Valentine

A while back I was digging through my embellishment drawers and found tiny kraft bags from Michael's. A Valentine's Day card was born.

Card Size 7.25" x 3.75"

Simple enough to make, and the addition of kraft adds a nice masculine touch to it. This is my hubby's valentine this year.

Shhh.

Don't tell him.

You can tell him I bought five new Copic markers Monday because he's buying a big expansion pack for a video game, so that's chill.

Mercy, grace, peace, and love,
Susan


Supplies
stamps: CASual Friday Only You, Papertrey Heart Prints
ink: Archival black, red geranium
paper: Papertrey white
accessories: red velvet ribbon, kraft bag, circle punch

Variations on Sympathy

It's always fun to take a basic idea and experiment with variations. That's what happened with these three sympathy cards.

Basic idea: little butterflies from Papertrey's Beautiful Butterflies set for sympathy cards.

Variation #1

Papertrey Beautiful Butterflies, Technique Tuesday
One of a Kind, and Gina K Elegant Florals

Here we have a trio of little butterflies in a hedge of greenery...soothing, soft, and pretty. I wanted to put a metallic line across the division of stamped background and bottom white space, but the gold was too meh, the silver too bright, and neither worked. After looking for ribbon (no good colors), I decided on a bold strip of StampinUp old olive to provide an anchor and support for the design. It was a compromise that works for me. Sort of.

This variation isn't bad, but it doesn't really feel like a sympathy card to me. It might work better as a get-well card or thinking-of-you card with the current colors. If the colors were brighter (hot pink and orange, or pinks and purples), it might even work as a birthday card.

But it doesn't feel like a sympathy card to me.

Variation #2 (With Bonus Variation...Two-fer!)

Beautiful Butterflies again, with sentiment
from on of Uniko's Flower Power sets

My reaction to the dissatisfaction of Variation #1 was to strip everything to bare minimums except the idea of three butterflies. As you might imagine, these two monochromatic and super-CAS cards make me the happiest: clean and simple in the extreme, with a fabulously soft gradient to add to the upward movement. The curlicues on the butterfly wings work well with the Uniko sentiment.

Yep. These are better.


Variation #3

Same stamps as first card.

Finally, I tried to strike a balance between the busyness of Variation #1 and the minimalism of Variation #2. The third card uses the same elements as #1 but stripped and simplified. The sentiment makes sense quite literally at the bottom of a vertical card, and the branch rises up from the sentiment to send off the upwardly mobile butterfly. Sweet. Sad. Sincere.

Also crisp and clean.

And that's all I have to say about that.

My critique of these three cards is, of course, simply my opinion. What's yours? Does one variation appeal to you more? Do you like any of them? What works for you and what doesn't?

Inquiring minds, and all that....

Supplies
ink: various 
paper: Papertrey white
accessories: craft foam, rhinestones, glue

IC582 Aquatic Rainbow Cards

This week's Inspiration Challenge at Splitcoast is hosted by SmilynStef and is to get inspired by the website Threadless. I chose THIS SHIRT as my inspiration and had tons of fun with one of my Kaleidacolor ink pads! The oceanic theme of the shirt, the strong colors, and the layout all inspired my cards.

The stamps come from an old A Muse set called Keep Swimmin', and I arranged them in a "random" layout inspired by the t-shirt art. (Y'all know there's nothing random about random designs...that took about ten minutes of fussing to get right. Notice the outline images move diagonally from upper left to lower right, with the heaviest part of the design in the lower center and lower left to anchor everything. Yeah, "random.")

The multi-colored bling added sparkle and shine to the design and enhanced the spectrum effect.

Given that perfectly Dory sentiment, I wanted the card to feel encouraging and energizing, and the colors of the Calypso Kaleidacolor pad plus all the movement certainly achieve that.

Now, you might have noticed that the first card has a shocking lack of white space for something made by me, so I decided to cut down on the number of images and try a slightly different layout that allowed for more white space. The inspiration shirt is certainly more solid and has a strong focal point with the turtle. The results of my second effort are not nearly as satisfying as the first card, though. Truly, the whimsy and fun of the first card are lost in the second design.

This design has a strong focal point but the kelp isn't the point of the sentiment, so it just feels off. Also, all the images are solid, with no outlines for lightness, so while the colors are certainly accented nicely, the whole design feels heavy.

"It was a good idea that shouldna' seen the light o' day."

Say that quotation in a long, slow southern drawl. Yeah.

Anyway, the Inspiration Challenge is a blast, and it was SO MUCH FUN to go outside my normal comfort zone and fill space up with so many happy images, colors, and rhinestones.

If you feel so moved, click on over and play along! SmilynStef landed a good one!

Supplies
stamps: A Muse Keep Swimming
ink: Kaleidacolor Calypso
paper: Papertrey white 
accessories: rhinestones, craft foam, corner rounder, glue

Playing with Something New

My visit with mom and my aunt was lovely, and now it's time to get back to some sort of routine...or at least what passes for routine in our crazy world.

While poking around at Barnes & Noble earlier today, I found a set of brush pens that begged to be bought for $12.95. (Surely you've had a similar experience.) The plan was to use them for coloring in a coloring book, quickly and without really bothering with shading...just putting down bright, happy colors. Coloring books, for me, are waaaay more relaxing if I don't fret about shading.

The colors turned out to be even better than I'd hoped! They won't blend well at all for me (I tried, just to be thorough, but more experienced colorers might meet with greater success).  While the flat color will serve its purpose well in a coloring book, I wondered if it would look good on a card.

It does.

These fabulously warm shades of red, orange, and gold glow off the white paper. Adding a bunch of bling helped to liven up the flat, bold color with the shiny illusion of movement.

So glad to have experimented!

Have you tried any new product lately? How did it work for you?

Supplies
stamps: Altenew Botanical Garden, Simon Says Stamp Uplifting Thoughts
ink: Archival black
paper: Papertrey white
accessories: Brilliant Brush markers, rhinestones, craft foam, glue

Here's What's Shakin'

Posting will be sporadic for the next week as I'm joyfully spending time with my mother and aunt who are visiting.

In the meantime, enjoy a retro-style card with fun colors and stamps from Simon Says Stamp (Retro Thanks):

I love that this set looks great stamped askew...no need to line things up perfectly. It's also a great set to play around with fun, retro colors that are bright and happy. Hard not to smile with such colors popping cheerfully off the white card stock!

Mercy, grace, peace, and love,
Susan

Supplies
stamps: Simon Says Stamp Retro Thanks
ink: various pigments inks...mostly Impress Fresh Ink and Memento Luxe
paper: Papertrey white
accessories: craft foam, glue 

Red Velvet Love

In grad school, a male professor who loved discussing sex in literature assigned a poem for us to explicate. The short poem described a young man on a lunch break in a warehouse looking at a picture in a naughty magazine. I remember nothing else about the poem except there were red velvet curtains in the magazine picture.

How cliche.

This professor was not my favorite. Not because I'm a prude, mind you (pears!), but because he was rigid in his thinking. There was only one way to explicate that poem: his way. He wanted all our papers to regurgitate his ideas. 

While intellectual rigor is necessary and good, rigid thinking hampers any intellectual activity. Literary critics, if they are good, play with ideas and interpretations, test them, see if they hold up, look at literary works in fresh and different ways, seek meaning and acknowledge ambiguity, engage in constructive debate and read other scholars' interpretations with open minds and curiosity. It really is quite a lot of fun, if done properly.

We stampers should not be rigid in our thinking, either. We benefit from experiment, play, mistakes, curiosity, stretching our skills and supplies, interacting with other stampers and debating the merits of, say, pigment inks and dye inks, or visual triangles. 

Red velvet ribbon, for instance, is a delight to play with, especially on a card for Valentine's Day. Even poets and naughty magazines know that nothing says true love like red velvet. 

The ribbon is attached with Scor-Tape and trimmed flush with the edges of the card. The architectural letters were punched out and attached over the very thick ribbon with dimensionals placed top and bottom (the ribbon runs through the gap between the dimensionals). While I loved the contrast of the soft velvet and the crisp letters, the design still looked a little blah, so of course I added bling. It's a shiny, velvety card that might appeal to a man...not too romantic or girly.

Please share something that you have played or experimented with lately. I'd love to get some fresh ideas!

Mercy, grace, peace, and love,

Susan

Supplies

stamps: Hampton Arts (really old!)

paper: Papertrey white

ink: Archival red geranium

accessories: red velvet ribbon, dimensionals, rhinestones

With Deepest Sympathy Inspired by Chrissie Tobas

This card by Chrissie Tobas on Pinterest, practically pinned itself to my Cards board and quickly became a wonderful source of inspiration. I love how Chrissie stamped over a tiny raised tree for her festive "just a note" card, but Karen's Card Shop at my church needed sympathy cards, so I took Chrissie's idea in a more somber direction.

The butterfly was punched from a scrap of cardstock that was colored using Distress inks on an acrylic block. This is by FAR the easiest way to get a pretty watercolor effect. Rub the distress pads on the block, spritz with water, press the block onto paper. It almost always turns out lovely. The soft blue and green of this panel is perfectly suited to a sympathy card, and Karen, my friend who inspired the card shop with her enthusiastic card ministry, loved butterflies. Everyone at church knows this, and as a result, butterfly cards are our best sellers for pretty much all occasions.

Many thanks to Chrissie for her fabulous inspiration!

I spent time last week making a batch of different sympathy cards for the shop, and those will be interspersed this week with Valentine's Day cards because while death is an inevitable part of life, so is love. And I encourage you to make some Valentine's Day cards, especially if you don't usually, and send them out this year. We can all spread more love!

Mercy, grace, peace, and love,
Susan

Supplies
stamps: Gina K Designs
ink: Distress inks, Memento Luxe black
paper: Papertrey white
accessories: dimensionals, Martha Stewart butterfly punch