Oh Boy!

Paper:          Daisy D, Anna Griffin
Die Cuts:      Elephant & Balloons by Cricut
                   Label 1 by Spellbinders
Stamps:        Brayton Alphabet by JustRite

Sorry for the blurriness of the photo.  Every have one of those days where no matter how you sweet talk your camera, it's not going to take a good shot?  Today was one of those days.

This card was made for a Baby themed card swap, but since all my friends (and I) are lining up to be Old Maids, I thought I'd come up with something that could swing for birthdays or other festive events as well, preferably ones that involve cotton candy.  I love cotton candy :-)  What you can't see due to excessive blurriness, is that I sanded nearly every square inch of that card and then rubbed brown ink over it in an artistic manner.  Even the elephant, who looks way cool distressed, btw, like an 1950s storybook about a circus that was very well loved.

Spellbinders Designer Spotlight

In case you want to feed my narcissistic tendencies and show Spellbinders how my public loves me ;-)  Here is a link the design team spotlight on moi.
http://spellbinderspaperarts.com/blog/designer-spotlight-on-donya-schroeder/
I'll be back tomorrow with a few new projects. Ciao dahlings!

Might as Well be Spring

Hooray, hooray~ It's up above freezing today!  The birds are singing and the dog is chasing them all the way to the neighbors farm.  Definitely something Springish in the air, groundhog be darned.  Here's a pretty little card to celebrate:

This is an uber simple card, easily replicated for masses of Valentines or birth announcements, you don't even have any major coloring to do, just stamp the main image (Crafty Secrets) in Versafine Black ink.  Normally I stamp images with Tsukineko's Archival Brillance Graphite so I can color them with Copics and not worry about bleeding, but with really detailed images you need that Versafine or you are going to wind up with a blob.  A very sad blob.

I did this card once using Marvy punches and one with Spellbinder Nestabilities in what I suppose could be called a cardmaking version of the WWF Smackdown.  Guess what? Nesties won, hands down.  They just look way more polished, especially when you are working with vellum, like on the background scallop here.  One other thing you can't do with the punches in that reverse stenciling technique to create a border (you can see a how to on reverse stenciling a couple of posts back, the blog party post).  Nope that's not an extra piece of tan cardstock behind the main image, I just inked up the die itself with a light brown fluid chalk inkpad.