Thank You Challenge

And a happy Wednesday to you all!

I hope you’re weather is more accommodating than what we’ve been experiencing for the past week – temps in the 90’s and dew points in the 70’s …..  If you’re from Florida, it’s probably nothing significant, but for us northern girls from MN it’s not what we signed up for!   On the bright side though, it certainly makes it easy to stay inside and work on cards!

Today Operation Write Home (OWH) issued a Midweek Challenge to create a Thank You card.   It’s a great category and there are so many possibilities.  Here’s one of the cards I made for OWH a while ago.   The patterned paper sort of made me dizzy, so I knew I’d have to find a way to use it as layer with only a border showing.  The ribbon has a sheer center.

It was very good fortune that one of the stripes in the patterned paper, the ink and the ribbon border all matched – an aqua color.  That certainly doesn’t happen very often for me!!

This card has a white base with a plain red layer, then the patterned paper layer, then another white layer with the sentiment stamped on it.   The ribbon wraps around the white and patterned paper layers.   The ribbon came from Joanne’s – sorry, there isn’t any color name on the spool.  The sentiment is by Stampendous! (For All You Do).  The ink is Tsukineko’s VersaMagic Sea Breeze.

Hope you’ve had a terrific day!

Gail

Cards 4 Kids Challenge

A very good Wednesday to you!

Today’s Operation Write Home (OWH) challenge was to make  Cards 4 Kids.   For this card I used a stamp I picked up with my grandchildren in mind, so I hope other kids will enjoy it too!   I tried mounting it with just one blue layer, but the image colors are so simple that I decided it just needed something extra to break up all the white, so I used 3 layers in alternating colors.  The layers are not equally sized (intentionally) and I’m still a little on the fence about whether or not I really like the result.  But of all the combinations I tried, this is the one I liked the best.

The stamp set is Stampendous! Doodle Wings – apparently it is no longer in production because it is not listed on the Stampendous! site.  The butterfly and sentiment are stamped using Memento Tuxedo Black ink.  The butterfly is colored with Memento pens in Blue Danube and Dandelion.  Dandelion was also used to trace over the sentiment.

The colored portions of the upper wings and the blue on the bottom wings have had Inkssentials’ Glossy accents by Ranger applied to give the image some texture.  I’ve used Kuretake’s Zig Wink of Stella brush marker, in clear, on the yellow portions of the bottom wings and the butterfly’s body, face and antennae for a little bit of a shine.  The spots on the butterfly’s body are self-sticking gems I’ve had for many years from A-muse Art Stamps.   I searched the web address from the back of the packaging and apparently they are no longer in business – sorry.

This card is a bit too fussy for mass production, so I’m quite sure this will be a one-of-a-kind!

Well, that’s it for this challenge ~ hope you’re having a terrific day!

Gail

Friendship Challenge

Hello and a happy Wednesday to you,

Today is an absolutely PERFECT Minnesota day!  We don’t get nearly enough of them and it is just too nice to spend a lot of time indoors (even if it is for an OWH (Operation Write Home) challenge), so today’s card is SUPER simple.

Today’s OWH throwdown is to create a friendship card.   With only textured cardstock and a single Silhouette Studio file, I hope this clean and simple card fulfills the requirements!

The Friend layer is a print and cut file (Design ID #3130) by Silhouette.  Since I’m a fan of blues more than golds, I did take the time to change the color from the original.

Clean and simple cards can’t get any simpler and I think (and hope) the textured card base gives it enough visual interest to make it appealing to the sender and the recipient.

So, that’s it for today ~ now I’m off to do something outdoors’y …

Thanks so much for stopping by!

Gail

Fall Theme Challenge

Happy Wednesday to you all,

Today OWH (Operation Write Home) issued a challenge to create a card with a Fall theme.    Makes me a teeny bit sad to think that our Summer days are coming to a close because it means that time continues to seemingly go by faster and faster.   Here in MN our State Fair begins in just 3 weeks, and for us that’s the signal that Summer is out and Fall is in.   The change of seasons is actually fine with me though since I am definitely not a fan of heat and humidity.  Fall is my favorite season.   Cool nights, warm and sunny days – at least a good share of the time.   I’d be perfectly happy to have Fall last until a couple of weeks before Christmas, then get about 4 – 6 inches of snow (must have a white Christmas) and then it could go back to Fall again until April.  I know that’s pie-in-the-sky, but a girl can dream.

So here’s my card for the challenge ~   The colors are much richer than this photo shows – apologies for the washed out look.  If I can get a better image, I will update this post.  All of the stamping is done using Memento inks.

The card ended up with a lot of layers.  The white sentiment layer and the white leaf layer are on textured cardstock.  I was a little nervous about how well the sentiment would stamp since the texture is actually quite deep, but it wasn’t any trouble at all.   The sentiment is from the Hero Arts clear design stamp set called Friends (CL351) stamped in Rich Cocoa.   The leaf is a wood block rubber stamp from Rubber Stampede called Small Maple (A2495E) – sorry, I couldn’t find a website for Rubber Stampede.   The leaves are stamped using Cantaloupe, Tangelo and Morocco.  The white cardstock is layered onto a dark chocolate brown cardstock.  The chocolate cardstock layers were cut to the same width and the white layers were cut to the same width.  The sentiment layer was then adhered to the leaf layer.

My original plan was to then mount the group to a copper cardbase, but I discovered that the copper cardstock was quite a bit thinner than I remembered, so, in the end, I cut the copper paper to cover the card front, mounted the leaf/sentiment group to the copper and then mounted the copper to a card base made from the same chocolate brown cardstock as the layers and lined the card base with white to give the sender a good space to write on.

So that’s it for this challenge.  I hope this card sparks as many lovely memories of Fall days for you as it has for me!

Gail