Colors, Colors Everywhere!

Here are the three different color versions of my CAS12 card from this post. I wanted to experiment with complementary colors (colors opposite each other on the color wheel). These combinations pack a nice punch, especially on mostly white cards where the colors can really shine. Ann asked to see the cameo coral and turquoise one, so it's first up.



You should check out Ann's blog, Creative Antics, if you haven't already. She's got tons of talent!



Here's a cheerful pink passion and green galore version. These colors really pop!





This is the only one of the bunch that is on PTI's cream cardstock rather than white. The pumpkin and brocade blue look stunning together, very different in feel from the other two cards.

I will send the first person who can tell me the source of the title of this post the card of their choice from the four versions of this card. Here are two hints: it's from a song on an episode of a show on Nick Jr. I have all the songs from every episode of this show memorized and they run through my head annoyingly often. Please tell me I'm not alone.

CAS12 Challenge: Little Bits of Ribbon

This week's Clean and Simple Challenge is to use little bits of ribbon as tabs or flags on a CAS card. Here's my sample card. The focal image is a detatchable bookmark for my niece, who loves to read (so it's not as bossy as it appears, LOL!). This fun color combination was inspired by the April issue of Good Housekeeping magazine. So fun and spring-y!

I did a whole color series of this card:



This was my favorite by a nose, just because the colors are so warm and friendly. The other combinations included cameo and turquoise; passion pink and green galore; and pumpkin and brocade blue on a cream base. Obviously, these three use complementary colors and have more color punch, which makes them cheerier, I suppose. I was limited by the colors of ribbon I had on hand. This little experiment made me want to order more ribbon in all the SU colors. Yikes!

Font of You Umbrella

I hope the subscriber box works now.

I love SU's new set Font of You. It's different from SU's usual stuff and very appealing to the English major in me. Wouldn't it be wonderful to see SU come up with more crisp, unique designs like this one?

And of course now that PTI has an umbrella set (SO CUTE), I need that one, too. Sigh

This card is pretty straightforward. I stamped the sentiment on a scrap of white cardstock and trimmed it to a 3/8-inch strip. I then used SU's Word Window punch upside down, pushing one edge of the strip into the opening from the bottom so only one rounded side was punched at a time. This allows you to make the window bigger to accommodate sentiments that are too wide for the punch.

The center panel of the umbrella, cut from an image stamped on a scrap, is popped up with dimensionals. It would be loads of fun to make the center panel a different color, but I was in an orange mood when I made this and aiming for monochromatic.

Hope you like it!

PS If you subscribe and received this in your email, please let me know you got it and everything is working. Thanks!

Supplies: PTI white cardstock; SU Font of You stamp set; only orange classic ink; dimensionals

My Bad

Somehow I put the code for my Questioning my Intelligence blog feed on this blog, so subscribers are getting QMI rather than Simplicity. I am SO SORRY! I've removed the Feedburner subscription box temporarily until I can get this straightened out.

In the meantime, I hope people are enjoying QMI. ;-)


Edited to add: There's a new link for email subscriptions in the sidebar. Hopefully it works!

A ***** Card

I couldn't resist the title here...doesn't it seem naughty! NOT! These colors make me happy, happy, happy. Celery and Cool Caribbean featured in the last card, and I liked them so much I made this one, too! This asterisk stamp comes from a small discontinued set by Hero Arts. I love the set and don't use it enough. Easy card, bit of bling for fun, and it definitely makes me smile.

Supplies: PTI white and SU cool caribbean and celery cardstock; stamps by Hero Arts; Palette noir and SU cool caribbean and celery; rhinestones unknown; dimensionals

Another CAS11 Card

Here's another card I made based on the CAS11 Inspiration Challenge for JC Penney children's bedding. The bedspread I used for inspiration was this one. I loved the color combination (which is a bit off in my photo) and the clean lines!

The squares were punched from scraps, as were the flower and circle. No faux stitching on this one, just clean edges and crisp white. I actually experimented with placement of the sentiment, which looked better centered rather than off to the right or on the bottom right of the card.

Hope you like it!

Supplies: PTI white, SU celery and cool caribbean cardstock; Palette noir ink; various punches; dimensionals and glue.

Clean and Simple Challenge #11

I am late posting this on my blog because I was away for my grandmother's funeral. She passed quite suddenly early Friday morning and is now with Jesus and her husband, whom she has missed so much for over twenty years. She would have loved this card!

The challenge was to use JC Penney's children's bedding for inspiration. I used this set here for my inspiration. What a fun challenge this was, and I'm going to go back and make a few more cards from different sets.

This card looks much more complicated than it is. I used a square punch on scraps of cardstock for the border and "wrote" the stitches with coordinating SU markers. The hearts are PTI's nesting punches. The flowers are a punch I've had forever. The faux stitching didn't take nearly as long as I expected it to take. The sentiment is from Papertrey's Quilter's Sampler.

Hope you like it!

Amazing Grace

I made this for a friend who, coincidentally, passed the discernment phase of her program to become a Methodist lay minister the next day. This was the last piece she added to her discernment journal, and I'm just so honored by that. Her favorite hymn is Amazing Grace.

Supplies: SU cardstock in chocolate chip, bravo burgundy, very vanilla; stamps by Papertrey; Brilliance red poppy, can't remember the brown; ribbon; scallop border punch by SU.

Another Monochromatic Card and a Cool Tip

Here's another monochromatic card. Of course I qualified for Papertrey's Anniversary Set again this year, and it's really a fun and versatile set. What fun it is to play with "free" stamps. I really don't want to think how much I spent to get them....

Simplicity Tip: The oval wing on the big bird stamp, by the way, fits in the SU small oval punch. Nichole may have done this on purpose, but I discovered it all on my own. Yippy!

Hope you like this black and white birdie!

Supplies: PTI cardstock, polka dot paper, and stamps; SU ticket punch; half pearls; dimensionals

CAS10

This card is for this week's Clean and Simple Challenge (CAS10). It's a very CAS card...just paper and a bit of ink and one really fun embellishment! That brad gave me the idea for the card, and as soon as I saw it, the whole thing came together in just a few minutes. I had to do a happy dance!

Please visit CAS10 and join the fun!

Supplies: SU cardstock in celery, artichoke, and white; SU 5-petal punch; Hero Arts sentiment; artichoke ink; brad (perhaps by K & Co); glue dots

One-Hole Knot Tutorial Link

We have Leanne at Wee Inklings to thank for the one-hole knot I used on my card Three Little Words. I had visited this tutorial from a thread on Splitcoast, and I'm so glad to pass that link to her original tutorial on here. She's got pictures and everything!

And while you're over at Wee Inklings, poke around at other posts. Leanne TOTALLY ROCKS!!!

Miss You

This incredibly simple card has lots more white space than even I usually use, but the theme...missing you...seemed to call for emptiness. Doesn't that tree look so lonely? I thought about cutting the vanilla panel down more and leaving a bigger sage border, but then it just wouldn't look so lonely.

Supplies: SU Trendy Trees, PTI sentiment; sage shadow, vanilla SU cardstock; versamagic chalk inks; scor-pal; dimensional.

My New Favorite Set

Okay, I haven't had that much time to play with Trendy Trees yet, but I'm totally loving it. This card in particular makes me smile, especially because I realized that VersaMagic Aquatic Splash ink is almost a perfect match for PTI's aqua cardstock. Love that!

Simplicity Tip: For two-step stamps, make permanent positioner sheets for your stamp positioner using left-over transparencies from clear stamp packaging and StazOn ink. Store the sheets in the box with the stamps. You save yourself lots of time and heartache this way. (BTW, just passing this tip along from someplace on SCS...I'm nowhere near clever enough to think of this on my own ;-)

Supplies: PTI white and aqua cardstock; versamagic aquatic splash and sahara sand ink; SU Trendy Trees and Paper Salon stitch set; SEI button; craft floss; dimensionals, glue dot