Had to play with my Alota stamps

I had to play with my new alota stamps, and a last second birthday card was the perfect opportunity to use this wonderful image.

This ended up with a piece of ribbon and some brads but of course I forgot to take another picture.... so you're stuck with this one! :)

Arranged with love

I wanted to make a card for a good friend of mine that I used to work with who is battling breast cancer and has such an AMAZING outlook on life!! She has always managed to pick me up when I am down and make me laugh. She also used to make a b-day cake for everyone in our department on their birthday and if she knew your favourite kind of cake it would be that kind too!! She has two gorgeous daughters who made me the most adorable card for my baby shower last year... maybe I'll take a picture of it and post it later. Anyway.. now I'm rambling of course.....

I had gotten this set and hadn't inked it up yet... let me just say "I LOVE this stamp!!!!!!!" This is a stamp by Melanie Muenchinger called Arranged With Love that is sold at Gina K Designs. I embossed the image with black EP, coloured it with chalks, then cut a piece of card to layer with the sentiment (great sentiments in this set that fit perfect in the opening) embossed it with my gold EP and took my gold paint pen to the edges of the sentiment piece and attached with foam tape to pop it off a bit. This is layered on some super shiny gold paper I found at the dollar store and have had forever and then onto some white card.

Well.. that's it for this post. I have a bunch more things to post.. if not today maybe tomorrow.

Another twinkling H2O card

So this was my first attempt at the "direct to rubber" technique I had learned at the class I took on my own. One catch of course since I can't do it like I'm told was that I wanted to use one of my clear stamps!

After many failed attempts at this with beading twinks all over my stamp but no solid image, I was going to give up when I was in "The Cutting Garden" down the street from me where they sell mostly clear stamps and hardly any rubber at all and mentioned it to her. The solution she came up with is so simple and genius!! All I had to do was ink my image with versamark first and then apply the twinks over the versa onto the stamp!! :)

Not sure I'm in love with this card as a matter of fact I was actually a little disappointed with my end layout... by the time I got to that stage I just wanted to be done with this. Either way, now I can actually do this without losing my mind!! :)

Non-paper craft!!

I made this last year for a good friend of mine's baby shower. I had forgotten all about it until someone on one of the forums I'm on was asking about ideas for baby showers. It reminded me and I figure I should post it on my blog for you all to see too!! :)

First I cut away 1/4 of the melon leaving a stroller like shape and cut a slice off the bottom so it would sit without rolling away and drain any excess juice off
Cut a handle out of the piecec I cut away (which was later attached with toothpicks).
Cut away all the melon inside and saved any pieces that didn't get mangled in the process to go back in the fruit salad.
Attach handle.
Cut orange slices and cut some grapes in half attached the orange as wheels with toothpicks and used the grape halves to cover the toothpicks and make hubcaps.
You can stop here and just add the fruit salad... or... add some pineapple flowers!!

For the flowers you can either do what I did which was cut them freehand from some pineapple slices (I do NOT recommend doing this as it is VERY difficult!!) OR you can use a flower shaped cookie cutter to cut them from the slices. Let me tell you that the cost of the cookie cutter would be well worth it!!!
Then I used some melon ball halves (from the waterlmelon I removed) for centers and put them on skewers and stuck them in wherever looked good. You could also use some baby spinach leaves if you had them for leaves... I of course didn't think of that until about 1am the night before and did not have time in the morning to go get them and put them on.