Fall Thanks

 A few months ago, a friend gave me some calendar pictures she thought would make nice cards. I made several at the time but then I put the rest of the pictures away for later use. I pulled them out of storage when I needed two thank you cards.

They were perfect!

One was the picture of an apple ... a perfect selection for this time of year. Here is what I did with the apple ...

I backed the apple photo with some gold metallic paper and added "thanks" in green on that same gold paper.

The second card is very different. I had a picture of some orange flowers but the flowers were not very big, so I cut the photo into three small sections and backed them with some brownish-greenish paper and layered them on a soft orange background. I like how it turned out.

I am entering this second card into the Word Art Wednesday challenge for this week.

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.

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!).

A Rosy thank you

 I like the simplicity of the current sketch at Freshly Made Sketches.  It is the perfect format for a thank you card I needed to make.

 

 Here is how I used it.

Quilted squares

I have had some Dazzle stickers called quilted squares in my stash that I decided to do something with yesterday afternoon.  They are gold filigree designs of two sizes, one about 4 inches square and the others are about 2 inches squared.

On this first card, a "best wishes" card for a widow friend who just became engaged to a widower friend.  I used a large square and placed a small one in the middle, popped up.

Adding some fancy gold edging on the top and the bottom completed the look and I think it turned out very nicely!

I also made two cards that have a similar design but look very different because of the papers and colors I used.  One is a thank you card and the other a birthday card. 

I have another view of the thank you card that I need to include for a totally different reason.  Take a look ...

I took this angle photo to show how I raised the middle square up but in the process I got a snap of my "Christmas cactus."  I say "Christmas" in quotes because this late bloomer just popped out in blossoms this week, a mere seven weeks late!

I have enough quilt square stickers left to make one or two more card and I think I'll try other color combinations just to see how different it can look.

Grateful for you

 
 I've been thinking and planning for the month of October, which is Pastor Appreciation Month, for many church-goers.  Each year I have tried to create a card to send to each of the pastoral staff of our church to remind them of our appreciation for their faithful and diligent ministry to their congregation, and more specifically to Russ and myself.  As I began thinking about what I wanted to do, I had decided that this year I wanted to challenge myself to make the front of the cards a totally stamped-by-me background, which I have only done one other time.

In the meantime, I found that two of the challenge blogs that I have really enjoyed following are sponsoring fall-themed challenges that fit in perfectly with the ideas I had for the appreciation cards.  One of the blogs is new to me but I have really enjoyed seeing all the cards on that blog ... Creative with Stamps.  This month the challenge to to make an autumn-themed card.



The other blog has been one of my "mostest favoritest" challenge blogs, Retro Rubber Challenge.  I have participated in this challenge in the past and always enjoy seeing how people use the older stamps in their stash since I have lots of those as well!  Their current challenge (#119) is to use the fall colors of red, brown and orange, and that was exactly what I was planning to use!

So... I have made this card as my "test card" to use in October to send to our pastoral staff members (each one will get his/her own card):

The card base is an olive-ish green to which I added a piece of orange card stock.  I stamped the background on plain white card stock using leaves from two different stamp sets, both of which I have had since 2012 (can it really have been so long??? Yep, it has!).  I stamped the leaves with chocolate chip brown, pale red, orange(the pad looked darker orange that it stamped out), and a green that was a pear green according to the name on the old pad!

I embossed the word "grateful" with copper embossing powder and stamped the "for you" with the chocolate chip brown.  The words are from a stamp set I bought on sale in 2017 and have never used.  I thought the words were perfect for the occasion.

On the inside of the card

I used a new stamp set for the words and repeated the old leaf stamp from the front of the card, stamping it twice with the pale red ink  so I could get a shadowy effect on the one leaf.

Anyway, all that to say I like the results and as of now, all 14 of our church ministerial staff will get a version of this card, and if I have the pleasure of having some good "vibes" from the challenge blogs DTs in the process, all the better!  But they have certainly been my inspiration for this year's Pastor Appreciation Month card, so THANK YOU Creative With Stamps challenge and Retro Rubber challenge!!