JB2509: Ornamental Color Challenge

It's time for a festive color challenge at Jingle Belles and thus we present a lovely and inspiring palette. This fortnight we'd like to see cards which incorporate at least three of these five colors:

Your card can be of any style, shape or holiday theme, you just need to work with some... (or all, if you're feeling brave?!) ...of these shades! Here's what I made:

As I was puzzling over what I wanted to make, it suddenly occurred to me that one of the things I liked in the inspiration pic is the sidebar with the colors stacked together. I was pretty sure I had scraps of cardstock in all of those colors, and sure enough I did! I found the sentiment on a mini journal card and diecut a Hero Arts Snowflake Cluster from glossy white cardstock to emphasize the winter/holiday aspect.

Be sure to visit Jingle Belles to see Stephanie's beautiful card and check out the little prize that one lucky random cardmaker will score this fortnight. JB2509: Ornamental Color Challenge runs until the evening of Wednesday, May 7th.

Give Thanks

It's a week before Thanksgiving, but there's still time to send out some quick, easy cards! This super-simple CAS design features Eyelet Outlet Leaf and Mini Leaf Brads layered over stenciled leaves in fall colors. The background and diecut sentiment are made from beautifully neutral Nature Washi Tape. Change up the sentiment and this design could be used for literally ANY autumnal occasion.

Speaking of stencils: Did you know that you can easily make your own custom stencils using ANY simple craft dies you love? In this case, I've taken the three sizes of leaves from the Essential Envelope Die Set in Wendy Vecchi's NOT Your Ordinary Card Collection from Spellbinders and blended my favorite fall shades of Wendy's Archival colors from Ranger through them before adding the Leaf Brads and a simple sentiment. Job done! I made my stencils from glossy cardstock which is pretty sturdy; but to make them last forever cut the shapes out of stencil plastic. Don't forget to leave a bit of distance around each shape so that you have room to blend without accidentally getting stray ink on other areas of your project.

 

Visit the Eyelet Outlet Store today for brads and tapes that'll work perfectly for EVERY season of your cardmaking year; and check out all of Wendy Vecchi's awesome designs from Spellbinders.

CAS Question...

...is a card still "Clean and Simple" if it features five Eyelet Outlet Washi Tape styles and nine Brads?! I say yes; but then I'm not exactly a minimalist, lol! 

Inspired by this cute tree sticker I found in my stash, I started looking through my Eyelet Outlet goodies for autumnal items in the right colors, and found Pumpkin Brads, Sunflowers, Mini Leaves, and the orange calico cat from our Feline Brads. To ground my embellishment grouping, I made a tape stack starting with Pumpkin Tape, Wood Washi, and my favorite Script Tape, to which I added some shorter pieces of solid color Skinny Tape. Since I had obviously made a tiny stylized landscape, it seemed like a good idea to finish off with Sun and Cloud Brads... so I did! 

Weekend Round Up

In addition to hostessing some of the challenges during Paper Anthology's WCD Crop Weekend, I also participated in a few that my friends Elisabeth Ostrowski, Shari Morris and Linda Duke were responsible for, and this seems like a good time and place to post those.

Acorns and/or Pinecones Challenge

Elisabeth made an utterly luscious card for this one, featuring vellum leaves to die for! My card has text diecut leaves on which I've smooshed autumnal colors of Tombow Dualbrush Pens, dimensional Prima flowers from various older collections and Eyelet Outlet Pinecone Brads... all set atop a piece of absolutely gorgeous patterned paper from 49 and Market's Vintage Artistry collection.

Clean and Simple Christmas

CAS cards are a true challenge for me, but this time I think I've acquitted myself pretty well. That Lawn Fawn Yeti never fails to make me smile, and he doesn't really need much embellishment to make a card work. I stacked some snowy washi tapes, added a couple of punched trees and finished off with a trio of EO Snowflake Brads.

Black and Orange Challenge

I gave myself a bit of an extra challenge on this one, I wanted to use these colors but NOT make a Halloween card! I'm happy that this is seasonless but still interesting and entirely orange and black!

 (Well ok, there's some white too...)

 

Cheering for You

It's a three-fer of colorful circle motif cards, featuring the newest additions to Wendy Vecchi's Signature Series Archival Inks from Ranger: Periwinkle, Goldenrod and English Ivy.

The other day I suddenly had an idea about a CAS card (which... if you know me... will surprise you, lol!) in which I'd stamp the pretty floral elements from Wendy's "Bravo" Stamp, Die and Stencil Set over variously sized circles of those three lovely shades. Then I'd add a sentiment (from the same set) and use my Perfect Stylus Set to scatter an accent of Periwinkle Liquid Pearls. As it turned out, I used that idea three different ways, and the resulting cards got less CAS (shocker!) as I went along.

My circle "stencil" is just three sizes of ancient circle punches, on a piece of glossy cardstock; but nevertheless the Mini Make Art STAY-tion's four magnets held it perfectly in place while I added my colors.

I found that I could mat the finished panels on nearly every shade of purple, green, blue or yellow in my cardstock collection, as long as they were slightly muted. Unusually for me, I did nearly all of my stamping on a single surface, except for the sentiment on the last card, which I made into a little flag.

I really like all three versions, and I'm not sure there's any combination of Periwinkle, Goldenrod and English Ivy that wouldn't look pretty flippin' cool; but if you realllllllly pushed me to choose, I'd probably confess that the one with the graph paper is my favorite.

The Ultimate 2020 Brad Set

If I had to choose just ONE Eyelet Outlet product to sum up last year, it would surely have to be the brand new Mask, Hand Sanitizer and Soap Brads which debuted this week. They are not just super-useful for making cards, layouts and journal pages with distinctive 2020 style, they're also kind of adorable don't you think?

I've paired them with simple, computer-generated sentiments and fun rainbow-colored styles of EO Washi... (Elephant Tape, Stripes and Confetti to be exact!) ...but there are nearly endless possibilities for these, so stay tuned to the Eyelet Outlet Blog to see more ideas from our stellar design team!

Anniversary Card Round-Up

In addition to hostessing, I also made cards for a few of Elisabeth, Shari and Linda's challenges in the Paper Anthology 9th Anniversary festivities. And here they are now:

To CASE Elisabeth's beautiful holiday card I chose a similar medium woodgrain background paper, dark green mat and a kraft cardbase. I used lots of foliage dies, plus some pretty Penny Black Pinecones. My sentiment is a slightly different shape, but I've tried to echo the corner element by placing it a bit higher.

I chose the bottom row of Linda's fun Tic-Tac-Toe board and combined about five different diecuts, some Lawn Fawn variegated twine and a plaid I hand-painted using Olive, Terre Vert, Chartreuse and Sepia ColorBurst. 

Clean and Simple cards are definitely not my metier, but I was determined to have a go at Shari's CAS with a Spin challenge. The "spin" is that you cannot use white or cream, which turns out to be harder than I thought! Luckily I had Spellbinders' Kaleidoscope Tiles die set to be my focal point and some Lawn Fawn Woodgrain cardstock to give all that (non-white) white space a bit of texture.

Many thanks to everyone who played along this weekend, there is still a bit of time to finish up challenges, answer trivia and poll questions... all of which earns you tickets for the big raffle drawing! Everything you need to know is on the Paper Anthology FaceBook Page.

...OOPS...!

Here's a funny (...sorta...) story: We're moving into the second week of the CASE challenge at Jingle Belles, so I headed over to Stephanie's Blog to choose a card I wanted to recreate, saw this gorgeous CAS masterpiece, et voila, job done!

Except... when I went back to link to that post, I realized, it wasn't actually a Jingle Belles card. Rats. I'm happy with how it came out, though; and it features a whole bunch of gorgeous Eyelet Outlet Washi Tape, so I'll show you anyway:

Meanwhile, there are about a gazzillion other Stephanie cards made especially for Jingle Belles that I love enough to make a version of; in fact, here's one now, made for our Stars and/or Stripes challenge in July:

Ok, so... I was pretty faithful to Stephanie's design, though instead of using a bunch of star and stripe patterns to unify my inchies, I chose to combine papers from Prima's "Christmas in the Country" collection, which has plenty of nice small motifs. Since my squares are just a smidge over an inch AND I matted them as well, I elected to move my sentiment up on top of my grid to keep my card size just under A7. I did scatter some Eyelet Outlet Star Brads and Sequins on top, though, because that's one of my favorite elements in the inspo card.

Be sure to hop over to Jingle Belles and see which card of mine Stephanie has remade this week and start scrolling through to choose something YOU would like to CASE!

A Few "Extra" Cards

Just a few pics that have been languishing on my computer's desktop so I figured I'd post and file them. By the way, to anyone who asks, "Why are you still blogging, when all the action is on social media now?" I reply, "A month from now, when you want to find one specific project quickly, would you like to scroll for all eternity through your feed, waiting for it to load each set of nine photos; or jump into Blogger's dashboard and use the search feature?" Plus I have the luxury of recording all the product I've used AND tagging the post so that I can easily make a group of say, collage projects, or cards that have brads, or ink blending, or stencils, or... well, you get the idea. Having said all of that, I tried Blogger's appalling new format last week (YIKES!) and if they don't fix their diabolically nested toolbar or allow the "Legacy" format to be used indefinitely, I may change my mind about the whole deal.

But for now, lookie, there are cards! :)

This is a "Clean Up Collage": basically when I take all of the random scraps on my worktable and instead of throwing them out or putting them away, I make a random collage. Usually I do this in my sketchbook, but since I had a focal point and everything, I made a card.

(ps: these leftovers are all from one project involving StencilGirl stencils, that I'm really excited about but can't reveal yet... hehehe... sorry to be cryptic, lol...)

Here's a baby card for a new family member who arrived earlier this year. I had intended to use it as an Eyelet Outlet project; then I realized that BOTH the sweet prams and the pink teddies had gone out of inventory... 

I was trying to draw hydrangeas on scraps of watercolor paper from a class kit I put together for Paper Anthology. These came out well enough that I decided to paint them with ColorBurst. I considered using this as my CAS card for SOS but then I realized it isn't very "stashy" is it...

♥♥♥

Yes, It's Really *ME*!

I mention it because when you see the card I'm posting today you might very well think you've come to the wrong blog. However this fortnight's challenge at Shopping Our Stash is called, "Keep it Simple, Sister" and we are looking for the dreaded (if you're me, lol) CAS -clean and simple- card. This is *NOT* my metier; and I am never telling anyone how long this card took to make. But here it is, and I'm pretty pleased with it:

narwhal stamp and die set: jen long/sizzix; narwhal colored with tombow dualbrush pens and shaded with prismacolor pencils; sentiment stamps: lawn fawn (have a narly) and paper smooches (birthday); stamping ink: ranger black archival; inky background: distress oxides blended with a sponge dauber; teal cardstock: gina k; enamel hearts: eyelet outlet; adhesives: elmers brand gluetape, 3m foam tape

I confess I did A LOT of cruising of Instagram and Pinterest in preparation; and while I didn't wind up finding something CAS to CASE, I did nab quite a few ideas that helped me compose something very pared down, that still looked "finished" to me. I knew I wanted to use the narwhal stamp and die set that Stephanie gave me a few years ago and I don't use nearly enough, so I stamped and colored (and colored... and colored; let's just say there might've been one or two "rejected" narwhals before I came up with a version I liked!) I wound up hand-cutting, because the die left a much larger border than I cared for in this context. I masked off a panel to be my ink-blended ocean; I managed somehow NOT to get a giant smudge on the white space; and finally I added a couple of enamel hearts and a teal cardstock mat. 

If you love making CAS cards, this is definitely the challenge for you! If you hate making CAS cards... maybe this is still the challenge for you? Because maybe part of the point of challenges is to stretch a bit and try something new? Either way, be sure to hop over to SOS and see the fab cards from my design team darlings! ♥

are CAS and grunge fundamentally impossible to combine?

seeing as CAS stands for "CLEAN and simple" it would seem so, wouldn't it? and yet i think you'll agree that, in the laurniverse, the card you are about to see is about as minimal as any i've ever made in my whole entire life. which ought to count for something, surely? but why does the question even arise... especially HERE, of all places? if you've guessed that there's a CAS-related challenge at shopping our stash this week, you're headed in the right direction! in fact, july 12th is national simplicity day, so we are paring down to just the essentials. which i think you'll agree i have actually done fairly successfully.

in the spirit of full disclosure, i have to admit that i somewhat cheated. because whereas i can recognize and LOVE a very minimal design when i see it, i have a hard time coming up with one on my own. so i decided to find an awesome CAS card and try to recreate it. i picked this card by an SCS member called biggan, and i stayed fairly true to the original. i even used a PLAIN WHITE BACKGROUND and stamped my sentiment right on the plain white background. which is how i lost the "clean" from "clean and simple". because i used a new set of woodmount alphas in a typewriter font that i absolutely love. and when i stamped them on scratch paper they came out beautifully clean. but... (you can see what's coming here, can't you?) ...when i stamped on my actual card i got a big honkin' black mark. i could have just started over. but i wanted to see what would happen if i added a few more black marks, and a tiny bit of distressing, to the design. so i added the 2nd and 3rd impression from all the other letters to the area around the sentiment, and the 2nd and 3rd impressions from several ink-ups of my favorite texty background stamp to the area underneath the hearts, to which i'd already added a little bit of crackle embossing paste, just to get some texture on here somewhere. so i'm not sure it's still CAS... but i think it's still simple?

you may --or may not-- be wondering where the hearts came from; but since they involve the stamping that qualifies me for the current retrorubber challenge (#66: going to the chapel: make a wedding card) i'm going to tell you, lol.

when i was designing the garden friendship book, for one of my july/august paper anthology classes, i tried out a lot of ideas using a beautiful tim holtz cling stamp set called "garden flowers" which is from either last summer or the summer before (2015, i think; but i'm honestly not sure!). a couple of the techniques involved smooshing together a few of my favorite shades of colorburst (peony and wisteria for the flowers; pthalo and turquoise for the leaves) on watercolor paper, letting it dry completely, then stamping the flower outlines on top to achieve that really loose watercolor stamping look i love.

in the end, i had several extra panels that didn't work for the book, but were much too pretty to toss away. i've used a couple in various ICAD collages, and for the remainder, i traced heart shapes onto the back of the panels, cut them out, and machine stitched them to the card. which brings me full circle, to my original question: is a card still CAS if you've grunged up all your elements??

meanwhile, my dearest SOS dt darlings have made beautiful cards that are clean AND simple, and i'd love for you to go marvel at their skill!!! ♥

aloha... monday?

isn't it weird how a holiday weekend totally disorients one's sense of time? i've honestly woken up four days in a row thinking it was sunday! mind you *yesterday* i was actually correct, so there's that! meanwhile, i'm fairly certain today is monday, and i thought it'd brighten things up a bit if we all had a nice little daydream about hawaii, k?

white kromekote cardstock: the paper cut; dies: echo park (hibiscus) and spellbinders (foliage); vellum letter stickers: amy tangerine/american crafts; patterned paper: doodlebug; adhesives: elmers brand gluetape, 3m foam tape, sewing machine

in keeping with my self-imposed mandate to try making more CAS cards, i'm jumping in on challenge #201 at CAS colours and sketches, it's a sketch this week, and apart from rotating it 90 degrees, i've been pretty literal with it. i do  have a teeny bit of pattern in my mat, which i hope doesn't disqualify me, but as anyone who knows *ME* will tell you, this is uber-CAS in the laurniverse, lol, and i'm fairly pleased with my take! :)

i'm also jumping in with the crafty friends challenge #45: blossoms, since i have this rather nice hibiscus!

have a good day and a great week! aloha, darlings! ♥

♥happy halloween♥

halloween falling on a monday is kind of a mixed blessing, isn't it? because on the one hand... it's MONDAY. but on the other hand: CANDY!!!!!!!!!!!! ♥♥♥

i confess that in the past, i have not always made halloween cards, but this year, i'm making up for lost time! so when the lovely and talented amy tsuruta sent me a link to a fab challenge featuring monsters i couldn't resist making just one more halloween card. the only catch was, it's a challenge at addicted to CAS. and we all know that whereas i *LOVE* to see cards with a CAS aesthetic, i am pretty hopeless at making such cards. but i was determined to have a go:

patterned paper: KI memories, from the paleolithic era; large chipboard letters: basic grey; small chipboard letters: american crafts; monster brads, spider brads and purple washi: eyelet outlet; glossy black cardstock: ranger; adhesives: elmers brand gluetape, 3m foam tape

luckily i still had some eyelet outlet monster brads left, which is a considerable advantage in any crafty pursuit; as are mini spider brads and ancient KI memories orange paper. obviously. and yes, i'm still totally addicted to oversized sentiments rendered in chipboard at the moment, so i'm just going with it. arguably, my card could be more CAS... but for me this is downright minimalist (!!!) so again, i'm just going to call it done and be somewhat pleased with my effort.

if you would like to see some cards by people who reallllllly know how to pare down a design to its perfect essentials, be sure to check out addicted to CAS, codeword: monster!

mama CAS?!

the other day stephanie found a cardmaking challenge with an "aloha" theme... which is totally up my alley, eh? except the blog in question was addicted to CAS, and as anyone who's ever been to my blog for more than 30 seconds can tell you, i can't do "clean and simple" to save my life. don't get me wrong, it's a style i love, and i sooooo admire the people who can pull it off, but it's just not my thing. funnily enough, though, i couldn't quite stop thinking about the fact that i just AUTOMATICALLY decided not to even consider taking part. that kind of knee-jerk decision worries me a bit. because a lot of times when we're saying, "i can't" what we really mean is, "i won't"; and the reasons why we won't might have more to do with habit and comfort zone than actual skill. i should also mention that all of this took place on the last day of our "art camp" vacation, during which we make a point to experiment and try new things. so in the end, i decided i owed it to myself to have a go. i made three cards, but only this top one is for the official addicted to CAS "codeword: aloha" challenge!

cardstock: bazill; tapes: love my tapes, heidi swapp, freckled fawn; vellum letters: amy tangerine/american crafts; palm tree paper: sandylion; hula girls: long's drugs, ala moana center, waikiki; adhesives: 3m foam tape

i can't say i'm in love with any of these, but they're all fun and they're definitely quite pared down. i've put them into the post in reverse order of making them. the white one above was made last, and is the one that's closest to the picture i had in my head. it has the most white space, and it has the most color, too, which probably makes it more appealing to me. also, it features a couple of the tiny hula dancer stickers i got at long's drugs in waikiki.

the middle card is more masculine... it has a cool tiki guy and a surf board and one of my all-time favorite eyelet outlet washi tapes with clouds on it:

cardstock: paper accents; cloud washi: eyelet outlet; stickers: creative imaginations, jolee's; vintage sheet music copied onto an inkjet transparency; adhesives: elmer's brand glue tape, 3m foam tape, sewing machine 

finally, here's the card i made first, and about which there is some debate as to whether it's "really CAS" or not. some people may consider that the palm tree cuts too far in to the white space; though i'd argue that a card with a total of FIVE THINGS on it and a plain cardstock background is sort of automatically clean and simple, but then a maximalist like myself would say that, right?!

cardstock: core'dinations; stickers: creative imaginations, jolee's; vintage sheet music copied onto an inkjet transparency; adhesives: elmer's brand glue tape, 3m foam tape, sewing machine 

so has all of this converted me to the true path of minimalist design? well, no, not really. i'm probably still a "more is more" kind of gal at heart. i did enjoy the challenge, though, and i'm proud to have produced cards that i think are rather nice, and quite pared down. will i be attempting CAS again? sure! not today, though; today i'm going to dive head first into a giant pile of vintage paper and attempt to use as much as possible on ONE PROJECT, lol! :)