Vera Stamps

For today’s shoebox swap at Fort Meade I decided to make a card using the Silhouette tutorial in the December 2010 edition of the Technique Junkie Newsletter. I figured coloring the flowers with a black marker would speed things up so that the Baltimore Ravens fans in our midst could leave the swap in time for the playoff game kickoff!

I’ve always thought silhouettes and oval panels go together very well, so I stamped the image on an oval die-cut of patterned paper and matted with a black scalloped oval. The Friends Are Forever set contains several sentiments that all fit inside the large oval SU! punch, so my fellow stampers could pick a different one if they wanted to.

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Most of the time, I make A2 size cards (5-1/2″ x 4-1/4″), but this time the card is only 3-1/4″ high. It’s because I tried to follow the sketch from Fall-to Layout 122 on the clean & simple stamping blog quite closely. I actually made two of these cards; the other one carried a Dutch birthday sentiment for my aunt’s birthday on Saturday. Hope the Belgian post woes are over after all the problems they’ve been having with the snow over there (and that my card made it on time!).

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“Looks like leather,” is what my husband said when he saw the card I made for the Gina K. January Release color challenge last weekend (Kraft, Chocolate Brown, and Turquoise Sea). For the background, I adhered kraft card stock to a larger piece of brown card stock and ran this through my Big Shot with the Gridlock embossing folder.

The turquoise panels were muted with Old Paper distress ink to make the birthday card suitable for a male recipient. I used the layout from SCS sketch challenge 314.

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Today’s technique challenge on SCS aimed to jump-start our creativity. First, we had to pick a technique that was featured during the last year (I chose TLC302 Emboss Resist). Then we were to pick a Color Combination challenge from the last six months (I went with CC298 Chocolate Cherry Crumb Cake) and finally, we needed to pick a Sketch Challenge from the last 100 sketches (this is SC309).

I must say this was a lot of fun, and this 5″ x 5″ card came together with greater speed than they usually do for me. I clear embossed the Wild at Heart image on ivory card stock, sponged red and brown ink over the entire image, and wiped off the excess ink with a paper towel.

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I’ve been a member of the Random Acts of Kindness user group on SCS for a long time, but I haven’t been sending out many cards lately. That’s something else I want to change this year. The ‘just because’ sentiment from Verve’s Great Friend stamp set is perfect for RAKs!

The layout I used is Mojo Monday 172. I applied the embossed reinker spread technique on the flower with Regal Rose, Rich Razzleberry, and Kiwi Kiss reinkers.

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