Three times a year, I go crazy with card-making. What's driving my insanity? The Stamping Board at my all-time favorite scrapbooking website, Two Peas in a Bucket, presents a series of challenges to create cards using various techniques and supplies. (I normally spend far more time on the Scrapbooking board than the stamping board, but I like them both.) The stamping regulars are currently winding down Winterfest 2012, which was my inspiration for five new cards.
A challenge to use a background stamp in a new way, and another challenge to combine punches with stamping inspired this card, which I will be sending to Ana Hess as soon as her son is born! Because I have an aspiring star in my family (Don Porter), I have quite the collection of star stamps. This one has lots of stars on it, so if I want a starry background, I reach for it. I also have a star punch, so it was easy to add a few more stars to the card.
Two Peas stamping board also issues a bunch of challenges every October, and calls them Stamptoberfest. During Stamtoberfest 2011, we were challenged to "reverse" stamped images by stamping them on opposite sides of white tissue paper. I did that, but my angels never made it onto a new card at the time of Stamptoberfest. But, when a new reverse challenge, coupled with another challenge to use buttons and bows on a card, appeared on Winterfest 2012, I had a very major head start on my 2012 Christmas cards. Expect to see a card very similar to this if you're on my Christmas card list.
When Positive Impressions, a store specializing in stamps, was open in Riverside, I took several card-making classes there. In one of these, I was introduced to water pencils as a means to color stamped images. A challenge in Winterfest 2012, took me and my water pencils to a new level: use them to color the background of a card. And then I happened to notice a paint can I've had for about five years, since the 2006 Sandals Couple's Retreat in San Diego. Similar colors to these, with beach images. I decided that would make a nice card, especially since my beach-themed stamps are among my favorites. Since I have a bunch of family living in San Diego, including one whose work has called him away from home for awhile, I am pretty sure one of them will soon receive this card.
I actually made this bejeweled flowery heart a few years ago. A challenge to make a shaped card, and include a stamped image on the card, inspired me to pull the heart off the original card I had made, and glue it to some cardstock that I would then cut into the same shape. While this would have been a nice card for Don to give me, I was never crazy about the original. By the time I made this card, I knew that Don had already purchased a Valentine's Day card for this year. (Last year I made one I loved so much I asked him to "give" it to me.) So this card went back into a box of cards I may give away some day. But this one has already been revised again. I pulled off five of these purple jewels and three of these pink heart brads, then cut the middle out of this heart and put the little embellishments, and the new smaller heart with the turquoise back side, on a scrapbook page. (See above.)
This is the Valentine's Day card I actually gave Don this year. I would not normally make a pink card for him, but I liked the "60s" feel these colors gave off. I was inspired to use this pattern and color scheme by another website's challenge, Creative Keepsakes. I was inspired to use this particular card design by a challenge in the "Design Garden" section of Two Peas in a Bucket.
And if you look very carefully, you will see that each of these pink strips of paper has been texturized, one with honeycombs, one with flowers and one with lace. I think if I had to do this card over, I would just use the honeycomb texture. But one of Winterfest's challenges was to use a tool called "embossing folders" to create a card. My texturizing plates are the orginal embossing folders, although people with more money to blow on scrapbooking than I have are now using much more sophisticated folders that will press a much deeper and crisper image into their papers. The challenge requirements were to use three different embossing folders, so that's why my strips are all different. The Christmas card above uses a fourth embossing folder, musical notes. I am sure now that I am into these texture plates, we will see more of the musical note plate soon. And the honeycomb plate, as honeycombs are a "trend" in scrapbooking for 2012.
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