Flower Cards

Here are the two cards my friend Beth and I made the other day. Aren't they pretty? She brought the paper and ribbon (and topiary stamp!)and we CASE'd a couple of cards and made a few minor changes. I love this paper, it is by Stampin' Up. The topiary card has Flower Soft in the floral part and the water colored roses card is using the technique that Patty gave a tutorial for on her blog here. You use re-inkers and a water color pen but watch the video to really do it right. It's fun and you can get a lot of gorgeous looks with it. This is short and sweet tonight, It is almost 11 pm, I have just finished my shower after a 70 minute work-out and really need to get to bed. I know 11pm bedtime is for wimps ;)

Good morning! Or afternoon or evening depending on when you read this :) Here is a cheery birthday card I made for one of my Wish-RAK birthday gals. I love the colors of this paper and have almost forgotten about it! I think I got it back in March maybe? So I pulled it out to make some cards and of course pulled out a Tilda to color too. I received this Tilda as a Wish-RAK so how appropriate to use :)

Next time I have two wonderful cards to post that I made with my friend yesterday, we stamped away and even got some fancy Gelato for a treat :) Until then have a great day!

Beach Bum

I have to say this little Edwin stamp looks like my little boy :) My son loves the water more than anyone I have ever met, including myself! (We just got back from the pool) He took surfing lessons for a day last Summer at age 6 and took right to it. We don't live close enough to the beach to go regularly though so he is stuck with body surfing or boogie boarding :) Okay back to the card, this is one of my new Magnolia stamps from the Summer collection. I added the sunset and water in the back ground with a stamp by My Craft Lounge. I colored with water color crayons, used Stickles glitter on the water and sponged the edges. The paper is Snorkel by Cosmo Cricket and I added some brads and ribbon. The sentiment I made with the Karen Foster snap together letters. The card stock is taken with teal. Love these colors and this paper! I saw it used on another blog and hunted down where to get it because I liked it so much. Now I see Archiver's has it on clearance :( Oh well, I like it so much it was worth full price.

The layout I came up with from a mix of a couple different cards, I wanted to be able to show as much of this paper as I could. It is 5.5 x 5.5 inches to accommodate the paper and image. I wont be mailing this one! Thanks for looking :)

Lori

Quick no fuss scrapbook

First off I hate how blogger rotates my pictures. The only one oriented properly is the first one. They are rotated properly before I upload them. Then it rotates them sideways after I upload them and I can't fix it. All the help things say to rotate them before you upload. So I decided to rotate it sideways before in hopes blogger will rotate it to the proper direction, HA! That didn't work either. So I can't find a way to get blogger to stop rotating my images or a solution to fix it. I even went back and saved them again oriented properly and no luck. Then I saved them smaller with a width of 400 and still no go. So look at these sideways LOL! They all need to rotate left, that is the command I put into the HTML but it apparently doesn't like that command :) It would be a good one though! I tried changing width and height but of course, it just squashed it. I messed with the code as much as I could think of! I tried the style="image-orientation: 90deg;" and no go either. If you have a solution please email me, I suspect it has to do with the columns I have in order to accommodate my lighthouse background. So with that being said...

This is the scrapbook my friend's daughter and I made for her upcoming trip to Japan. We only had a few embellishments so this was very paper oriented! The whole thing cost less that $30.00 too, amazing. We did this is roughly three hours, we went back over it later and stamped on a few pages real quick. All she has to do is add pictures and titles (which me made with the Printmaster program but I didn't take pictures of, sorry!) and a little journaling. I just don't have time to spend three hours on one page layout any more and learned this technique at Archiver's. It was an 8 x 8 album and I converted it to 12 x 12 and added one more picture mat per page. This helps so you can use 4 x 6 prints and not have to cut them into shapes or tiny sizes, all in the name of quick and non-complicated!

My bff and her daughter have left...

Old Baldy Lighthouse


In case you wondered where I have been, my bff and her daughter came for a visit for the week. She lives in Southern California, the one I visited back in March. We had a blast, doing all kinds of fun things like getting eaten alive by mosquitoes in Orton Plantation Gardens LOL! (They do provide spray!) We went to the beach for the weekend, we had pedicures at a real nice spa and spent a lot of time it seemed at swim practice and swim meets! Thank you Jan for being so patient with swim team stuff :) We also made a scrapbook for her daughter's upcoming trip to Japan, pages are ready for her pictures when she goes! I will post the pages next time but here are a few pictures from our trip, these are from Bald head Island and Orton Gardens

Orton Gardens

Finally saw an alligator in NC!

Such nice bridges and walkways.

Lower gardens.

The Orton House.

Walking the path through the gardens.

Bald Head Island, NC

The beach on the south side.


Road on the island, golf carts only!


From the top of the lighthouse, view of the point where the sand bars are.


Walking on the sand bars at low tide.


Sunset on the ferry ride.


Pretty Toes :)

New Tilda! Summer Club Kit

I splurged and ordered the Summer Club kit from Magnolia and oh I am so happy with it! You have to pre-order it and you have no idea what is coming so to me that is scary but with these darling Tildas and Edwins why should I even think of worrying? There is one of Edwin with a surfboard that I have just got to do next but this little gal with her ice cream cone called to me first :)

I used paper from a stack of K & Co. double sided paper that is gorgeous, the whole stack is yummy. The sketch is this weeks from Splitcoast Stampers (236) the fence, flowers and sentiment are all from the kit. I put a little Stickles glitter on the mint chocolate chip ice cream (though of you Paula!) and the Prima flowers as this is kind of plain but I like it :) I have absolutely no idea where the card stock came from, one time I was trying to find some close to cocoa real quick as I was out of it at home and bought this. It isn't even close (pun intended) but it is a nice warm brown that worked best with the K & Co. paper.

Now confusing as the colors on the two pictures are (I took them at different times under different lighting), do you like with the ribbon or without? I have the worst time incorporating ribbon on my cards. It is just not my thing. I like ribbon I just never seem to know what to do with it. Thanks for looking and have a great weekend!

Something Different

Here is a card made with a different type of stamp, Ketto from Stamping Bella. This is my first one, I liked her from seeing cards on Splitcoast and going to stampingbella.com. When I was at the Enchanted Cottage a few weeks ago I saw this one and picked it up. So yesterday I pulled it out - well actually I was going to stamp a Tilda when I saw her and thought she would be fun to color. Then I ended up paper piecing the majority of her! I put Stickles glitter on her wings but I don't think you can see it here. It sparkles nicely though! The designer paper is Basic Grey and the card stock is eggplant from SU. This is an old sketch I made a card with a while back and I really like it, I think I might use it for a few more. This card is going to a birthday wishRAK person and I have 4 more to do this month. Some cards are hard to let go of like this one but I can't keep them all :) Thanks for looking!

Tilda with Puppy

I made this card a couple days ago, took the picture, cropped it and had it all ready to post and then went to bed and forgot about it. Ugh! However here it is now and I am happy to post my new Tilda with Puppy stamp. I used the color challenge this week on Splitcoast Stampers of night of navy, so saffron and kraft. I was trying to figure out how to get kraft on this so I stamped the dog bones in white on kraft, punched the lace border punch with it and punched branches with it . My husband says the branches look dead LOL! However I wanted to stay within the color parameters so they are what they are ;)

Look how cute the puppy is! I stamped an extra one and cut out just his little head, put it on a pop dot and outlined it in black so it stands out in her lap. He kind of disappeared with all of this navy color, it is a bit strong but dramatic in a nice way. I just love her overalls, I just realized a lot of the Tildas that I have bought have overalls on! I loved them as a kid, begged my mom to get them for me and wore them as much as I could. I tried them once as an adult and it just doesn't look good on me. So no more for me but I can still enjoy hers. I colored her with water color crayons and didn't fuss with it. Took me 2 minutes to color her and I am just as happy with the outcome. I did fuss with the details and that took me long enough to make up the difference!

As a side note, I had used the shell Cuttlebug embossing folder on this navy paper a while back and ended up not using it so it sat in my scrap paper bin. That is the back ground of this card - you can't see the shell, just some imprints and cursive writing but I think it is actually versatile now that I have used it in this way. It is hard to use a folder like that because the main image (the shell) is 2/3 of the card so if you want to see the shell embossed you can't cover it! I always like it when something like this works out :) Thanks for looking and have a great day!

Lori

Card Sketch Challenge and Black Belt!

I am sharing the pictures below of my son for my friends and family however if you come here for cards only enjoy my swap card :)


I will start with a card I made for a swap, I tried to make this card somewhat easy since I had to make several of them for a swap. However, I still wanted it to have some nice features and layers to it so I chose this stamp to ease up the coloring process the stamps like Tilda and such take. I colored the stamp directly with markers and stamped. I used the rock and roll technique where the edges are colored in a darker (or some other) color but it didn't show up real well. There are Stickles on the center of the flower also. I used a Cuttlebug folder to emboss the white background and used the Nestabilities dies for the oval. The sketch for the card is from Techno Stamper.

Now for the black belt! My oldest son started Taekwondo when he was 8 and went to an Olympic style TKD school. He had his last belt - red/black or Bodon as they called it and was ready for his black belt training when the school pulled a few bad tricks on us and I chose to remove him from that school. He was 10 then. We recently found a new school by our new house and it is an ATA martial arts school. It is wonderful! I can't say enough good things about ATA as a philosophy and training for Taekwondo. Very positive, character building, professional schools. Master Wegman was willing to "re-train" Brian and get him into his black belt and 8 months later - last night, at age 17, Brian received his black belt! We are so happy for him. He worked hard on getting back into shape and getting back into forms and weapons training, sparring and board breaking - one of the pictures I posted caught the moment his foot hit the board, look for it :) He is proud of himself too and that is an accomplishment in itself.

Way to go Brian!!!!!!!!!!!!

Have a great day!

Lori

Hearts for Tilda

Good morning! Back from vacation and ready for my birthday tomorrow :) I am going to a Copics class taught by Sally Lynn MacDonald from Copic, it is an acrylic album and looks like we are going to use the airgun and all kinds of fun and messy stuff. I like the subtitle "leave no surface uncovered" LOL!

Today's card is one I made for the sketch challenge on Splitcoast for this week. I was having withdrawals and had to make a card yesterday even though I had 5 loads of laundry to do and myriads of other things waiting for me when I got back home. Also had to pull out the adorable Spring Tilda again.

The designer paper was a freebie in an order I received so I cant tell you who makes it but the card stock is SU bayou blue and riding hood red. The hearts are buttons with twine tied in them, same MS butterfly I like to use with some gemstones in the center and some dew drops in blue in the corners. I used my Prisma color pencils with Gamsol on this one. I am getting better with them! I also found and used my white pen I ordered from KL Stampin N Scrappin Store, she has some Magnolia Tilda's and such by the way. Anyway the white dots on her blouse, boots and cheeks are with that pen and I must say it really rocks! I had so much trouble getting gel pens to write and at the right moment. Hope you like her!

Lori

Beach Scene Again

These are two more things I have made with the beach scene stamp. They are both colored with chalk! I haven't used them in a long time and for some reason this stamp called out to use chalk LOL! It is such an easy medium to use really. It just looks soft and weathered, sort of beachy I guess. I really liked the shells from another set (by Stampin Up) stamped on the kraft with choc. chip ink and covered in diamond glaze so I used them again on both of these. Fun and adds some interest.

The first one is an ATC, since ATC's are generally stored like baseball cards in plastic sleeves you have to keep the thickness down on them. This just seems to need more but for now it is done. The sand dollar is threaded through the hemp twine that is wrapped around the image. The second one is a card with those beachy colors I like so much! Groovy guava and taken with teal or not quite navy, not sure which I tend to get them mixed up. Thanks for looking and I will make some cards and post with the other beach stamp set I got coming up in a few days.

Oh, and if you are wondering since some of you know I am going on vacation to FL this week these posts are set up to publish automatically :) I really like blogspot (blogger)!

:)

Father's Day or Masculine Cards

Just two, I did these cards at a workshop, they are CASE's in "case" you are wondering :) It is hard to come up with Father's Day cards so I love going to stamp classes that have this theme! I don't have much to say today but these are all Stampin' Up products :)

Have a nice day!
Lori

Beach Scene

I ordered this stamp after seeing it on a blog last week, oh I am bad! However it is gorgeous! It is by Impression Obsession. No matter how you color it, it looks great! I love beach related stamps and always look for them. I happened upon another set from a different company and well that is another post :) Apparently I am on a beach stamp set spree! This uses soft sky, taken with teal and close to cocoa for the layers. I stamped the silver dollar on kraft with choc. chip ink and cut it out, applied crystal effects and put a jump ring through it. I hung it from the hemp twine that is wrapped around the card through the brads. The other shells are stamped on kraft also and put on using pop dots. There is a bit of Stickles glitter here and there to make it sparkle. I used my Prisma colored pencils to color it in, the sky is sponged on with ink, and all of the edges are distressed too. I love this card! I hope you like it too :)