All this scratching is making me itch

The theme over on the Simon Says Stamp Monday Challenge this week is "from scratch".  I make a lot of cards and I always use pre-scored 5x5 square cards that come with envelopes.  I decided that for this project I'd make my card from scratch, in a different size (bye-bye comfort zone!) and make my own envelope too.  Why not enter the challenge yourself?  What will you make from scratch?  An embellishment?  Your own patterned paper or a card like I did?  I'm sure you're brimming with creative ideas!  Remember, you could be the winner of a $50 voucher to shop at Simon Says Stamp!

My card is 6.5" x 4.5" (ok, so maybe not a million miles outside of my comfort zone, but far enough!)  I believe this is called an A2 card to our American friends (happy Independance Day for the other day btw).  I started out with a 9" x 6.5" piece of shattered Kraft-core card, which I scored and folded.



I've used a few recent stamp purchases here, the first of which was Tim Holtz's Artful Tools set.  I stamped the rulers with black archival ink and spritzed it with water before applying several colours of distress paint and drying it with my heat tool.  Hero Arts Winter Trees is another new stamp to me and I stamped it with black archival and painted the sky with a water brush and Stormy Sky distress ink.  The quote from Tim's Random Quotes set was the perfect shape to sit nicely on a torn piece of card.  I assembled the card using my trusty ATG gun and finished it off with the cute couple from Tim's Custom Fasteners set.  To be honest, I'm gutted to have used them because I've hoarded that particular image for a long time until I finally decided that if I kept it any longer I'd just never use it!

Of course, any card needs an envelope to go with it, and thanks to the WeRMemory Keepers Envelope Punch board, making an envelope of just the right size was a breeze! :)

Supplies I used included:

InLinkz.com
Our ever-generous sponsor Simon Says Stamp is offering a $50 gift voucher as the prize again this week, just make something for the challenge and you could the winner! The winner will be chosen at random from those who enter the challenge, so why not give it a try? At the very least why not head over to the Challenge Blog to see how the other members of the design team have interpreted this weeks theme! :)

Don't forget, Simon Says Stamp have a great Facebook page too!  Check them out here!

All White on the Night

The theme over on the Simon Says Stamp Monday Challenge this week is "white".  I had this white mirror from my local Swedish furniture superstore kicking around in my studio for a couple of years and I sensed that this challenge was the one to finally bring it's waiting to an end! :) We all have white things in our stash, even if it's just plain white card, so why not enter the challenge and you could be the winner of a $50 voucher to shop at Simon Says Stamp.

My frame was roughly 10" square.  I started by cutting an 8" square of cardstock from the Laboratorie card pad, cutting a 4" square out of the middle so that the mirror could be seen, and fixed it to the frame.  I cut strips from the black ruler design in the same pad and used them as a surround for the central mirror, using my Tim Holtz craft knife to mitre the corners.

I used Commute tissue tape as a border to the cardstock panel, again mitring the corners.  As a final step, I went crazy with French Industrial salvage stickers - they are another thing that has been eying me up across my craft room for far too long and I felt their time had finally come :)




Supplies I used included:

InLinkz.com
Our ever-generous sponsor Simon Says Stamp is offering a $50 gift voucher as the prize again this week, just make something for the challenge and you could the winner! The winner will be chosen at random from those who enter the challenge, so why not give it a try? At the very least why not head over to the Challenge Blog to see how the other members of the design team have interpreted this weeks theme! :)

Don't forget, Simon Says Stamp have a great Facebook page too!  Check them out here!

A few of my favourite things

The theme over on the Simon Says Stamp Monday Challenge this week is "I ought to use this more".  We all have items in our craft stash that we bought with the best of intentions and just never got around to using them as much as we should.  One of those products for me is my Dylusions Art Journal - I absolutely love it but don't seem to have used it as much as I should.  I'm going to rectify that, starting today!  Why not make something using some of your under-used items?  Enter the challenge and you could be the winner of a $50 voucher to shop at Simon Says Stamp.

The page that I made for my art journal is focused around some of my favourite stamps, hence the lyrics from "My Favourite Things" from the Sound of Music.

I started out by cutting a piece of Tim Holtz's Seasonal card stack to the right size.  I stamped 6 of the polaroid stamps, some on white card, some on manilla tags, and cut them out.  Next I stamped some of my favourite images and stamped the polaroid frames again, on top of the images, so that I would know where to cut out the "photo" section.  I cut them out and fixed them to the plain polaroid frames I had cut earlier.

My next step was to arrange the photos on the background and fix them in place.  I didn't want corner bits sticking out of the edge of my journal so I trimmed it to size.  The text was printed from the computer, cut out and fixed in place.  Finally I fixed the whole thing to a page of my journal.

That makes 4 completed pages in my journal, still lots to go but it'll be fun slowly filling them up!

Supplies I used included:

InLinkz.com
Our ever-generous sponsor Simon Says Stamp is offering a $50 gift voucher as the prize again this week, just make something for the challenge and you could the winner! The winner will be chosen at random from those who enter the challenge, so why not give it a try? At the very least why not head over to the Challenge Blog to see how the other members of the design team have interpreted this weeks theme! :)

Don't forget, Simon Says Stamp have a great Facebook page too!  Check them out here!