A Green Birthday Card

Aqua and pink you say? Not green? No, it is green since it is a recycled card!!

This started out as an aqua colored pergamano birthday card, bought at my favorite store, All About Paper, LLC in Hampton NH. The gold oval and sentiment are stickers. There is a gold penned edge on the lighter aqua paper. I cut it down a bit, layered it on imported pink and aqua paper (then put on a base card of Pink Pirouette textured cs), made a little butterfly and tied a bow.

You know how the photograph thing works, the bow is silk that matches but looks badly in the photo!

Papertrey April Blog Hop~ Tissue!

Woo Hoo! April, and that means spring, is finally here for us! Thing is, Spring for me means lots of events during the month; this week was our anniversary, today is DD#1's birthday, and tomorrow is DH's birthday! Luckily, we generally don't celebrate our anniversary and birthday's, so that leaves a little birthday event for Alex. So, this afternoon I needed to create a gift bag to hold one of her gifts, and since it is all about the baby this year, and since baby Wes' 'theme' is forest animals, I did up her bag using the leftover paper from his shower invites.

Now jump to the Blog Hop challenge this month- use tissue. I have lots of different colors, and well, since it's spring and the fruit trees are gong to bloom, and a tree might work, and I had some dark green tissue... well...here you go!

Makes me smile just to see that little owl, lol, and I am not an owl person! I cut a piece of tissue into fourths, then folded each one into fourths, then used a decorative edge scissor to cut them into layered rounds. Squished them a bit, layered them and pinched together, then stapled them together at the pinch. I folded the stapled area flat, and attached to the patterned paper with glue dots.

The tree trunk is the new tree bark stamps done in Dark Chocolate. The owl is from a Martha Stewart embellishments package. The little bird is a brad from Doodle... Doodle...Doodle something. After it was all together and tied with twine, I decided the tree needed a bit more, so I glued on some tiny flowers, and also took the scissors and cut long slits into the tissue here and there.

There are some million dollar cloth diaper covers int here, in case you are wondering, lol!!

Have fun on the hop!!

A Reconfigured Bear~

Long ago and far away, I made what I thought was a pretty cute card; Anna Griffin papers and a Cotton Scraps sleeping baby on green Bazzill textured paper and a ribbon and button flowers and golly, just adorable! Well, we all see beauty differently, right? So I guess we all see adorable differently, too. The card sat at the hospital unused for months- they even passed it by and used one I did in oranges, for goodness' sake! So I brought it home and took the sleeping baby off, and colored the Bear from Inkadinkado with watercolor crayons and stuck him on and sent him back- and yep, used within a couple of days...

...so what's up with that???

The Daffodils are blooming!

The daffodils are blooming all over the yard, spring has definitely sprung! We've had a ton of water, and it's raining out there again... another inch or two of rain tonight... but the tulips seem to be loving it!

This is the March Year of Flowers set from Papertrey- here you go! I colored it with Prismas and Copics, layered it on Ripe Avocado and Spring Moss, and used a piece of a new paper pack- Linen, from DCWV. It really needs a silk ribbon, but I haven't been able to bite the bullet and order some May Arts ribbons sight unseen- You can't see it unless you make it bigger, but the daffodil stamens have a bit of glitter on them.

So, it is close to midnight here, I have just gotten into the house from Stamping Around NH, which lucky for me is local! We had a great class tonight, and will have great classes tomorrow! One of the Waltzingmouse DT members Julia) is there with Claire's stamps, and Lauren Meader will teach a class as well- Heaven, with a little bit of rain!!

A Blue Stork

Yesterday I did a lot of studio clean-up, then took a nap early for work~ then I got a wind from the islands, and good golly I went on a baby card blitz and had 8 done before I knew it. Somewhere in there the phone rang and it was work asking if I wanted to stay home- I practically cheered in her ear!! I think I was finishing up numbers 5 and 6 at the time, and went on to do 7 & 8 late into the night.

This one is created from some 'scraps' found during the clean-up. The background is from Waltzingmouse, stamped on Stamper's Select with Spring Rain. I almost tossed it since I didn't like the gap I got in between the first and second stamping. The stork is from a new set from Fiskars, I bought it on a little shopping spree on Monday. The DH dropped me off at ACMoore, and told me I could do all three craft stores if I wanted to walk the mile between them~ it was an expensive forced march, lol, but we got our exercise for the day, the wallet and I! Now that I think of it, I never did tell him I expended no calories since there is a Dunkin' Donuts in between 2 of the stores, and the day was warm, and well they have this new thing called a cinnamon bagel twist, lol... Sorry, I digress.

So the new stamps had to be trialed for goodness and function, I do that on Papertrey's paper inserts, you know the 8 1/5 x 5.5 inch piece that has the logo and color name on it. I save them all, and use them for insides of dark cards, or to test out stamps or inks on. So this image came out rather nicely the first time inked, so I went ahead and colored the baby with some Copics, and put him on a leftover bit of Spring Rain, and gee it looked kinda nice on the WMS messed up background, and there was a wee bit of I don't know whose blue gingham ribbon sitting right on top of the ribbon bits pile- and there you have it!

My REAL Button Blog Hop card~

Sooo.... last week, well maybe 2 weeks ago... was the March Papertrey Blog Hop. The challenge was to do something unique with buttons, and I came up with something ok but a little bit numb- see it here~ Over the past couple of days I was finally able to sit down and get out the vision I had in my head, lol.

I confess, it was not my original idea to put faces on buttons, I saw it first over at SCS I'm sure. I've used it a couple of times now; it makes me laugh every time I do it!

I stamped Tin Types on Stamper's Select in Hawaiian Shores ink. The printed paper is Green Boutique. The little leaves are just wrapped around the Nestability cut ovals. The pea pod is from Baby Button Bits, of course. Those are Ripe Avocado buttons, sitting on the Ripe Avocado pea pod- I sliced out the center of the pea pod and put some Hawaiian Shores paper under the cutout- Gosh, I'm all tired out from putting in all of those links, lol, you can figure out the rest!

The sentiment is also from the Baby Buttons set. The yellow flowers are from Savvy Stamps; they come in two sizes I think, these are the larger.

Kristie Larsen Baby cards!

This two card series started with a wonderful baby card in the March/April 2010 Stamp It! magazine. I can't find a photo online, but it's on page 28 and was made by Kristie Larsen. Part of it's attraction for me is the colors and patterns she used- not traditionally baby colors, and a juxtaposition of textures/prints. I wanted to SPICE it pretty closely, and I also loved all of the button backgrounds on the Papertrey Button Blog Hop last week, so I did this one in pretty pastels. Printed papers are from my antique paper stash, but the buttons and ribbons are Papertrey, the sentiment is from Papertrey's Mega Mixed Messages and the file folder tag punch is SU's.

But this one was a bit too pastel and the patterns weren't quite right, so I did another one-

Ahhh, yes, I like this one better!! The light printed paper is from the Pretty Pastels paper pad, sentiment is from Baby Button Bits , and the buttons -ah yes, all from Papertrey. Punches are SU for the scallop and Martha Stewart for the lacier one. The green dotted paper is unmarked- from the previously mentioned antique stash.

I wonder how designers and submitters of cards keep track of their paper manufacturers? I mean, once you cut off the edge, do you write on it somewhere who made it??

The ribbon is Papertrey's 1/4 inch silk, colored with a Prisma marker to match the green paper, the pale is colored to match the lighter tin type print. I like tying those double ribbons, and when the ribbons widths re the same it works well to see both colors or prints evenly.

Good cards,lol, but Kristie's is still better!