow but we know what happened last time they said that! None zilch zero nada. So we stayed home today and watched TV, made pork BBQ sandwiches and put the fireplace on. I had some time while my son was advancing his army forces across the family room floor to make a card. Here is the story:

OK so I fell in love with the new Gina K. Stamp TV and the first kit. I was thrilled it had the papers, her pure luxury card stock, ribbon and stamps all included so I ordered it. It arrived already! I just used the stamps today as my first try with a the day lily, next time I will use her papers and ribbon etc. This was a spur of the moment sort of thing. I used Stampin' Up markers to color and the butterfly punch again :) This time I put little tiny pearls on the body part of the butterflies, I have seen a couple people do that on Splitcoast and it just looks so awesome.

{Edited Monday morning: We got snow! 4 inches, it is so beautiful! The kids are out of school today and we will have a snow play day :) Oh I need to add this is the third snow predicted for the season. The first one we got 7 inches, the second we were supposed to get 7-10 inches and we got nothing - that was the one I was referring to, and now this one we got lots of pretty fluffy white stuff! ...Edit done}