Here’s a card I made for my aunt Maria in Belgium (hence the Dutch greeting). I used an old Viva la Verve sketch from last September that included this diagonal design for the background, which took a little bit of puzzling with the vertically-striped DSP. It had been a while since I last set an eyelet, but this little tag just didn’t look right without one. To decorate the tag even more, I cut a couple of tiny flowers out of the patterned paper and glued them above the sentiment.

Thanks for stopping by!

I remember admiring LunarLana‘s gallery back in 2004, when I officially joined the stamper’s community called Splitcoaststampers (after lurking on the site for several months). It’s great to see her chosen as the first featured stamper of this new year!

Looking through her gallery for something to CASE, my eyes fell on this orange butterfly card with the faux torn edge. It’s been a while since I used the faux tearing technique — a great way to add some interest to a fairly simple card. I blended a couple of distress inks together and stamped butterfly images with black ink while a torn piece of scrap paper was temporarily adhered to the top of the white card stock.

I hope to be posting with more frequency in the future, but I didn’t quite make it a new year’s resolution.

Thanks for stopping by, and Happy New Year to you!

I’ve been meaning to make a card for this week’s Featured Stamper, Understandblue, and luckily I managed to do so before the next FS is announced. Back in January I favorited Lydia’s Leadership Swap card, so that’s the one I CASEd. I used a silhouette image from the long-retired Vintage Postcard stamp set and embellished the oval focal point with sparkly brads. Colors were changed (sorry, Lydia, no blue), but the layout remains the same.

Thanks for stopping by!

I finally stepped back into my stamp room today (first time after vacationing in Belgium) to make a birthday card for my dear husband. I spotted a very nice masculine birthday card in Featured Stamper sweetnsassystamps‘s gallery that I wanted to CASE. I noticed too late that the original card was made for a sketch challenge, but at least I changed the shape of the card from a square to a rectangle. Other than using different papers and a different birthday sentiment, I kept everything else the same. Why mess with perfection?

Thanks for stopping by!

I was happy to find inspiration for an Easter card in Featured Stamper bspinks‘s SCS gallery today. Her Moving on to Easter card has a nice clean and simple design, just the way I like it!

I stamped the image and sentiment from Verve’s Easter Joy set with black ink and colored them with Copic markers. The ribbons were fastened with my favorite ribbon adhesive: Scor-Tape.

Thanks for stopping by!

I’m afraid it’s too late to send a Father’s Day card to my dad in Belgium (we celebrate on March 19th in Antwerp), but way too early to send one to my American father-in-law. At least I have another card ready to be used!

I turned Jen del Muro’s March Sketch For You to Try on its side and pulled colors from BasicGrey’s Marjolaine collection. The argyle pattern is what made me decide to create a masculine card. The Lovely Labels 3 image was a great match. I stamped it with Not Quite Navy ink on white card stock and colored it in with a light tan marker. The Tech Talk sentiment was stamped directly onto green patterned paper and cut out with a circle Nestabilities die.

Thanks for stopping by!

I can’t believe this is my first blog post in almost three weeks! No wonder I had a hard time coming up with a design for the shoebox swap I’m attending in Laurel today. I really should finish organizing my new (basement) stamp room so that I can get creative again.

Thanks to Fall-To Layout 130 from the clean & simple stamping blog I ended up with a fast, easy-to-make card for my stamping buddies. It was nice to discover how perfectly the happy birthday sentiment from the Curly Cute set fit inside the Top Note die-cut.

Thanks for stopping by!

I made a quick card for today’s FS Challenge on SCS, honoring the talented CAS artist StampGroover. I saw a card in her gallery that reminded me of The Angel Company’s Flower Collage Trio images. Wanting to stay close to the blue/green color scheme, I decided to use the pansy stamp.

This layout just called for a tent topper version, and I constructed my “topper” with a Labels Eight die-cut. The violet matting was hand-cut (after tracing the outside of the die with a pencil). I added extra colored flowers on top with dimensionals, similar to what Cookie did with her butterflies.

Thanks for stopping by!

Thanks to my friend Amanda, I found a great new challenge blog called Use it Tuesday. Their first challenge is to make something with an image you have not previously used for a project. I had just received this Aloha stamp set from Gina K. Designs in the mail today (my prize for winning last week’s color spotlight challenge on StampTV), so that’s what I used on my challenge entry.

I kept the card very clean and simple, because the sketch is Fall-to Layout 128 from the clean & simple stamping blog. The only embellishments on the card are knotted hemp twine and jute ribbon.

Thanks for stopping by!