Holly, Poinsettia and Pinecones

There is no possible combination of holiday foliage that I do not love; especially if we're talking about Eyelet Outlet Holly, Poinsettia and Pinecone Brads! See?

Here's a shocking true confession for you: I own probably 15 sets of foliage dies and at least 7 or 8 of them are holiday foliage! But I use *all* of them --separately or together-- pretty much every year. In this case I've pulled out some medium sized pine branches and some smaller holly clusters, but really this idea would work with any foliage you like... you could even stamp rather than diecut, for that matter. I've used the same basic sketch for all three cards, just changed up the specific shapes and products. This is a great way to make a bunch of cards quickly, without having to mass-produce in the traditional way. For my first card I added the foliage to a matted star diecut, anchored the fronds with a trio of Poinsettia Brads and grounded the whole thing with some argyle-inspired Christmas Pattern Washi.

My second card is landscape rather than portrait, and I've used a nice big label shape, so that I could scatter a bunch of the gorgeous new Pinecone Brads around a Bling-bedecked Paper Flower stack. A double strip of Pine Tree Washi frames the whole thing quite nicely.

My third card features an ancient 3-layer heart die and a cluster of Holly Brads with red Jewel centers against a background of sheet music adorned with Holly Tape. This illustrates one of my *favorite* things about washi tapes that have a lot of "white" in them... they are almost always translucent, so that you can apply them over different colors of cardstock or patterned paper and get different effects!

Of course, there is a nearly unlimited amount of beautiful combinations you could make with just a few EO Holiday Brads and tapes, so let your imagination go wild! ♥

walkin' inna washi wonderland!

we're celebrating "washi, washi, washi" this week at shopping our stash. you don't have to use sixteen strips in eight different styles of tape on the same card... but you can... and i have, lol! :)

patterned paper: doodlebug design; pink cardstock: sei; flowers: prima; badge: of unknown origin, but it's ancient, so you'd never find it anyway, lol; tapes: prima, october afternoon, little b, target, freckled fawn, eyelet outlet, heidi swapp and... ok, i think that's it; again... they're all really old except the wide flower tape from prima's havana collection and the skinny gold stripe tape that's still available at eyelet outlet; adhesives: elmers brand gluetape, 3m foam tape, sookwang scor-tape and sewing machine

yes, i like pink. i may have mentioned that a time or two. i also like flowers, flair and tape. so this seemed like a good time to break out all of the above... in quantity! something i don't like much is measuring, so whenever possible i like to apply washi tape onto a background with a line- or graph-pattern. so obviously i was pretty psyched this summer when doodlebug design released a whole rainbow collection of "floral-graph" petite prints, which have (as the name implies) a tiny floral pattern on one side and graph paper on the other. they come in a couple of dozen colors, many of which are available at paper anthology, where i stocked up on quite a few; and they are every bit as amazingly useful as i thought they'd be! 

everything else on this card is considerably older than this summer: the flowers are particularly ancient; most of the tapes are four or five years old and i have no idea where the strawberry badge even came from, but it's the perfect finishing touch!

of course you don't have to use eight different tapes OR make the tape the center of your design to play along with the "washi, washi, washi" challenge at SOS... which i hope you will! ♥

gingerbread for EVERYBODY!

we are still celebrating all the delightful sweets and treats that make up the festive foods of the holidays at ♥JINGLE BELLES♥ and you still have time to join the fun and... get a shot at the little prize that's on offer to one lucky random cardmaker who links up with us! here's what i made this week:

santa baby patterned paper, chipboard, puffy stickers and cardstock shapes from prima marketing; other papers from prima's havana collection, studio calico and bella blvd; washi tape: heidi swapp; border punches: martha stewart and recollections; adhesives: elmers brand gluetape, 3m foam tape, sewing machine

prima marketing's "santa baby" collection recently arrived at paper anthology and i confess to being completely obsessed already. i suppose it's a good thing it wasn't released earlier in the year, or most of my holiday cards would bear an eerie similarity to each other lol. one of my favorite surprises about these papers and embellishments is how well they coordinate with other collections both from prima and other manufacturers. on this card i've mixed in some of prima's "havana" collection from this summer as well as bits and bobs of other, older, mostly neutral, papers to ground the design a little more. 

my layout was inspired by the current sketch saturday (#540) devised by the very awesome and talented claire grantham!

be sure to visit stephanie's gorgeous card at ♥JINGLE BELLES♥ and link up your own masterpiece!

Happy (Almost) Thanksgiving!

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving in the US, so this seems like a good time for a couple of especially autumnal cards featuring Eyelet Outlet Leaf Brads and a few other goodies.

If you have Leaf Brads and a sentiment, you don't really need a whole lot more. In this case I've trimmed the sentiment down from a journal card, matted it with some wide Flower Washi Tape and  Skinny Glitter Tape and then set the leaves in a sort of cascade, as if they were falling from their trees. I added some Mini Leaf Brads as well, for more variety.

I fell in love with this pickup truck sticker partly because I figured it would mix really well with our Pumpkin Brads and I stand by that decision. Since my pumpkins are stored with my Halloween brads, I found a black Kitten at the same time and thought it would be a fun combination. I made a little scene for the truck using Brick Washi, punched grass, and a few Mini Leaf Brads on the ground... because there is not a patch of grass anywhere near where I live in New Jersey that doesn't have some leaves scattered around on it right now! Finally I added a sticker sentiment which had some leaves printed on it, but I decided that dimensional ones, in Leaf Brad form would be even better.

If you are celebrating tomorrow I wish you a very Happy Thanksgiving! If not, I hope you have an Especially Nice Thursday! ♥

inspired by a label?

i confess that this week's challenge at shopping our stash stumped me for a bit. we're looking for cards inspired by the label/packaging of a food or beverage item. which actually isn't all that hard, once you start actually looking at labels. but for some reason i could not get my head around the idea at first, lol. once i did, though, there was no stoppin' me!!! see?

patterned paper: echo park, basic grey, american crafts; stickers: jolees, martha stewart, echo park; ink: colorbox; adhesives: elmers brand glue tape, 3m foam tape, sewing machine

ok, so, unless you live in hawaii, you might not immediately recognize my label inspiration, so before i go any further, i'll just mention that i was inspired by a hawaiian beer called kona longboard. it's available here in new jersey, at wegman's, and lovely husband jeff recommends it. i don't enjoy beer myself, but it is a really pretty label with a fun vintage hawaii sort of vibe!

it also just happens to use a few colors and themes featured in two of my favorite echo park beachy collections: island paradise and paradise beach! as it turned out, i used more bits and bobs from other sources than from the two collections in question, but they are what got me started; and my card base, blue background paper and "aloha" come from those. i also brought in some ancient basic grey paper to be the sand, a fun faux polaroid and miscellaneous tropical stickers. because YES... i love stickers! ♥

of course you can use any food or beverage label as inspiration, so if you're feeling stuck, the SOS blog is a good place to start because my design team darlings have AWESOME things to show you!

Little Journals, Everywhere

It’s a merchandising Mandala Monday on which I’ve just added sixteen brand new 6x6” spiral bound journals to my Etsy shop, Just Enough Stuff. Each has a handpainted, ColorBurst mandala (by me) and 20-40 pages, depending on paper style. Choose from sketchbook paper, watercolor paper or a mix of new and vintage pages. Something for everyone! (at least... everyone who likes little journals, lol...) ♥

bring us some (metaphorical) figgy pudding!

we are celebrating all the yummy treats of the holiday season this fortnight at ♥JINGLE BELLES♥ so a card with any type of festive food on it will qualify, from xmas pudding, to gingerbread, to a roasted turkey, candy canes... or even a plate of cookies for santa, like i have here:

patterned paper: carta bella, bella blvd, stampin' up and the stripey layer is a digi collection from echo park, i think; santa and cocoa cut from doodlebug and american crafts journal cards, respectively; dear santa card: pebbles; border stickers: fancy pants and crate; cookie plate is a basic grey tag with a crate paper doily sticker on top; cookie brads: eyelet outlet; ink: colorbox; adhesives: elmers brand gluetape, 3m foam tape

my cookies are eyelet outlet cookie brads, which are on currently sale in the EO store, a fact which i fear means they are on their way to being discontinued. so i'm especially glad i stocked up on them in the booth at expo over the summer!

all of the other bits and bobs are from different sources. the cocoa and santa were each part of larger journal cards, from two different companies, but i couldn't find stickers the right size, so i had to fussycut them. i was excited to see that julee tilman's awesome mojo monday sketch challenge is back, fortnightly now, and it's being held on her personal blog, poetic artistry. don't you love the sketch? (ok, yes, i might've got slightly carried away with the scallop border section lol!) 

be sure to hop over to ♥JINGLE BELLES♥ and see stephanie's amazing card, then start planning your own food-centric holiday masterpiece! btw, did i mention there's a little prize to commemorate our last official themed prompt of the 2018 season?! just sayin'... 

Bird Conversations

Even in the aviary world, some folks have more to say than others, lol. A fact that I have captured in card form, using one of my favorite sets from the fall 2018 release, our Blue Bird and Robin Brads!

I used some ancient speech bubble stickers as templates to cut many (MANY!) left-facing speech bubbles from sheet music to constitute the bluebird's part of this discussion. And also one right-facing speech bubble from ledger paper on which I had typed Mr. Robin's succinct reply, "Whatever". I diecut a branch, set the Bird Brads, then added all of the bubbles to an appropriately sky-like background. A thin orange mat helps direct the eye immediately to those very handsome birds!

Whatever ♥YOU♥ might be inspired to say in card form, I'm pretty sure there's at least a few styles of Eyelet Outlet Brads to help you do that!

tic-tac-toe... let's go!

it's a make-your-own challenge kind of week at shopping our stash, since lovely mimi has devised (and hand lettered!) an awesome tic-tac-toe style board for us to choose any row, column or diagonal of three consecutive elements!

i chose the diagonal that runs from top left to bottom right: leaves, stash more than five years old and powder pigments... in my case colorburst, of course!

patterned paper scraps from: authentique, glitz design, graphic 45, photo play and carta bella; scraps of gold glitter paper: american crafts pow; glossy black cardstock bases: ranger; circle die: spellbinders/nestabilities; leaf dies: provocraft/cuttlebug (small) and sizzix/tim holtx (large)... used on bits of vintage book paper painted with autumnal shades of colorburst; ink for edges: colorburst; pen outline: faber-castell pitt artist pen in SX; gold distress stickles: ranger; flowers: prima; brads: queen and co; labels: dymo; adhesives: elmers brand gluetape, scor-tape by sookwang

ok, so the leaves and the colorburst are pretty obvious, i think. i painted various vintage papers somewhat randomly with 2-3 shades of the latter, then diecut them. i inked and outlined around the edges and dabbed on a little bit of gold stickles, which is hard to see in photos but very cool irl. the 5-year-old items are the set of cuttlebug dies i used for the smaller leaves-- one of the first dies i ever purchased. for that matter, the tattered foliage die i used for the larger leaves is probably close to five years old as well. the little white prima blooms are from the "got flowers" era, which is probably 6 or 7 years too, right? of course, my trusty dymo labelmaker is much older than anything else i used, and it's still going strong!

i made four artist trading coins, for an instagram swap with an "autumn" theme. the requirement was actually only to make three... but i decided the camus quote fit better when broken into four pieces.

all of the papers i used were scraps from my september and october classes at paper anthology. which were still sitting in a pile in my art lair, and were perfect to make a neutral, but not boring background for the coins.

the tiny red mini brads are pretty elderly too, actually. they probably come from around the same time as the little prima flowers.

there's lots more inspiration awaiting you from the lovely ladies at SOS, why not treat yourself to some eye candy, darlings? ♥

festive flower power

we're still wishing you Mele Kalikimaka (which is hawaiian for merry christmas) at ♥JINGLE BELLES♥ this week and making cards that feature flowers to celebrate!

patterned paper: carta bella, american crafts; florals: we are memory keepers; holly leaves: petaloo; snowflake flair: studio calico; sentiment sticker: doodlebug; glossy white cardstock: the paper cut; adhesives: elmers brand gluetape, gluedots, sewing machine

i had this american crafts floral paper in my hand last week, but it wasn't quite the right home for a flamingo, so i moved on. i hadn't stopped thinking about it though, so i had a head start when i sat down to make this week's card. as soon as i saw this week's sketch saturday, i was smitten (see below) so that took care of positioning. a white flower, badge center and velvet holly leaves were all pretty straightforward. believe it or not, the hardest part was finding a sentiment which made sense, fit the space, and didn't clash!!!

as i said, my layout was inspired by the current sketch saturday (#538), which i think you'll agree is pretty awesome:

be sure to hop over and see stephanie's card at ♥JINGLE BELLES♥ then cruise the kalikimaka gallery for even more inspiration!

Birthday Pun(s)

As you know, I'm always excited about pairing Eyelet Outlet brads with diabolical puns OR awesome pre-made journaling cards. So imagine how excited I am to be able to do BOTH... simulataneously!

I'm definitely crushing on Doodlebug Designs' "So Much Pun" collection, especially since it works really well with a lot of different EO brads and washi tapes. For one thing, they don't just have any old frog, they have a super cute one who could definitely be the elder brother of our adorable Frog Brads! Since we're celebrating a birthday on this card, I decided not to stop there, but to also add a Party Hat and a Cupcake as well. For the background I used one of the coordinating prints from the paper collection with a few neutral solids and a nice strip of Green Dot Tape because they're frogs, lol!

I guess it wasn't too shocking that one of the other 2.25" square minicards featured some birthday candles; but what are the odds that those candles would be EXACTLY the same size as our Candle Brads? (and yet... they were!) In this case the colors were just right to feature all three shades of Sprinkles Tape too!

Of course you don't need any particular papers to make the many styles of EO Birthday Brads shine on your own cards. We've got everything from Balloons to Birthday Sock Monkeys... and a whoooooooole lot of great stuff in between! ♥

try not to step in a poodle!

because it's raining cats and dogs this week at shopping our stash. by which we mean we'd like to see projects that feature cats, dogs, or even rain! here's what i made:

frenchie and frame: pipsticks; sentiment sticker: studio calico; heart punch: ek success; patterned paper: amy tangerine/american crafts; october afternoon, basic grey; glossy white cardstock: paper accents; ink: colorbox; adhesives: elmers brand gluetape, 3m foam tape

this sweet french bulldog sticker was in my pipsticks pack months and months ago and i confess that due to his extreme cuteness i've been hoarding him a tiny bit. luckily, i have a dog-loving friend with a birthday coming up and i know she will love him as much as i do. the frame postcard is also from pipsticks, but it's a bit newer. all the patterned papers are oldies but goodies. strangely for me, this is quite a flat card, but there's so much going on with color and pattern that it felt finished.

it's raining cats and dogs' worth of inspiration at SOS, you should definitely check that out, ASAP! ♥ 

Anniversary Party and New Classes!

It's one of the best weekends of the entire year at Paper Anthology in Kenvil, NJ. We're celebrating our SEVENTH anniversary with a big party that includes food, games, prizes, special savings,*4* awesome make-and-takes and more The best part? It's all FREE! So come on down and hang out today between 11 and 4! If you can't make it today, be sure to check out the class schedule for the next two months, there are some fabulous holiday (& non holiday!) choices! I'm teaching two:

Bloomin’ Beautiful Holiday Cards:

We’ll learn three different ways to make beautiful, dimensional (& easy!) Poinsettia and Holly Clusters using Heartfelt Creations’ coordinated system of stamps, dies and shaping mold. Then we’ll combine our beautiful blossoms with Authentique’s “Nostalgia” collection on a trio of elegant cards and finish off with Elizabeth Craft diecut sentiments.

Festive Foliage Gift Bags:

We’ll combine diecuts with premium materials like metallic and glitter papers, beautiful felt and vintage buttons to create a pair of lovely gift bags that can be dressed up or down to suit nearly any winter holiday or occasion.

festive and floral

we're celebrating christmas with a floral flair this fortnight at ♥JINGLE BELLES♥. for "MELE KALIKIMAKA" any flowers will do; and your card needn't have any island or tropical connection, but it can if you want. and SURPRISE... mine does!

patterned paper: echo park, creative imaginations, american crafts, crate paper, elle's studio; flamingo and scalloped border sticker: echo park; hibiscus stickers: martha stewart; palms and plumerias: creative imaginations; poinsettias made with heartfelt creations stamps, dies, stamens and foam paper; ink: colorbox; adhesives: elmers gluetape, 3m foam tape, beacon 3-in-1

i couldn't resist adding a flamingo of course, but actually heartfelt creations' system for making awesome dimensional flowers-- in this case poinsettias-- was my number one inspiration. I used the coordinating stamps and dies on their very cool foam paper, added some color and ultra-fine glitter,  then used my heat tool to make the petals curl into realistic looking blossoms. once i had loads of poinsettias and a flamingo, of course i added some hibiscus, plumeria, palm fronds and faux polaroids. like ya do, lol...

be sure to hop over to ♥JINGLE BELLES♥ and check out stephanie's fab florals, then get cracking on yours!