Swirl Cards

I tried my hand at making the fascinating (to me) swirl cards, and I am hooked.

The orange and coral card is on a light beige background and the circles are evenly centered on each other.

For a slightly different look, the blue circles (on a white background) are offset, changing the entire look. 

I already cut some pink circles to try this one again!  

I do not know if "swirl" is the correct word to use for this design, but that's what I am calling it.

Happy Birthday, FMS Style

 Freshly Made Sketches has an interesting sketch this week.

 It intrigued me to the point that I decided to enter the challenge with this card:

Hummingbird birthday

 

I used one of my newest stamps from Maymay Made It for this card. I fussy-cut the little hummingbird and popped him up on foam tape. I think I am continuing to improve in my coloring technique! I used white card stock but put it on a cream card stock card base and I like the slight difference of color for interest.

Sylvia's birthday

I created a card for my very dear friend Sylvia using a new Sunrise Stem die I purchased from Simon Says Stamp, and I love how it turned out. 

I used a Stampin' Up die for the white background and backed it with one of the papers from Simon Says Stamp Color Blend set.  It is not clearly visible in my photo, but I embossed the stem and leaves with green embossing powder and feel quite pleased with how well I was able to cover the leaves and still have the embossed lines show.

Spring Fling Experiment

 I have been following Kristie Marcotte for some time on her blog The Best Things in Life are Pink. What fascinates me most about her work is the many times she takes a pad of 6 x 6 paper and shows how many cards she has made from that one pad. I have always wondered how many cards I could come up with using that same principle.

When I purchased several pads of pretty paper from Honey Bee Stamps a couple of months ago, I decided I should try my hand at Kristie's process. I chose the Spring Fling paper pad as my trial.

The pad had 24 sheets of two-sided decorated paper, so I had a lot to work with.  I started off using some card designs that used larger pieces of paper, but as I worked, the pieces got smaller and smaller as I used up the larger ones, until I had only small strips and/or blocks left. Low and behold, I ended up using all but a very few very small pieces of the paper ... 30 cards in all!  I shocked myself! I did not know I could get that much creativity out of my fairly small creative brain!  Only one side of one design did I not ever use, otherwise something of every design in the pad got used somehow, someplace, on a card.

So ... without further adieu, here are my 30 cards. Some have already gone in the mail, others await that day in my card box.

Birthday angels

 One of the challenges when making birthday cards is finding a way to reflect the season with the card decorations but at the same time, not overpowering the birthday sentiment with the seasonal decoration.   I think this is especially challenging for Christmas-time birthdays.

I have found a great solution for this year's December birthday cards I have had to make, and there seem to be a lot of them!  I have a new stamp set of angels.  While the sentiments are mostly Christmas-related, a couple of the angels are holding a banner onto which you can stamp numerous words, such as "blessings," "peace," etc.  

"Blessings" is a good birthday sentiment as well as Christmas, so making the angel hold a blessing banner makes a great Christmas-y birthday card, especially when adding a "Happy Birthday" sentiment,as you can see here:

I made this one using gold and white card stocks, but I also made a couple using white and deep blue.  They all came out so pretty and festive with just a little bit of Christmas included.

Thanks,Maymay, for yet another inspiring stamp set!  This one is called "Good News."

World Cardmaking Day 2022

 October 1, 2022, was World Cardmaking Day and I did something I have never done before. I set aside all my usual Saturday tasks to make cards most of the day.  The bathrooms did not get cleaned, the laundry still sits in the dirty laundry basket, the living room remains un-dusted.  The only thing I did was to cook supper. BUT I had a great time making cards.

I decided to use papers from a 6 x 6 pad of fall designed paper.  I looked for ideas on designs and chose two methods to use as my idea base.  I ended up making ten cards:

The papers are basically the usual fall colors - red, gold and orange with a tiny bit of green thrown in, so I used metallic brown, metallic rust, and metallic green papers for the bases of the cards.

The first six cards I made using a template for a 6 x 6 one sheet wonder, which made three cards from one sheet.  I used two papers to do that.  These are the cards I made with that template, which I found on the Internet:

The other four cards I made using an idea I found on Pinterest where you cut four sheets into four pieces each, stack them up by shape and size, then place one of each sheet onto the front of the card.  

  

Here is what I made, and if you look carefully, you can see one piece of each of the four sheets on each of the card fronts.  I was not sure I would like it, but as it turns out, I really enjoyed making these cards ... simple but the result is quite effective, I think. By changing the backgrounds, the cards looked different (I am not good at making all the same ... I would never have been able to work in a factory where I had to do the same thing over and over and over!).

More Leaf Paper Cards

 Well, I have used all but a small piece of the leaf paper I started using earlier, and I am pleased to have come up with so many ways to use that paper, and I like all of them!

The first one is based on the current challenge over at Freshly Made Sketches.  This is the sketch I used:

 

Here is my interpretation, using the leaf paper as the background:

 I double stamped and embossed the sentiment, first with white pearl embossing powder then offset slightly and embossed with plain white.  I wanted a shadow effect, but not too much.  That's why, in the photo, it looks like it is blurred, but in "real life" it is quite striking.

I am going to submit this to the challenge.

I also made two other cards using the same leaf paper in the background.

I wanted to try some more non-traditional color combinations.  I am always afraid to try that even though I enjoy seeing what others do in that area.  I don't have a lot of color confidence, but I was pleased with my little girl card and the pinks and fushia I used.

Masculine birthday card

 I usually have a hard time coming up with ideas for masculine birthday cards so when I saw the sketch at the Freshly Made Sketches this week, I immediately saw how good a sketch it would be for using a masculine theme.

This is the sketch they have for the current challenge:

 

With all the right angles and the general layout, I thought this looked very masculine!  Here is the card I made based on that sketch.

 Blue and brown were the main colors, as you can see.  I used a piece of tan embossed card stock for the background.  The multicolored top rectangle is white card stock that I inked using a stencil I got recently in a kit from Pink & Main.  I wanted to add a little bit of colors besides the hues of blue and I think that helps with the card's appeal.

Long story short, I am entering this card into the challenge at Freshly Made Sketches.