commission!

Here's an invite I designed for the open house of the shared office space of one of my friends.  They've even offered to pay me!

birthday card

Here's a card I made for my friend Deedee's birthday.  It is inspired by the Tim Holtz class I've been doing.  To get this effect, you apply ink directly to an embossing folder.  I have to admit that I stole this particular combination from my 8 year old daughter.  The way I was doing it was to apply a stamp in the middle of an embossing frame.  It doesn't look nearly as cool as this.  Now I may have to invest in a few more embossing folders with this technique in mind!

retirement card

Over the weekend, my sister and I went to the retirement party of one of our favorite teachers from high school.  I brought a few supplies with me to my mom's house and made this card for him.  I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out, although I might have added some embellishments if I'd had access to them.

Distress Inks

Back in March (!), I signed up for Tim Holtz' Creative Chemistry 101 on-line course.  Today I actually started doing the course.  My sister, my five year old son, and I watched the first two lessons and then tried our hand at creating some backgrounds with distress inks.  Unfortunately, I don't have a whole lot of colors to choose from (yet).  We had moss green, antique linen, and wild honey. 

The first technique involves rubbing distress inks onto a tag using an applicator and then flicking water on it to make splotches.

 

In the second technique, a stamp was inked with distress inks and then spritzed with water before stamping to get a watercolor effect.

The third technique (and our favorite) was to apply the ink directly to a craft sheet, spritz with water, and then press the tag onto it.  You can keep adding layers with whatever ink is left on the sheet.  We also cheated and added in some drops of distress stain to get some other colors involved.

My son's tag was the best one of all:

 

Here's another one I did:

 Here's a final comparison.


If you get a chance, this class is definitely worth it!

Hello there

I recently ran across this drawing my daughter did in 2008 (when she was 5).  I just love the energy of it, so I decided to make it into a stamp.  Here you can see the original drawing and the carved stamp.
A couple of close ups for you:
 
I colored in the stamped image with colored pencils and then used Gamsol to get the watercolor effect (another technique learned from Deedee while I was in NM).  

just one more

Yet another card I made with Deedee's stuff and using distress stains for the background.  Love this image by Penny Black.  The second image shows the shimmer spray effect a bit better.

Fun with distress stains

I really enjoyed crafting with Deedee while we visited New Mexico.  Her craft space is amazing and has pretty much anything you might ever think you could need (probably in duplicate).   She showed me some techniques with distress stains.  Here are some of the cards I made:

Notice the bling, the ribbons, the shimmery papers, the shimmer spray, the bling.  So much glitz!  I think my cards have been taken to the next level.  ;-)

bicycle

This is a carving I did for a letterpress coaster swap.  I haven't gotten the coasters yet, but I'll try to post a photo when I do.  I like the vintage bicycle-- although my husband pointed out that the spokes are missing near the bike chain.  sigh.  Put this card together while visiting my friend, Deedee Stroud, in Albuquerque.  She thought of using the gear stickers (made using one of her punches and the xyron sticker maker).  I used a couple different color cardstocks in yellow and orange tones.  I think I like orange better.  I distressed the tags lightly by brushing with an antique linen distress inkpad.  The strip of green was embossed with  the Cuttlebug gear embossing folder.

zebra

I carved this zebra on Mar 29 from a photo taken at the Rio Grande Zoo while we were in Albuquerque a few weeks ago.  I used distress stains for the background.  I spritzed the blue with water to make the mottled effect.  Pretty pleased with how this card (and the stamp) turned out!