Happy (Almost) Fourth of July

Tomorrow the USA will celebrate its 248th birthday and here's an appropriately red, white and blue card featuring Eyelet Outlet Flag and Hat Brads, Flag Washi, Heart Tape, Red Jewel Strips and coordinating Star Brads!

Shopping List:

Flag and Hat Brads

Star Brads

Flag Washi

Heart Tape

Red Jewel Strips

Eyelet Outlet has all the embellishments you need for ANY occasion! 

SOS525: NBUS

In case you're wondering, NBUS stands for Never Before Used Stuff; and this fortnight at Shopping Our Stash, we're asking you to create a card that features items in your stash which are more than one year old, but haven't, for whatever reason, been used yet. Here's my card:

In the photo below you can see my Never Before Used item: a fabulous IO stamp set called "Aloha" which Stephanie gave me for my birthday last year (or possibly the year before?!) which I absolutely LOVE but somehow, despite the fact that I've gotten it out periodically and re-admired it, I had still never inked up?! I did my own variation of "spotlight stamping" by using the MISTI (also a gift from Stephanie, quite a few years ago, which I do actually use ALL the time!) to stamp a panel of tropical flowers and leaves. Then I carefully lined up my Altenew Bold Alpha dies to spell "ALOHA" and cut them from the background. I left the surrounding area plain, but used my Tombows to color the flowers and leaves of the diecuts, which I then shadowed with a second set of diecut letters in bold blue, before placing them back in the holes from which they came. I added tiny (ancient!) Prima paper flowers with Eyelet Outlet Pearl centers; added a bold blue mat and a surrounding panel of 49 and Market's Sunburst collection and called it a (sunshine-y, tropical) day!

Take a look over at SOS at what the rest of the Crew have made, then dust off one (or more!) of your Never Before Used items and make a card to link up with us! The NBUS Challenge runs through Monday evening, July 15th.

Week 5: Index Card a Day Round-Up

It's another week of Index Card goodness and a reminder that the Daisy Yellow Art Blog is a fine source of information and inspiration; as are a few selected Instagram accounts including mine (@llaurenb) and the official @indexcardaday feed!

ICAD24-31: Mandala Monday

It’s a loosey-goosey, wavy-gravy, somewhat deconstructed Mandala Monday; Tombows and Letter It Fineliners on an index card divider.

ICAD24-30: Sepia

A super fast One Staple Collage in (mostly) sepia!

ICAD24-29: Off-Prompt

The most random of all random collages everrrrrr?! Off-prompt and a bit fishy on Day 29.

ICAD24-28: Steampunk

A fairly tangential take on Steampunk, lots of vaguely wheel- and cog-ike shapes, glued on top of ink-blended circles of Distress Oxide Inks on a green index card. Not exactly where I thought this would be going when I started out, but that is the fun of ICAD you can take a left turn at any point and wait to see what happens next!

ICAD24-27: Ranunculus

Flashing back to a prompt I skipped last week; at the time I didn't have an interesting idea, but suddenly I thought that if I just kept cutting wonky flower layers and stacking them up, the result would be cool and possibly a bit ranunculus-like, which I think kinda worked! Also a fab use of quite a few patterned paper scraps although I still have PLENTY left... sigh...

ICAD24-26: Strawberry

Not my favorite card ever but... the pattern was fun to doodle and they are more or less recognizable as strawberries so my work here is through!

ICAD24-25-: Off-Prompt

Have already made several doodled cards involving strips or stripes, I decided to try my hand a collage of strips. I chose a few vintage book pages with similar colors, tore them vertically, glued them onto an index card, and added super-simple stitching.

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Holiday Shape Up: Week 2

Cruising into the second week of our Holiday Shape Up festival at Jingle Belles for which, as you'll recall, we're making shaped cards. New Jersey is just one of the states currently under what the weather gurus are calling a heat dome, and the temps for the last 10 days have been in the mid-90's with humidity off the charts. So of course my first thought was to make MITTENS lol!

A few years ago I had downloaded a photo of a beautiful mitten-shaped card, printed it out on cardstock at 4x6" size, used it as a template and raided my stash of ancient Basic Grey holiday patterned paper to make THIS CARD. Luckily, I had saved the template and still had some nice big chunks of BG, so I'm back with the same idea... times two! Basic Grey flower layers, Recollections flair, scraps of felt  trimmings, 7 Gypsies velvet holly leaves, and a couple of buttons from my stash complete this pair of mixy-matchy mitten cards.

Stephanie's card can be seen at Jingle Belles, where, coincidentally, you can also upload your own magnificent shape-card design between now and next Wednesday evening, July 3rd.

Gnome Sweet

The adorable new Eyelet Outlet Girl Gnome Brads have settled in nicely and have teamed up with our Gnome 2 Brads on this extra festive greeting! Grass Tape literally grounds the oversized sentiment and adds a special touch to the envelope along with a strip of Gnome Mushroom Butterfly Tape; while a few Mini Bee Brads are buzzing around happily.

The Eyelet Outlet Store has brads, bling, flowers, enamels and washi tape for literally EVERY occasion you'd care to celebrate!

ICAD2024: Week 4

Another week has rushed by at lightning speed, and here are my ICADs! For more information, inspiration and loads of samples visit @llaurenb and/or @indexcardaday and/or @gypsy999 on Instagram; or check out the Daisy Yellow Art Blog!

ICAD24-24: Mandala Monday

It's a Diamond Dogs Mandala Monday thanks to a leftover diamond-shaped piece of patterned paper leftover from last week's Argyle card, lots and lots of diamondy and circley Letter It Fineliner Doodles, and a few coordinating Tombow Dual Brush Pens.

ICAD24-23: Hummingbird

Super-literal take on the prompt, featuring the eponymous winged creature, a vintage slidemount, some nectar-y flowers, a scrap of leftover map, and some trading stamps... all atop a pale blue, repro library checkout card.

ICAD24-22: Tulip

I was flicking through a vintage nature encyclopedia for some tulips when I stumbled upon this Tulip Shell and let it pivot me into a completely different collage-ical direction!

ICAD24-21: Crystal

At least once a year I try to draw some gems or crystals and I've never felt like I got the facets right, but this one is pretttttty good, lol! It turns out the secret might be to just draw them really really quickly without giving very much thought or care to the process... who knew??!

ICAD24-20: Gold

 I’ve approached "GOLD" via doodles… using three types of gold pen: Posca, Zig Dot Marker, and the good old Gellyroll Metallic. Not the fanciest thing I've ever made, but it was fun to draw and I love how the three pens each have their own version and shade of gold.

ICAD24-19: Alternating

A super-simple, doodle-centric idea, alternating stripes of violet and pale blue Tombow on a gridded index card; with alternating doodles in black Letter It Fineliner or white Posca pen.

ICAD24-18: Beach

I found this pre-watercolored heavy divider card in my ICAD box and added undulating strips of sand and froth; the latter being layers of torn vintage paper of varying patinas brushed with a little bit of Stickles Glitter Glue (the shade is Waterfall, appropriately enough) from Ranger, then machine-stitched for extra texture. 

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SHAPING-Up for the Holidays

This fortnight at Jingle Belles we're celebrating the challenging (but rewarding!) field of SHAPED cards. Anything other than a square or rectangle will do; you might try a circle, star, stocking, candy cane, snow globe, mitten... the choice is yours.

I used the second largest bauble in an older set of older Hero Arts Ornaments Infinity Dies to diecut this charming, vintage-inspired Santa from Prima's Candy Cane Lane collection, then traced and handcut a few additional layers to make a slightly larger and sturdier card. I used Wendy Vecchi's brilliant "hinge" method to add another diecut piece to the back (with a crease scored at 3/4" from the top before affixing) and thus make this into a card that actually opens!* A few Impression Obsession diecut snowflakes, a seambinding bow and a scatter of golden star sequins complete the design.

Be sure to visit Jingle Belles to see what Stephanie made (spoiler alert: it's an amazing Santa-shaped G/C holder!) and then start planning your own SHAPED masterpiece. This challenge runs until the evening of July 3rd.

*Shocking True Confession: In the past, many of my shaped cards were essentially very fancy postcards, whereby I wrote my greeting on the back; and there is NOTHING wrong with this method if you prefer it!!!