Covered composition book

 I wanted to start a new journal for a special project I am working on this year.  I remembered that I had one of those black and white composition books that you can buy inexpensively at the beginning of the school year, so I went hunting it down and found it in my craft room where I had stored it with the intention of covering it with pretty paper sometime as a gift.  So I decided to gift myself this time around!  I had some really pretty paper that I have wanted to find a use for but never could figure out how to make it good for a card.  I covered the front and back covers with it, then added some burgundy suede paper for the spine and I am really pleased with how it turned out.

I put a fancy title label on the cover and covered the inside of the front and the back with matching fushia paper.

I like the animal print background of the flowered paper, but like I said, I could not picture making a card with it ... I am not quite artistic enough to picture what to do with it, but I am glad I had that paper because it made a beautiful journal, I think!

Sympathy card

 I needed to make a sympathy card yesterday and turned to one of my favorite dies as the anchor for the card.  This simple spray of flowers is so easy to make into any kind of card and I have used it numerous times for everything from get well to birthday, and now for a sympathy card.

I used a green fern paper for the background because the one who passed was a man and I wanted to reflect a masculine "aura" on the card even though I was using flowers.  I cut the flower die out of dark brown suede paper and it turned out so beautifully against the cream colored card stock that I edged with some bamboo green ink and a little brown.  

Roses

I have been very negligent about writing and posting in this online journal of sorts lately.  Maybe it's the hot weather, although I suspect is more laziness than heat!  Anyway, this week I made a card that was a challenge for me, using a new die I bought.  The die is a bunch of roses with lots of more intricate pieces, as you can see from this photo of the inside of the card:

I cut the roses out of some pink suede paper I had, then I cut the leaves from forest green suede paper and glued them on top of the leaf portions of the pink.  As you can see, the die is an outline of roses, and it has all those small parts that also get cut out.  There were so many pieces it reminded me of a jigsaw puzzle, so I thought I would use them also.

I cut the die from some gold metallic paper and glued it onto the front of the card, then I glued each piece of the pink suede paper rose petals and green suede paper leaves into the appropriate spots in the gold metallic rose outline.  Yes, it took a long time, but yes, it turned out beautifully!  I think I am going to try this out again, and maybe try it on some other dies as well.