Birthday Turtle

Happy Birthday

Grade 1

Card for my favorite boy, starting 1st grade in a couple weeks:

The chalkboard is simply a black piece of card stock framed out with red strips. I used my best left handed printing on it, using a white gel pen. The piece of chalk is a rolled up piece of white paper.

Simple Hearts

Even More Eggs

These eggs are covered in small seed beads and bugle beads. I used really, really strong tacky glue to get these beads to adhere. When I coat an egg with beads, I don't put any decoupage or glaze on them, because I haven't found any that doesn't turn the cracks between the beads milky.

This one is covered with shells, using the same thick, sticky glue that I used for the beads. My grandson helped with this one.

More Eggs

Making these little eggs is not hard. You simply blow out the egg. Decorate it. Then I thread a sequin (which will cup the bottom of the egg) through a looped thread with a bangle of some type at the bottom of it. Thread the looped part (which is what you hang it from) from the bottom of the egg to the top, thread on another sequin to cup the top of the egg. And add a touch of glue to each sequin to hold them in place. Add several coats of decoupage medium or glaze medium to each egg (allowing it to dry completely between each coat). You can use bead caps instead of the sequins if you want a fancier egg.

Here are some eggs that I made using temporary tattoos to decorate them:

Personally, I rarely color my eggs before I decorate them. Somehow I like the plain white or brown of the egg best. But occasionally I do make one that is colored and when I do, I like to use fingernail polish to paint them with.
Here is the only egg that I have in my stash that is colored:

The crosses (I guess only one is showing here) are scrapbook stickers.

Let me warn you if you decide you are going to make a cloisonne looking egg by drawing the design on and then coloring it in with nail polish -- it is extremely time consuming. I made a couple like this before and the recipients loved them, but the time involved was ridiculous!

Eggs I

Every few years, I like to make eggs. I only make them every few years, because it seems to take me a few years to get each batch completely finished.

These first two are real eggs, (blown out, of course) with the traditional decoupage and napkin mediums.

On these second two (real eggs,too, of course), I used my scrap booking stickers and a thick glaze medium.
This first one is for Claudie:

I took 3 pictures of it, so you can see that I add detail all the way around each egg and not just on the one side.

This is Theo's (notice I managed to chip it somehow):

Another Hero Card

Thank you to our Troops

Usually, I hit the after Independence Day sales to buy crafting items to make my cards for Operation Write Home. This year the clearance racks were filled with 4th of July glitter and shine -- not actually appropriate for our troops overseas. So, that thrifty bit of inspiration was not going to work this year. What am I going to do? Well, Rick St. Dennis left some cute little digi art at the Operation Write Home site and I used his Uncle Sam to start my card making this year.

This year I decided to make my cards in batches of 8, so I have 7 more of these to go. I don't think I am happy with the die cut "Thank You" and I think I will use a stamp and blue embossing on the rest of the cards.

Smokey Mountains -- Tennessee

I am desperately trying to post on this blog for 30 days straight -- thanks to the inspiration of my dear friend, Bridget. The trouble with that is I am a slow crafter and time is limited anyway. So what do I post on those days that I haven't found a crafting muse?
Today, I am drawing from the photo archives back to my trip last September (2010) to the Smokey Mountains.

Scrapbook Pages w/ChipBoard

One of my "old" scrapbook pages. Old meaning early 2008.

I realize that isn't a very good picture -- something about all the gold and the glare and shadow. So, here are a couple detail shots of the chip board embellishments.

On this particular spread, I had painted the chip board pieces, leaving the paint rather thick to give them added dimension. Then I added micro beads to some with that super sticky red tape (that stuff is amazing) and in some I strung wire with beads or just coiled the wire up. There is so much that can be done with chip board that I never tired of using it.

Using favorite embellishment...

Back in the day when I used to scrap book a lot, chip board was my all time favorite embellishment. I almost never use it on cards. Yesterday, I decided to drag out my chip board stash and see if there was anything there I could interpret onto a card. Here's what I came up with:

The design would have been improved, I do believe, if I would have had a bigger star to use at the top of the card, but I was determined to use only what was in the stash.

Hip Girl

Well, I just had to use more of that great DP that I received. I'm not real sure if a hippy girl goes with skull paper though -- but I really like that paper and just had to use it!

Bracelet

My granddaughter will be 2 at the end of October. Here is the first "big girl" (made on a wire instead of elastic)bracelet, I strung for her. You'll never guess her name. No, it is not Rumpelstiltskin.

Gift Cards

There I was with nary a gift card to slip inside my package, so it was to the crafting table with me...

Made a few for my stash, too:

Figured I might as well do a Christmas tag while I was at it:

Baskets of Flowers

Here are three separate baskets full of flowers cards. I colored the flowers using a glaze pen because I like the shine and the depth that it gave to them. The glaze pens didn't allow for any shading though which I could have achieved using Copics. A bit of a trade off, I think.

The Rolling Stones on Rock-n-Roll: "I Like It."

First, I want to thank two of my dearest cyber-friends for making this card possible. One for the image and one for the designer paper. You, two are just wonderful -- and generous to boot! Thank you, ladies!

Boy with Flowers For You

This image was given to me during a swap at the Anything Goes group on Paper Craft Planet. I was quite pleased with the way this little card turned out.

Spring and Easter

I was downloading a card onto the computer and realized that I hadn't posted some of the spring and Easter cards that I had made. This first one I tried to make in non- traditional Easter colors. I think I will be liable to stick with tradition from now on.



You all know I have a passion for Karen's Doodles turtles, so I tried making another version with Herbert, too.



Two colors of Karen's Doodles Bunny were used for spring cards too.

Christmas Bear

Christmas Greetings

Monday the temperatures here soared into the high 90's; with the humidity factored in the heat index was 115 -- so I did the only thing possible -- stayed in the air conditioning and made Christmas cards!

For You