Graduation

School is officially out and while the kids are happy, the parents are wondering what to do to keep them busy for the summer. I remember those days all too well! One of our grandchildren had a ceremony for his graduation in Elementary School so I thought I would send him a card to keep with his certificate. I was glad when our daughter told us that the school had a ceremony, it really means a lot to kids to have that sense of accomplishment. I still have folders full of certificates our kids collected every year in all of their subjects. They brought them home beaming from ear to ear excited for any acknowledgement of their work or even attendance. I hope this card adds to his sense of significance, he is a good boy and works hard to learn and achieve.

I kinda did the same thing with this card as I did with the last one - I cut up a sheet of graduation scrapbook paper for the piece of DP and then cut out extra images to get the elements popped. Anybody remember when you could get the big slabs of paper at Hobby Lobby? Yep, I have a stash of those too! Save money om some things so it can be spent on others! I am really good at justifying how I save to spend ROFL! I added Stickles glitter glue to the grad hat tassel and the stars and I think it is noticeable in this image. I should go back and add some to the pennant since it also has a gold bar in it. The little things count ;o)  The stamps are CTMH, a set I got when my oldest was graduating homeschool and one of the moms was a consultant. I double stamped them with black and purple to give them a little pop. I didn't want to use all purple so I used a light blue patterned paper to matt congrats and a light blue satin ribbon (Hobby Lobby also) but went back to a light purple to matt the grad hat. I am getting better at tying those bows finally!

For the inside I cut out some more of the grad paper sheet and then cut the scroll by itself (well, it wasn't really in a good place on the paper to keep it whole anyway) and yes, I am thinking about adding some Stickles to the tassel on the scroll now! I guess it won't get mailed today unless the glitter glue dries good enough that I feel safe to close the card and send it out.  I can't put the Stickles on the inside until the front is dry and won't stick to my craft mat when I open it to put it on the inside tassel. I hate that my lettering went crooked, I normally do better than that! Hopefully the 10 yr old won't say anything about it LOL!  All in all, this was one of the easier cards to make once I saw my idea working out, not a lot of thinking to do about the embellishments (which usually takes me forever to settle on hehehe).

This card fits into these challenges:

I Did it Creations Challenge Blog (Robyns Fetish you may know it by) - Challenge #58 Hats

Little Darlings

Congratulations to Scrapgirl who started her own business - Little Darlings Stamps - and is featured in the Love to Stamp store! Angie was already very accomplished so it is not surprising that her rubber stamps are awesome! The only reason I didn't have a hard time choosing which stamp to purchase is that I love cats. This stamp is definitely a "Little Darling" LOL! The other reason I chose this stamp is that it reminds me of Florida summers spent at my Grandparents' house. I always helped my Grandpa, whether it be working outside at his house or working with him somewhere else. They had a big white 2 story house with a big pool and big extra lot that was bordered on the far side by a creek that he had a pump connected to for watering. Watering what? Anything and everything! Once I even accidentally watered my Grandma ROFL though she didn't laugh at first after being hosed down with smelly creek water. Grandpa had orange, lemon, grapefruit, tangerine, banana, loquat, avacado, papaya, fig and mango trees, plus grew tomatoes, cucumbers and many other veggies. I watered Grandma when she was trying to show me how to water the tomato plants properly. Grandpa got a kick out of it but he knew better than to bust out laughing too hard until Grandma had time to chill out. Everything he did always included a wheelbarrow or two depending on how much stuff he had to lug around or transport from one place to another. My Grandparents were 100% Polish, and my Grandpa had a strong accent up until the day he passed away in the summer of 1994. Grandma just passed at the end of this January. I miss them both terribly, but the good memories this stamp brought back made me both smile, laugh and also get teary-eyed.

I stamped and colored it 3 different times. This last coloring was with my newly won Letraset Promarkers. I this background was perfect for it, but no matter what, I could NOT figure out any embellishments to add to it! I looked through my ribbons, buttons, flowers and everything else and nothing seemed right to add. All I could do was mat the image and background onto nice pink paper to match the flowers and call it a card. It is going to be an encouragement card for a wonderful lady in our crafting family who is fighting cancer. I hope it cheers her up and helps her endure another round of chemo by thinking of the beautiful summer days ahead with blue skies and grass ready for her toes to run through.

Just in case you are wondering about the background used, it is a piece cut from a 12x12 scrap paper out of the "Teddy In The Garden" set of Miss Elizabeth's. Yes, from the Dollar Store. Miss Elizabeth is one of my best friends! When I first got interested in scrapbooking and cardmaking, I found these sets when I was shopping and I kept collecting as many as I could. So many of them are awesome and I was terribly sad that they quit making and selling them!! Even today if I ran across them I would buy them again. I purchased multiples of most that I did buy, but some have become my favorites and I have had to be careful not to use up every last bit for making cards so I would have some full sheets for my scrap albums that I have not started yet! I bought some just for the patterned papers and not the backgrounds like this. The rest of this is the three bears on lounge chairs and is adorable, but not suited for cardmaking using an image stamp like this, but I will definitely use it with a sentiment! I wish I could turn back the clock and knowing that these paper packs were not going to last long, I would buy even more of them! Between these, the stickers that matched, the wooden stamps, glue sticks, and everything else I spent $1 on, I saved a lot of money that I promptly spent at the local scrapbook store or Hobby Lobby on the good stuff. Of course, my husband does not by any means think that I SAVED any money at all! I always had a knack for saving money and STUFF. So I always had some stashed cash to spend on more STUFF! Yes, I am smiling too :o) The majority of us are crafty ladies in more than one way, and again the majority are married and know EXACTLY what I am talking about and can probably hear their own husband's saying something like that to them at some point (or over and over LOL).

So, I hope you enjoyed my reminiscing a little, as I enjoyed it a lot. I am grateful that I am getting any blog traffic since I am so new plus have not been as consistent as I would like. I am also grateful as well as amazed to have followers! I REALLY APPRECIATE ALL OF YOU!!! I don't have much to offer so it is thrilling to have followers and my hubby gets tickled when I shout out that I have a new comment or follower hehehe. I did just get through another phase of "Spring Cleaning" so I have bought myself a little extra crafting time for now, but still have so much to do in the basement that hubby has made me again promise to spend time on daily sorting through the boxes. I am a procrastinator of sorts, but most of that is due to the poor condition of my spine and the rest is that I can always find something else to do ;o) Plus, I am the bookkeeper for his business and my office is at home and I really should be spending more time on that so I have less time to craft than I like to have. When I do look through blogs for challenges I get so caught up in reading, browsing, following DT or submissions to their blogs, etc. If I didn't have to sleep, eat, and leave the couch I would be on here 24/7 and enjoy every minute! Of course, if I don't do some more unpacking and sorting in the basement, my craft area will not get worked on and it needs so much more organization! *Sigh* Guess I had better be saying goodbye now so I can get some sleep and get something done tomorrow.

Many, Many Blessings to you all!! Deborah

P.S. I am excited that I am going to have my watermark soon! Laurie from Doodle Pantry has been awesome in designing and working with me to get one done, and I love her work! Of course I will need to learn how to apply it, but I am excited just to picture it on my work in my head! If you are in need of a watermark or even blog design (yes, I need that too!), Laurie is great and I highly recommend her. Visit the Doodle Pantry Store (click this link then click Browse Store) to find awesome digital work, some free, and the blog design and watermarks to purchase. Have a great day or night depending on where in the world you are!

Challenges I am entering this card in:

Little Darlings - Contest using LD stamp
Crafty Emmas CES Challenges - #39 Clean and Simple
Prairie Fairy Fridays - #54 Summerfun

I won Letraset Markers and SK8 boy Happy Birthday Card

So it's Saturday on Memorial Day weekend almost noon and I am not in the best of shape with my back, as usual, but have a lot to do that I don't feel like doing LOL! I really just want to make cards and post them to my blog which has been very neglected. I had been working on a card for my daughter's boyfriend's birthday (which happened to be on Memorial Day) and wasn't real happy with it because it needed something more and I just didn't know what to do with it. I had gone in to change clothes to put something cooler on since it was getting way too warm outside and came back into the living room where my husband was looking at the mail he just brought in. I walked over to see what arrived and saw a box on the back of the loveseat and he asks, "What did you order now?" I looked and saw that it was from Letraset and knew I didn't order anything and I voiced my only thought exclaiming "Did I win something??!!!" I grab the box, run to get something to cut the tape, open it and find these letters on top:

I stared at them quite dumbfounded, then had to read them out loud - half to myself to make myself believe it was real and half to my husband to prove I did not spend a bunch of money ordering anything. We both pulled the marker sets out of the box - 2 sets of Pro markers and 2 sets of Aqua markers!!!!! WOOHOO!!!!! I was more than ecstatic!! All I could say was "WOW!" and "Holy cow!" and "Praise God!" and other things while trying to keep my jaw off the floor hehehe. My husband asked, "Are they expensive?" "They aren't cheap", I answered, "but I was contemplating buying these or Copics that everyone is using to color their stamped images with, and now I don't have to!" I grabbed the markers and sat down on the couch to open them up.

Up until now I had been using watercolor pencils and a waterbrush to color all my card images, envying other people who colored with Letraset or Copic markers and now I had my very own. I wanted to test all 48 markers right away but restrained myself to read the inserts first. The two different sets both needed paper other than regular copier paper or even the color copy paper I was using for the images I had been coloring with the watercolor pencils so I went looking and brought back 3 different kinds of paper hoping I didn't have to go out and buy some because I wanted to use the markers right away. I tested all of the papers and found that one of them was a color copy paper but it was coated as suggested in the marker literature and so the markers didn't bleed through. I was in business! I colored 48 swatches all the way across a sheet of paper to see if the literature color samples were accurate. Almost all of them were, and if not, then the color on the marker label was close enough. I looked through my printed out digis to see what I wanted to color for testing. I chose a D2D bloom image that was simple and open because I didn't really have time to color anything complicated. The markers are awesome! I found that I can still use my waterbrush with the Aqua markers after coloring to blend the colors to control how much water I want to use for blending. The Pro markers do not work with the waterbrush, and they are somewhat translucent that get darker as you layer the ink. The blending pen can be used for blending the inks or for when I want to draw ink out of a marker to get a gradient result. I just kept thinking, "This is so cool!" The bloom images came out pretty good so I will be using them on the next cards I make, but I needed to do something with the SK8 card and wanted to use the markers.

I decided to draw some extra skateboards a little bigger than the one on the digi and then drew outline text of HAPPY on one and BIRTHDAY on the other. Then I colored them in with the Aqua markers and blended the ink with the waterbrush. The result was fair and since I didn't have time to keep experimenting, I decided to go ahead and use them.

A few years back I signed up to be a Leaving Prints rep. I only did it for a couple months because I wasn't really ready to do that, and also had to start packing the house up to move from Tennessee to Louisiana where my husband had gone down to help rebuild after Katrina. After I had colored the SK8 digi I had a sort of revelation of what to do with it for a card. I had this "ribbon" (ripped fabric strips really) from Leaving prints that I never knew what to do with and it matched the digi colors perfectly. Since it has a textured look I decided to use it as a background instead of patterned paper so I cut strips and glued them onto the card front. I matted the digi onto red, yellow and blue paper to match the digi and ribbon, then I cut pieces of foam tape to make it pop. I cut out the skateboards, matted them on yellow cardstock and cut them out again and used zots to attach them to the ribbon strips. I like the CAS style so I quit there.

The inside and back are even more simple. On the coated white paper I stamped a cupcake with a candle using the bold point of the Aqua markers on the rubber stamp. It took 2 tries to get a good result and then I still had to go back over the lines a little with the fine point of the markers. That will need more practice. I matted the cupcake image on a larger piece of the yellow cardstock and cut another piece of white paper to glue onto the yellow and wrote a sentiment with the bold point of a red Aqua marker. I stamped "Love is homemade" onto white and matted it onto yellow cardstock and glued it onto the back of the card. That is one of my favorite stamps, so it will show up on one of these card posts soon. I think he liked the card. It was a little juvenile for a 32 year old, but men are just boys inside a big guy body ;o)

Well, that is all for now. I have a lot of cardmaking to do to make up for such a big gap of time on the blog. I promise I will multi-post some cards right away. This card was actually supposed to be for the D2D challenge, but since I had a creative block of what to do to it after the digi was matted, I didn't get it posted in time. Cute cards deserve to be posted whether they are for challenges or not and I have more waiting to go digital.

Be very blessed! Deborah


Challenges I would like to enter this card in:
Creative Stamp Friends - #27 Birthday