Favourites of the Year

I have been taking a little break from stamping over the holidays but today I thought I would post 10 of my favourite cards from 2009 that were made before I started my blog on September 1st. (I have two blog entries for today so keep reading after you're done this first one) It's fun to go back and look over older works and critique them and to see all the techniques I used. I've noticed that my camera skills have improved over the year, now that I have a light box and play with the settings on my camera. Enjoy the show!

I'm a leaf stamp addict, need I say more!
 

















Love the textures and layers plus the fuzzy body is so fun!
Beautiful background colours with Distress Inks and Perfect Pearls.
A really different card for me and I love how it turned out!
A maple leaf, simple and beautiful! 

Fold-out photo card with fantastic colours!
Red, black and white are always great together and love the shine of the metal butterflies. The black mesh is window screen, this was made for a recycling challenge.
Very fun garden of Spirelli or String Art flowers!

















Please keep reading, I have two entries for today. Below is my entry that shows some of my favourite cards by other stampers.

Thanks for stopping by!

Favourites Part 2

These are some of my favourite cards made by fellow stampers this past year. I picked cards from the Hero Arts group but it was extremely difficult as there are many in my favourites stash.

by Lin
So charming and elegant























by Silvakelly54
Fantastic design

























by Shelly,
Fun pink undulating hills























by Jill
Love the colours and speckled background

























by Anne
The swirling colours in this background are amazing






















by Heather
Love the black with the background colours




























by Tracey
Fantastic design and great mix of patterns






















by Kathy
Gorgeous butterfly and love the heart trail



























by Kryssi
So charming and love the real branch


























by Jacqueline
Dreamy background colours




























by Kathy
Love all the dots and white lines


























Thanks for stopping by and Happy New Year!

Happy Holidays

I would like to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year and have a safe and fun holiday filled with family, friends and scrumptious food! I would also like thank everyone who stops by to visit my blog and leave wonderful comments, I truly appreciate every single one. Happy Holidays!

Giving Cards

The challenge for the next two weeks at Hero Arts is to incorporate a gift into a card or project. It can be a gift card, money, photos or a small gift. I made two cards that hold gift cards.

For this card I coloured vellum with alcohol inks and embossed the flourish design ontop with white embossing powder. I put it through the Cuttlebug and attached it to purple cardstock.
 
























The pic for this card shows it with and without the gift card. It's for my nephew for his birthday that is coming up very soon. I tried to give it a masculine feel with the distress inks and patterns that I used.
 














Thanks for stopping by!

Busy Christmas Season

I haven't had a chance to post because I've been busy with holiday things. I've been doing a little bit of baking (made Butter Tarts and Chocolate Shortbread), a little bit of shopping, a little bit of gift wrapping. But I did manage to squeeze in some time on Friday for Hero Arts Blog Hop featuring their new 2010 stamps. There's still time to check it out here. They've released a lot of new stamps and they are gorgeous! Can't wait to buy some and play!

I made a few really simple and quick holiday cards. The last ones for the season. I'm ready to move onto other holidays now.

This one was embossed with a Cuttlebug folder. The snowflake was punched out of paper I had coloured with Twinkling H2O's. Just added a sentiment and an embellishment.

These tree images (Denami Designs) were embossed, one in gold one in malachite, and mounted on metal paper.

There was a bit of embossing on this one with the sentiment and cloisonne tree (Michael Strong Rubber Stamps). The tree was mounted on text paper that has the definition of Happy and Joy on it.
Thanks for stopping by!

Hybrid

I was playing around with some Hero Arts Digital Kits and came up with this card. The leaf is from a digi kit as well as the flowers on the pink background. The sentiment was curved and stamped and the butterfly embossed and punched out.

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Sneak Peek #2

Another card for the Hero Arts challenge. This time I was inspired by the colours pink and brown and by the round scalloped shape.


The background is stamped with Versamark while the flowers were black embossed and coloured with Stardust pens for a little shimmer. I used a couple of border punches and some pretty ribbon I've had for awhile. Finally I added some gems and a button.

Thanks for stopping by!

Sneak Peek Week Challenge

It's Sneak Peek Week at Hero Arts. The challenge is to make a project inspired by one of the sneak peeks of the new catalog (it's coming out on Dec 18th). It can be a design, an element, a colour. My card is inspired by the colours green and turquoise which was in one of the sneak peeks. I used a fun technique which I learned from Jennifer McGuire.

I embossed the fern in white ep on white glossy cardstock and coloured over the fern and paper with alcohol inks. The inks stain the embossing but once the inks are dry, sand over the image and the colours start to come off and the white shows through. The more you sand the more white shows through. I wanted to have the image kind of mottled so I didn't sand all the way. If you run your fingers over the card you can still feel the raised fern but not as much as when originally embossed. So fun!
Thanks for stopping by!

Another one for SPCC

I enjoyed playing with the SPCC colours so much (see colour chart below) that I made another card, this one with some more colour to it.


I stamped the PTI butterfly with white Staz-On onto acetate, attached it to a Cuttlebug background and used a Hero Arts sentiment.
























Thanks for stopping by!

Colour Challenge

I came across SPCC (Scrapmaster's Paradise Color Combos) through Kelly Marie's card on the Hero Arts Flickr site. I haven't done very many colour challenges and when I saw the colours for this challenge I was a bit surprised. I would never have put red and lavender together but thought I would give it a try. So glad I did because I love these shades together!
 
















These colours made me think of love so this is the card I came up with. I did use a lot of white and red with just a hint of purple.




















Thanks for stopping by!

Blog Candy

Head on over to Jennifer Biederman's blog to win some great stamping goodies and stay awhile to look at the amazing projects that Jenn creates. She is very talented! Here is one of my recent favourites. Isn't that snowman card fantastic! Thanks for the giveaway Jenn!

Christmas Tags

This week at Hero Arts the challenge is to make a holiday tag. These stockings are a paper mosaic technique that I saw Judi Watanabe from Judikins demo. You can see step-by-step instructions here. It's a very easy project and you get to use up scraps of paper and ribbon! Yippeeee! Scraps are taking over my craft space!

The stocking has a quilted kind of look to it. The next one has an added cuff which was made from paper embossed in the Cuttlebug.

























This is a super quick tag with a little stamping and punching. Very easy.




The last tag has a Cuttlebug background and a paper pieced tree over a Hero Arts stamp.
 
























Thanks for stopping by!

Papertrey Ink

Today I was playing around with the Sign Language set from Papertrey Ink. I've had it for awhile and really haven't had a chance to use it. I love this set, it has 46 images and can be used for so many occasions.

I made a few Christmas cards with the stocking image and the sign post.

I also made a few cards for birthdays.

Thanks for stopping by!

Digi Kits

I was playing around with some Hero Arts Digital Kits available here. I like the Winged Friends kit which comes with butterflies and dragonflies. The butterfly was printed onto yellow cardstock, cut out and covered with yellow Stickles for some shimmer. I added a pipe cleaner body and some wire antennae. I stamped the Design Block Stencil from Hero Arts with white pigment ink on the bottom of the card and added the sentiment, ribbon and buttons.

  
























Thanks for stopping by!

Playing Around

A couple cards I made with Hero Arts stamps. There's no challenge this week at Hero Arts because of Thanksgiving so it gives me a chance to play a bit. This card would be good for an Anniversary, Wedding or for Valentine's Day. A red rose means love, right!

The rose was black embossed and coloured with Twinkling H2O's so there's a soft shimmer. The vase is a stamp from an Asian set and is black embossed and covered with Diamond Glaze, it's very shiny! I used a couple of border punches and did some ribbon binding on the side. It was really hard to get a decent photo of this card. No sunny skies here and the shine from the Diamond Glaze didn't help matters. Sorry.
 I was trying to come up with a design for a Christmas card that would be easy to mass produce. This is a hybrid card with the background being from a Hero Arts digi kit. I printed it in sepia and distressed the edges. Simple stamping and layering for the rest of the card with some more distressing. Not too sure about the distressing, seems like a bit too much on a holiday card!

Thanks for stopping by and Happy Thanksgiving!

Another Quickie!

I wanted a small card to go with a small gift and used a Scallop Circle stamp from Hero Arts to make the card base. The card measures just 3" across. It's kind of cute and not as bright as the pic makes it out to be!

Thanks for stopping by and wishing everyone who is celebrating, a Happy Thanksgiving!

Quick Post

A quick post today, I hurt my back last week and haven't been able to do too much crafting or computing. This card is for a colour challenge at Lucy's blog. The colours to play with are pale pink, aqua and kraft. I really like these soft colours together. Go check out Lucy's blog, she makes beautiful cards!

This is another card for the Hero Arts trimming challenge. It's based on a Port Hole Card that Shari demonstrates in a video here.

 Thanks for stopping by!

Ribbon Mittens

Well I made another ribbon card for Hero Arts challenge. I can't seem to stop but this one I think is a bit cheesy or corny! Oh well, I think it'll be my last ribbon card! I used up quite a few scraps for this one, including the kraft paper which had bad stamping on one side, just flipped it over and added the snowflakes and cut out the mittens. I didn't have enough blue ribbon to do the "boy" mitt so I went with turquoise, I figure it's masculine enough! I had a lot of fun with this card, hope you enjoy it!
Thanks for stopping by!

Trimmings

This week the challenge at Hero Arts is to use "trimmings" or scrap pieces of paper, ribbon, lace and accessories on a project. Here's my card using scraps of ribbon. I have a bucket of ribbon scraps and never know what to do with them so I made a tree card, similar in idea to the ribbon ornament cards I made last month.
The snowy ground is a scrap piece of torn paper that I embossed in the Cuttlebug and covered with Stickles. The sentiment is stamped on a piece of ribbon and the tree trunk is also a previously stamped scrap.

Thanks for stopping by!

Glittery Goodness

This weeks challenge at Hero Arts is to use glitter on your project. I love the look of glitter but don't like using it because it gets everywhere! Weeks later it's still showing up in unexpected places! I went all out with glitter on this card. I cut some tree shapes with my Cuttlebug, ran them through the Xyron and glittered away. I used Martha Stewart glitter, she has some really lovely colours.

Here's a close-up of the background. The snowflakes were stamped with Versamark and Judikins Psychedelic embossing powder was used. The cool thing with this ep is that the colour of it changes depending on how long you heat it. The colours you can achieve are blue, purple, green and copper. You can see it a bit on the pic, still doesn't do it justice.

For this card I punched out a snowflake and ran it through the Xyron to glitter. The punched snowflake border has Star Dust Stickles rubbed on it for a soft glittery look and the background is clear embossed.

And finally this card was done with my favourite way to get sparkle on a card and that is by using Sakura Stardust pens and Stickles. They are just so much easier to work with than glitter. I coloured the flower with markers and then applied Clear Stardust over the purple and Gold Stardust over the yellow. The center of the flower has Stickles on it. There's some nice dimension to this card as it has three flower layers.

Thanks for stopping by!