Kittie is Queen

My dear friend and fellow Rubbernecker Red Hot Mama, Kittie747, has been crowned Queen for the Day! Kittie has a style that is all her own with her beautiful watercolored scenes. Each and every one of her magnificent cards is My Favorite. As much as I would've liked to have cased one of her scenes, what takes Kittie probably an 30-60 minutes to do takes me hours and hours and I'm limited on time. However, I did want to case one of her cards and finally settled on her beautiful Cupcake Wedding Cake as the main premise for my card.

I kept the cupcake and liquid pearls theme, changed colors , incorporated her signature gingham ribbon, changed orientation, and added a flower border panel.  I colored the cupcakes with Copic markers and then added pale pink liquid pearls around the Crystal Effects cherry and pink glitter to the frosting.
Congratulations, Kittie, and I hope you had a grand and relaxing vacation!

Love Without End Bookmark Card

I'm working on making cards for a swap I'm participating in next week.  I made my required masculine cards already with my horse post on June 17.  Here's what I came up with for my required feminine cards.

I wasn't able to capture the swirled embossing on the black vase that I made with an octagon Nestability cut in half, and now that I look at my photo here on my blog, the colors look kind of washed out.   I tried indoor shots and outdoor shots and this is just going to have to do because I've spent way too much time on trying to capture a good photo.  The pink on the flower really is quite pretty.  I wish my friend, Sabrina the photographer, lived here, but it'd probably be asking a lot of her to travel all the way from Ireland to take my photos for me, huh?

Well, I'll just try to explain what I did to make my card for those of you who like the details.  The colors are Pink Pirouette and Certainly Celery cardstock accented with black.  The green and white polkadotted designer paper is by American Crafts and does match Certainly Celery quite well in real life.  I heat embossed the Love Without End floral in black on pink designer paper (it's kind of polkadotted), cut it out, and popped up on a dimensional; the flower stem and the word "friend" are also heat embossed to make the black more prominent as opposed to when you just stamp with black ink.  We aren't suppose to use a sentiment on our designs as a part of this swap, so I'll keep this card for a friend and come up with something else to replace it on the bookmark.  The leaf on the right side of the flower stem was punched with the 1" circle punch and punched again by inserting the leaf almost halfway back into the circle punch to shape the leaf.

The corner piece is actually a detachable bookmark, which I made as part of the Our Daily Bread Designs blog challenge.  This was a technique challenge over on Splitcoaststampers all the way back to September of 2008.  Here's a link to TLC187 in case you're interested in making some yourself.  These bookmarks are so easy to make, and would make great little gifts for those who love to read.  Here's a picture of it removed from the greeting card.  Cute idea, huh? 

We're also required to use two embellishments on our swap cards.  For this card, I used a black brad and the pink polkadotted ribbon.  I used my wavy border punch for the black and pink panel behind my main image.  For the center of the flower I used the Boho Blossoms and 1/4" circle punches.

Thanks for stopping by, and I'd love to hear what you think of this card as a card for a swap.

Flowers of Summer

Thursday brings another CCEE Stampers challenge, and this week Shirley challenged us to make a summer-themed card using flowers or floral ribbon in our design.  I chose to use my Florals and Weeds images by Rubbernecker.  My red poppies were colored with a red marker directly onto the stamp onto glossy cardstock.  I added a touch of orange ink with a blender pen for color variation and then I took my burgundy marker to add shading for depth.  The lavender flowers were also colored with SU markers (lovely lilac and old olive).  The weeds were stamped in Peeled Paint Distress Ink.  I applied sahara sand ink using a paint sponge to create the wispy sky and then lightly sponged soft sky over that.  Because I wanted my field of flowers to be the sole focus of my card, I kept my design simple.  I matted this to a sahara sand panel and punched the lattice border.  I wanted to use these brads that match sahara sand perfectly, but, since I do not like to have the back of brads show on the inside of the card, I cut an extra piece of real red cardstock, punched it with the same lattice border punch, and stuck my brads through the lattice holes.  I applied this to a strip of sahara sand to hide the metal of the brads and then raised this panel on thick dimensionals.

If you'd like to play along with us and/or see the designs my friends, Frances, Joanne, Shirley, and Cindy made, check out the details on our CCEE blog.

Happy stamping!

All Aboard the Birdbrain Train

Splish, splash, I was takin’ a bath
Long about a Monday night
A rub dub, just relaxin’ in the tub
Thinkin’ everything was alright

When what to my ears did I hear?
Comin’ down the track in the rain?
Yellin’ come on, Bertie, is party time
Why, it’s the tea partiers on the birdbrain train

Well, I stepped out of the tub
I put my feet on the floor
I shook my tail feathers
and I headed for the door

There I saw da Mudder
Reelin’ with the feelin’
Movin’ and a-groovin’
A-wheelin’ and a-dealin’, yeah

Bing, bang, I saw the whole gang
Headed for Californ-iiii-aaaaa
Flip, flop they wuz doin’ the bop
In celebration of mom’s 75th birthday

I began a-rollin' and a-strollin'
reelin' with the feelin'
movin' and a-groovin'
splishin' and a-splashin', yeah!

Hey, tea partiers!  Are you a-movin' and a-groovin' this fine Tuesday?  Be sure to check out Mothermark's Teapot Tuesday story and challenge and come on board the Birdbrain Train!

My bird and flowers were colored with Twinkling H20s; the center of the flowers and dots on the bird's shower cap were colored with pretty purple Smooch Broom sent to me (thanks, Hilda!); the bird bath was paper-pieced with SU dp; the sky was watercolored with bashful blue; and the grass and flower stems were colored with reinkers and blender pen.  I applied Lavender glitter to my faux brads (1/4" circle punch).

Hope to see you at da tea party today!  Bertie is movin' and a-groovin' to the tunes and flingin' soap bubbles today, so you're guaranteed not to get hurt or dirty!

Punchin' Cute Tree

Iris (Pam) is the chosen featured stamper on Splitcoaststampers today.  I chose to case her cute Happy Bird-day card.  Obviously, I made several changes with colors, stamps, and using no ribbon.

Isn't this punched tree cute? I got the idea for it after I saw Mary Fish use SU's 1 1/4" circle punch to make a leaf for her flower stem, and I thought, why not tree leaves?

 

These sweet flowers and grass are from Rubbernecker's Kittie Kits Cause a Scene and are the perfect size for fitting under my tree.

I used the same punch for the tree trunk on chocolate chip cardstock, using the remaining piece of cardstock after I cut out the leaf portion.  I then used my 1" circle punch for the center of the tree and adhered the leaves with glue.  You can see the pieced sections in the photo on the left and how I inserted just a portion of the 1 1/4" circle.  I then finished off the tree by adhering an olive green button with embroidery thread tied through it.

Want to know how I made those clouds? With my SU slotted punch! I just punched bashful blue and white cardstock at various depths, sponged the edges in ballet blue, and then glued them together.  Here's a close up.  The black buttons on each side of the main image panel were made with the Buttons #5 Sizzlits die.

Some Saturday Stampin'

Happy Saturday to you!  Thanks for stopping in at my blog.

I had a chance to make a couple cards today.  The first one is for the Inspiration challenge on Splitcoaststampers  from the LoveArtWorks Clay Pottery website.  I was drawn to Kristen's raspberry treat platter.

Kristen uses a lot of black/white line drawing with splashes of color on some of her designs, as well as a lot of bird images, so I brought all three of those elements into my design using an old SU hostess set. I relied heavily on my stamp-a-ma-jig to get the images lined up within the frames as well as for the solid image within that set to stamp the soft pastel colors over my images after I colored them with reinkers and a blender pen. I then cut each frame and adhered to a piece of black cardstock. I used my ScorPal for the scoring outside of the black frame. My card is 4 1/4" square.

My next card is in honor of this week's Queen for the Day zgirlsgranny, aka Linda.  Linda is such a sweetheart and a terrific stamper to boot! She's also a crazy tea partier at Teapot Tuesdays, and we always have such a blast.

My poochies are clear stamps by Inkadinkadoo in solid images. For the pappa pooch on the left, I stamped him first in creamy caramel, lined him up with my stamp-a-ma-jig and stamped him again in chocolate chip. I then took a black marker and colored just certain portions of the image and stamped the image again using my stamp-a-ma-jig. For the darling daughter poochie on the right, I stamped her in Adirondack's ginger (to reflect her lovely reddish brown tresses) and then took black marker and colored portions of her, too. I had to cut out each piece of both poochies and glue them to the kraft cardstock.

This darling daughter pooch with the beautiful reddish brown hair is giving her pappa pooch a particularly delicious bone for Father's Day. It will be in the form of a gift certificate to one of his favorite stores.

Happy Father's Day Pappa!

Majestic

Shirley from my CCEE group gave us a terrific sketch challenge this week.  If you'd like to play along with us, please visit our CCEE blog to get all the details.  You can also see the fab projects my team mates Cindy, Joanne, Shirley, and Frances designed.


For my card, I silver embossed and watercolored with Basic Gray reinker this terrific horse image from Out West by Gina K. on Gina's Pure Luxury White cardstock.  I then cut him out and adhered him with dimensionals.  I think he looks majestic; therefore, his name!



I'm thinking about using this for a swap I'm going to be participating in.  We have to create half masculine and half feminine cards.  Obviously, this is a masculine theme.

Stamps:  Out West (Gina K)
Cardstock:  Basic Gray, Gina K Pure Luxury White, Pebbles Inc dp
Ink:  Soft Sky
Accessories:  Versamark, silver embossing powder, silver brad and lasso, star punch, paper piercer, dauber, dimensionals, oval Nestabilities, circle Nestability