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.

Leaf sympathy card

 I have a bad habit of keeping papers I purchased to use in scrapbooking and/or card making and not actually using them.  Sometimes it is because I like the paper so much I want just the "right" way to use it.  That is what has happened this week.

I have a page of leaf-covered paper that I really like but never seemed to find just the right time to use it but when I saw the current challenge at the Alphabet Challenge Blog this week, I decided I needed to get out that paper I've had for several years, and put it to use. The challenge is "L is for Leaves."

Then I took a look at the current challenge #709 over on Sketch Saturday and saw the perfect opportunity to use it, given what I was thinking of doing for the leaf challenge.  Here is the sketch I used:

 

Here is the card I made that I am planning to enter into both challenges this week.

As you can see, I have used my leaf paper for the background.  The leaves on the paper are a nice mixture of green, blue and turquoise colors with a brown every now and then. I really like the little leaf die so I cut two from green metallic card stock and one from a dark turquoise paper.  It's interesting to me (the non-photographer that I am) that the green metallic paper I used for both of the small rectangles showed up so differently in this photograph when I put the turquoise leaves on one and a matching green metallic leaf set on the one on the upper right, but in any case, I was pleased with the final outcome.

I made this into a sympathy card for a dear friend.

I still a a piece of the leaf paper, so I have more challenge ahead to actually use it up!  This project gives me courage to keep working on it.
 

Never-ending Need

 Seems like the older we get, the more frequently our friends pass away.  Russ and I knew that would be the case, but these days the reality of it all hits us often, so it seems I need to make a stash of sympathy cards so I'll have at least one on hand at all times.  This is the one I made yesterday.  I actually made two, and already found it necessary to use one of them, so this is the one I have left.

I embossed a piece of white card stock to use as the background, and made one of my favorite color combinations, black and white.  It is on a background of black, and then put on a white card base.

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.  

Sympathy card

It seems especially sad to know people who have to go through the sorrow of the death of a loved one when everyone is already saddened over all that is happening with the COVID-19, so I wanted to make a really nice card for our friend whose father died this past week.  One nice effect of having to be "distanced" during these days is having time to make and send cards to encourage others.  Keeps my mind off my own situation and focused on others.

I got this idea when I saw the Retro Rubber Blog challenge of making something using squares in some way.  This is the card I made:

I used a stamp set I got back in 2016 to stamp the corners on each of three card stock squares and added tiny dark blue Jewel Dazzles to the end swirls on the corners, then backed them all in a row on blue-grey metallic card stock, and then on dark blue card stock.  I mounted the three square banner with foam tape on top of a strip of navy blue ribbon.  The sympathy stamp is from that same 2016 set.

I think it made a very sedate but warm card in the end. 

I am also entering this card in the Double Dare challenge #54, in which Thing 1 is  titled "It's Hip to be Square" and Thing 2 is to use an old stamp set.  I've followed this blog for some time but never entered it before.

Green and yellow

I really enjoy following the Retro Rubber Challenge blog even though I have not joined in as much as I would like to in the future.  This week they have an really fun challenge in the form of a tic tac toe board.


It captured my attention and I decided that this was the week to get back into the swing of things and enter their challenge!   I chose to use the first column, green, 4 x 4 card, sympathy.  Here is what I made:

I had some marbelized paper with the green swirls that I thought would look nice as the background then added some small butterfly black and silver stickers backed with yellow card stock to add just a touch of another color.  I like the looks of the card ...  somber but not so much so as to be depressing for the recipient.  The stamps I used are from a set I got back in 2012 or 13 and I had never actually used the wreath stamp before for some reason!

5 from 2

I had a 12 in. x 12 in. piece of flower paper that had big beautiful peachy-orange roses on a white background, and a sheet of orange gingham that seemed to match very well, so I decided to challenge myself and see how many cards I could get out of the paper.  This is the result:

 I was interested to see how different the flowers and gingham looked when using three different shades of green paper as an enhancement. All three matched bits of the leaves, but created a really different look each time.

For these I used a pale green as the solid green base:

And for these two I used a darker green that had more blue in it:

And for the last one I used yet a different green color as the base and it looks completely different.

I still had a small piece of the flowered paper and one of the gingham but I decided that five was enough for one day!

I like trying new little challenges on myself that help me stretch my creativity but I still am weak in courage to try more unusual color combinations, but who knows what I may try next!

 

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.

New cards

I keep busy making cards but my old-age brain keeps forgetting to take pictures of the cards!  BUT I finally remembered to do so yesterday, so here are three of the four I made yesterday.
The first one is a sympathy card ...

Then there is a get-well card ...

And finally, a thinking-of-you card ...  This one is a cut-off front.  The blueish-green portion with the rose on it lifts up to reveal a message under it. 

These were all made with a small packet of papers that blended colors in somewhat unusual ways and it was a challenge for me to find ways to put some of them together.  I also used a piece of metallic textured paper to add some more glittery look to some of the cards.  It did not seem to be truly gold but neither was it brown and sure enough, when I looked at the back of the paper there was a sticker that said the color was "jasper."  In any case, it seemed perfect for these papers.

Birthday and Sympathy cards

Two men in the family needed cards this week and I finally, today, had time to sit down and put cards together for them.  A birthday card for Jeff, featuring his trusty truck filled with stars and hearts, complete with a nice acetate window ...

And a far less happy occasion card for Tim at the death of his mother on the 4th anniversary of my own mother's death.  However, I was equally pleased with the results of what I think is a good masculine-looking sympathy card.