oh little town of bethlehem...

one of the sneaky things challenge blogs sometimes do is make the title of a challenge just a teeeeeeeeeeny bit obscure. we don't do it intentionally to see who will actually read the whole challenge post... well, ok, maybe we do that once in a while, lol. i mention all of this because this week's ♥JINGLE BELLES♥ prompt is called, "oh little town of bethlehem" which you might think means we want to see religious images, but actually, we want to see holiday cards with at least one building on them. which at first seems kind of tough, but when you start looking through your stash, i expect you'll find --like i did-- that you have patterned paper with cozy christmas cottages, and stamps of gingerbread houses, and stickers with santa's magical castle at the north pole; not to mention cityscapes, eskimo igloos, lovely snow-covered churches or yes, even a stable with a manger in it! so there's a lot of ways to go with this. here's my card:

another great source of christmas building images: snowglobes!!! this one and its attendant embellishments and sentiment came from a pack of my mind's eye cardstock elements... some of which are very sparkly, which i love. i grabbed papers from a couple of different manufacturers that just happened to match, and called it a day.

i've used the incredibly lovely sketch saturday week #428 to guide my layout; i'd also like to thank those lovely ladies for the shout out on my pink and grey card from last week.

stephanie has a gorgeous card to inspire you, as well. why not hop over to ♥JINGLE BELLES♥ and check it out, darlings?!

logical, collage-ical

i suddenly realized the other day that i haven't done a non-assignment blog update since icad ended, which means i have over a month's worth of funky things that i've posted on instagram but not here. so i think i'll break them up into categories and post them over the next week or so. today i've got some collage pieces:

if you saw the autumn leaves gift bags i'm teaching as a class at paper anthology later this month, this will look a bit familiar to you. it's actually the page of my sketchbook where i worked out my ideas of what should be in each layer of the collage on the bags. in this "draft" there was a layer of modeling paste under the book paper tinted with colorburst, but over the stenciled distress ink. for the class i later left out the modelling paste (on the grounds that TWO sets of drying times would be inconvenient in the context of a class) and added flowers and gems to bump up the texture factor, instead.

a few days after i finished the "official samples" for the gift bag class, i used up the leftover leaves in this collage which has a background of torn vintage paper bits and a rather lovely bird from a napkin my mom "liberated" from a fancy dinner party she attended. 

(because YES, if you have something beautiful that's made of paper, and anyone in my family sees it, they will use the vulcan-mind-meld quite mercilessly in order to take it from you and give it to me. i have trained them well, lol.) 

here's yet another background of random bits of vintage paper, made over the course of several weeks, because it's soooooooooo much more fun to paste things into my sketchbook than it is to actually clean them up. at some later point i found the palm trees illustration in an old book, the nature stamps and an extra print of a buddha photo i took at the foster botanical garden in honolulu.

...and they all lived happily ever after...

i've only realized while writing this post how many of my collages are inspired by leftover bits and bobs. in this case, i had a bunch of circles ranging from an inch to six or seven inches. so OF COURSE i glued them into my sketchbook. and then it seemed like it'd be fun to practice shading one side with ink and distress crayons; and then i doodled in the bits of background that were still showing; and, well, i guess that's about it really. it kind of reminds me of a galaxy, in a way... 

i hope things are going well in your personal segment of the galaxy this week, but if not, cheer up, it's almost friday! ♥

down on the farm

this week's challenge at shopping our stash is called, "mary had a little lamb" and we'd like to see... well, personally, i'd like to see some tasty recipes, actually, but the brief is to make a project featuring a farm animal. which i suppose makes more sense seeing as we are a papercrafting blog, afterall. here's what i made:

farm illustration from a falling apart old book; sunflowers from my aunt, i cannot imagine WHERE (or why!!!) she had them, but they're great on cards if you nip the stems off!); chicken brad: eyelet outlet; cloud chipboard: october afternoon; cardstock label sticker: crate paper; alphabet stamps: freckled fawn (colored with red prismacolour pencil); "girlfriend" stamp: unity; patterned papers: dcwv, crate paper; ink: ranger archival (for stamping) and colorbox cat's eye chalk ink (for edges); adhesives: elmers brand gluetape, 3m foam tape, tiny bit of hot glue for the sunflowers

i was slightly shocked to discover, in the course of planning my card, that except for the admittedly AWESOME eyelet outlet chicken brads, i don't own ANY products with farm animals on them. go figure! i do however, have quite a nice stash of falling-apart vintage children's books that i grab up at garage sales... (people are always stunned that i'm actively seeking the ones whose covers are dangling and which contain more scribbled-on pages than clean, lol!) ...this page from a visual dictionary seemed like the PERFECT background for the theme!

i'm jumping in on retro rubber's "critter time" challenge again, since i have an animal or two (or six!) on here, lol. i also have a couple of older stamps in play: i've inked only half of unity's, "hey girlfriend" sentiment (which was an xmas present some years ago... maybe... 2012ish?) and swapped out the "hey" for the more farm-centric "hay" using a freckled fawn alphabet* i treated myself to last summer. 

need a little more rustic inspiration? head on over to the SOS blogstead, y'all, and check out the DT's amazing creations!

*this has since become my all-time favorite alphabet set, and i'm so pleased i grabbed it at the time, because when i went back like 2 weeks later it was GONE... and i've never seen it for sale ANYWHERE since then! carpe deal-um, my friends; seize the clearance sale bargains!!! :)

Tape LooOoOOoOoove (and a Tape Tester!)

It my day on the Eyelet Outlet Blog again, and I'm talking about my forbidden love: WASHI TAPE!!!!!! :) I may have mentioned before that I quite like the stuff. Some people have even suggested that I own too much of it. They're wrong, obviously, but not nearly as wrong as they'd be if they thought a person with as much tape as I have wouldn't be all that excited about the gorgeous NEW tapes at Eyelet Outlet. Because LOOK:

And that's just a sampling of what's new and upcoming at Eyelet Outlet, in fact, not everything is even officially *IN* the shop yet, so be sure to keep checking the blog, the shop and FaceBook throughout September because the designers will be showing off loads more cool stuff! It's not just tape, either, there's also a whole bunch of awesome new brads (I've used one of the Balls of Yarn as the center of my Solid Color Paper Flower stack) and a huge collection of epoxy shapes in sooooooo many beautiful colors. But I digress. We were talking about tape.

A few tapes I especially love are the Paris Washi, the Tape Measure Washi, the Wide Travel Washi, the Stocking Washi, the Reindeer Washi, Season's Greetings, Cruise Washi, Book Washi... I could go on, but you get the idea. Oh, and I didn't even mention the Skinny Tapes, which come as sets of three 5mm tapes. The Skinny Washi Hearts Set is super cool, imo, as well as the Star-Heart-Pawn Set (those tiny clouds!!!) If you want to see all the choices, spend a little time in the Eyelet Outlet shop, you won't be disappointed! Other tapes I used in my card include: Admit One Ticket Tape, Flowers With Cute Bug, Holiday Dots, and Stripe Washi.

 
Faced with so many gorgeous choices of tape, I decided to make one of my favorite styles of quilt card, for which you fill a large cardstock square with neatly lined up strips of different tapes, then cut the fully covered square into segments, which get re-arranged into a quilt-like-pattern. Like this:

If you'd like to see the entire method, I did a step by step tutorial a few years ago, featuring a card that is made exactly the same way as this one, but using strips of patterned paper. My favorite material for this is definitely *TAPE* though, because it's just so flippin' easy; heck, you don't even need adhesive! To enhance the quilting theme, I machine stitched around each of my triangles, before adding a Solid Color Paper Flower stack embellishment with a Yarn Ball Brad center.

Of course the one teeny drawback about tape is that it comes on rolls, and depending on how translucent the tape is-- and how long the repeat of the design is-- it can be difficult to see exactly what you're getting, or how well it will match the rest of your card... until it's actually stuck to your card, by which time... it's already stuck to your card! a few months ago I hit upon the idea of making a "tape tester" by sticking a bit of each design onto plain white cardstock, so I could see at a glance what I had, and how well it coordinated with my other supplies. When my crafty BFF and fellow EO Designer Stephanie saw this, she thought it was a great idea, but suggested it would be even better if I used a clear plastic base, so that the "tape tester" sheet could be laid right over one's project as a sort of preview mode. She was right, of course (she usually is!) so that's what I've done:

I cut up a sturdy but inexpensive acrylic file folder from the office supply store to use as my base, but you could use any clear plastic... even a bit of packaging, or one of those clear containers in which you get takeaway from the salad bar! You can see that I've arranged the tapes by color, and also a bit by theme, for example, all of my holiday tapes are grouped together. Some tapes appear more than once, because they fit equally well into different groups, and it's nice to see them side by side, in context, I think. Of course you can arrange YOUR tapes in any way that makes sense to you, but one thing I think I can promise is that you'll use your tapes more when you can really see them!

aloha, labor day weekend!

yes, i'm still marveling at the fact that it's september already... time to say, "ALOHA" to another summer. in light of this year's mega-hot august temps and especially high humidity here in the northeast, i'm actually looking forward to autumn a bit more than usual. meanwhile, i'm still making cards, and here's one for the retro rubber challenge blog's "critter time" challenge:

whale and fish stamps: lawn fawn (critters of the sea set) from... 2010 or 12??; transparency and journal card set: basic grey; paper scraps for piecing critters and sunshine: basic grey, doodlebug, cosmo cricket, dcwv, mme; aloha sticker: ehco park; ink: ranger archival (for stamping) and colorbox cat's eye chalk ink (for the edging); sticky back black pearls: eyelet outlet 

one of the requirements at retro rubber is not only to use a stamp that's more than a year old, you also need to discuss the approximate age, so here's my whale and fish dudes, who are from a lawn fawn set called "critters in the sea" and are copyrighted 2010. i know i won this set in a challenge, and i'm positive it was before we moved into this house, so i've had these guys for AT LEAST 3.5 years and maybe more. they are suuuuuuuuuuuuuuper-duper cute, though, don't you think? 

i paper pieced them to use on top of this very elderly basic grey journal card + transparency overlay, for which i also made a bit of a sunshine from scraps of yellow patterned paper. btw, i think from now on ALL whales should be plaid. seriously. we're going to need some marine-grade, pet-safe, vegan paint and a few realllllly big paint rollers... ok, no, maybe just the whales on cards should be plaid, and whales irl can remain a solid color. yeah. that's probably a better idea, i really don't want greenpeace protesting out in my front yard, especially now that we've got a bit of rain and the lawn is looking nice!

i was pretty excited that my pink circle-y SOS card was the winner of retro rubber's recent sketch challenge (ta v much, ladies!) and i'm looking forward to guest designing with them later this month. 

wishing my friends in the usa a very happy labor day weekend, and a very happy ordinary weekend to everyone else. g'head and take monday off if you like... tell your boss lauren made you an honorary american, so it's ok! :) :) :)

every body, SING! :)

we're still celebrating the sounds of the holiday season at ♥JINGLE BELLES♥ with cards that feature music. here's what i made this week:

patterned paper: my mind's eye, kaiser, crate; kromekote cardstock: the paper cut; poinsettias: michaels; xmas chipboard: mme and october afternoon; brad: mme; ink: colorbox; adhesives: elmer's brand gluetape, 3m foam tape

everyone knows that i loooooooooooooove PINK for christmas, but i'm not sure i've ever paired it with a warm grey before. i really like this combination, though, so i rather suspect it'll be something i do again in future! i also really like this week's sketch saturday (#427) layout, which i think you'll agree is rather fab:

speaking of fab, you really NEED to go and see stephanie's splendid card over at ♥JINGLE BELLES♥!

*WHERE* did august go??!

is it just me, or did the summer FLY by at a dizzying speed? i've been treated to gorgeous niece and nephew "back-to-school" pics all week and last night the paper anthology september newsletter landed in my inbox, signalling that today is SEPTEMBER FIRST... yikes! i've got two new classes coming up in september and october, that i'll be teaching three times each, so if you're in or around central new jersey, be sure to check out the dates and times on the paper anthology website! oh and be sure to look at the other classes on offer, because as usual, georgia and elisabeth have brought their "A" game! (actually, i don't think either of those ladies even have-- or need-- a "B" game, they are always working at the very top level!) ♥

meanwhile, here's what i'll be teaching:

love me and leaf me gift bags

(why yes, i *DO* write my own titles, however did you guess, lol?!)

...in which we'll have a blast playing with color burst pigment powders and vintage text paper, then diecut the results into gorgeous autumn leaves we'll use to decorate a couple of gift bags.

AND 

lettering tips and tricks

...obviously no one can make you a hand-lettering expert in three hours... BUT... i can teach you a few cool tricks involving outlines, shadows and faux calligraphy which, combined with stamping, stencils or handwriting, will instantly elevate your titles. we'll also talk about and test-drive the correct tools for each job (including tombow brush markers and the letterman envelope template) so you'll get a sense of what specific techniques to practice for even more impressive results! 

hope to see you in september and october!

(full details on the paper anthology website!)