Friday Link Love: Father’s Day Edition
June 14th, 2013
Have you made a card for your dad yet? You’ve got about 48 hours to get it done! I’ve actually got several to choose from, but I have an idea for another that I might like better so… you know how it goes! Whatever I don’t use I will save to send to OWH when they are ready to start on Father’s Day 2014 boxes.
Before I get to Friday Links I thought I’d share a few scrappy cards I’ve been working on lately, trying to get the scraps bin to the point where I can fit the lid back on it 
No sources for any of this stuff, it is truly random from my stash!
Click on the images to embiggen!
Friday Link Love
1. Sunflower Mel’s – This first card is an amazing baseball themed slider card – the baseball slides around the card, isn’t that awesome!?
2. Zakka Life – This fun Swiss Army Knife shaped card is also being generously offered as a free printable. I love that the blades swing out for the sentiment!
3. Cardmaking Connections – Beautiful masculine card using the spotlighting technique. I love the use of pinecones – they’re everywhere here and always remind me of home.
4. Handmade by Paula – Another great card by Paula, and another printable! Makes a great Father’s Day card, but clever Paula made it flexible so it can be used for all sorts of sentiments.
5. Bella Rose Cards – Love this military-inspired card for dads. Fantastic silhouetted image of a marine saluting a flag – be sure and check this card out!
6. Kaminski’s Creations – For the superhero Dad! A cute take on a Superman themed card, and a tutorial on how she made it!
7. Paper-Scissors-Superheroes – Got a rockstar Dad? This is the perfect card for him. (Scroll down to the last card in this longish-post!) Love the popped up guitar!
My Lucky Stars
June 12th, 2013
Hello friends! Today’s card share is another one in my series using the Authentique Strong collection 6×6 paper pad. AND since it uses repetition, it’s a great card for the OWH Design Bootcamp lesson this week. The three stamped stars are not only repeats of each other but are also repeated in the little stars in the sentiment.
This also uses an older OWH sketch, #58.
Specific products used on this card:
My go-to favorites for all cardmaking:
Thanks (so much)
June 10th, 2013
Since I pulled out the Silhouette last week to cut letters, while I had it out I also cut a few more things which I will share with you this week, starting with today’s card. This is a thank you card I made for a friend. The big black kitty was inspired by my own big black cat. (Did you know that cats that are completely black with no white at all will have golden yellow eyes? So if you see a green eyed black cat, that kitty has a splash of white somewhere.)
I popped up the cat and backed his eyes and nose with some scrap cardstock. I added a little Stickles to the nose to coordinate with the glittery brad I used on the sentiment flag. The sentiment was stamped with one of those clear stamps from the dollar bin at Michael’s – and actually it’s part of a larger stamp that I cut up to get what I wanted!
Specific products used on this card:
My go-to favorites for all cardmaking:
Friday Link Love: Stampin’ Up! Edition
June 7th, 2013
If you’ve been hiding under a papercrafting rock, then you might not know that Stampin’ Up! has released their new annual catalog. I thought today for Friday Link Love I’d share some links to SU! bloggers who’ve posted beautiful cards made with some of these new stamps!
Here are seven cards that caught my attention this week…
1. Mosaic Madness with Deb Valder – this is a beautiful navy and white card featuring the Mosaic Madness stamp set. I love that she embossed the base, and popped up some of the panels to add a ton of dimension.
2. Picnic Season – For a fairly clean and simple card, there’s a lot of new product going on here! New DSP, new stamps, new washi tape! All really sweet and summery!
3. Chalk Talk – SU! has a new stamp set specifically designed for the chalkboard craze, and I love this card using it!
4. Bleached Swallowtail – I could not buy this large stamp fast enough when it became available, and I love what Dawn has done with it here. This blog post also has an awesome tutorial on how to do the bleaching technique. I haven’t done that technique in forever but now I want to get the bleach back out and give it another go!
5. Cycle Celebration – Another new stamp is this adorable bike and it’s punny sentiments. Love the use of washi on this card, too!
6. Postage Collection – This card features one of the new hostess sets, Postage Collection. I just love the gold embossed bees and the honeycomb dry embossed background. And the black, white, and gold color scheme is so elegant.
7. Wildflowers for Mom – I know Mother’s Day has passed, but this card could be for anything with a slight change of sentiment. It uses the new SU! Wildflower Meadow stamp set and coordinating embossing folder. She used watercolor paper and markers to get the cool texture in her stamping.
That’s it for me today, y’all have a great weekend! I’ll be back Monday with something cute to share 
Love You
June 6th, 2013
Happy rainy Thursday everyone Today I have a sweet little confection of a card to share. I decided to participate in the Moxie Fab World Tuesday Trigger this week. If you aren’t familiar, they do a great inspiration photo challenge every week. This week’s photo was this beautiful bedroom….
Don’t you just want to jump on that bed? No? Just me?
My inspirations here were the sweet feminine bedding, specifically the floral coverlet and the little puff-dots on the comforter. I also loved that the bed skirt is box-pleated. I love a good box pleat! And finally, the chunky A on the bedside table was also an inspiration.
Here’s what I came up with…
The papers are from the Authentique Grace collection 6 x 6 pad. The cardstock is some SU! Blush Blossom which I have been hoarding – still can’t believe they retired this color! The LOVE letters were cut on my Silhouette and beefed up with some extras cut from cardstock (I will never have a baggie full of random unused chipboard alphabets again, thank you, Silhouette!) I intentionally mussed the box pleated paper so it didn’t look too perfect and rigid.
Thanks for visiting today!
Specific products used on this card:
My go-to favorites for all cardmaking:
Happy Birthday
June 3rd, 2013
Hello friends! Today’s card share is another one from the series I am working on using the Authentique Strong collection 6×6 paper pad. These papers are more in the masculine range so I challenged myself to make a feminine card with them.
I think I succeeded, although it certainly isn’t a “girly” card by any stretch.
This card uses my favorite Happy Birthday sentiment – the one included in the Hero Arts OWH Year Round Sentiments set. I just love the size of it and especially the font. Also please note, my button is not naked!
And as you can see below, I am trying something new, linking my products with Inlinkz Project Manager. Most of these links are Amazon Affiliate links which would net me a small commission should you decide to follow the link and purchase the product. SU! products are linked to the SU! store which I am not affiliated with. I’m hoping this will be an easier way for me to keep track of what is what and for you to find something if you happen to fall in love with it.
Specific products used on this card:
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My go-to favorites for all cardmaking:
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Friday Link Love
May 31st, 2013
Hey y’all! Happy Friday! Today I’m kicking off a new weekly (or thereabouts) feature where I post links to some of my favorite cardmaking blog posts that I saw during the week. Cute cards, tutorials, freebies, etc. I promise they will definitely all be worth clicking on!
Before we get to that, though, I wanted to share these cellphone pics of my nephew Jacob, age 5, stamping some flowers onto a card for “his mimi” aka my mom. So cute, isn’t he?
Sorry for the quality of these pictures. It’s pretty hard to get a good shot of this boy in action, lol!
Friday Link Love
This past weekend was OWH’s big Memorial Weekend Bloghop. There was tons of cute inspiration to be had, but I pulled out my top ten favorites to share. If you still haven’t gotten around to all 140+ blogs on the hop, do it! But start with these folks:
Kathryn’s Cards – a really darling card with a great use of patterns, die cuts, and layering. One of my favorites of the hop!
Donna Inks – another really cute card – this is a clean one layer card that uses color for a big impact. She also has a step by step photo tutorial showing how she made it!
Marybeth’s Time for Paper – two great patriotic themed cards using trendy reverse die cuts and sequins to great effect.
Handmade by Paula – (what a great blog name ) a group of super cute patriotic cards, all made with the one print card kit that she created. Paula is not only a talented graphic designer, she’s also super generous, offering this kit as a free download on her blog. If you haven’t gone and downloaded this kit already, go do it right this minute!
Just Coffee Please... – I’m not sure how to describe this card. Vintage? Collage? Shabby chic? It’s all of the above and it’s adorable. I especially love her use of a clear acrylic banner. Go see!
Cinful Crafts – really knocked it out of the park with her first bloghop card. This is a patriotic sequined shaker card that you’ve got to see, it’s just awesome!
Diane Creates With Paper – I just loved the cool Cricut cut fan on this card and the punny sentiment. And the little stars and button details! Absolutely adorable.
Expressions – Becca created such a beautiful dramatic card that everyone should go see. I love the colors and the stamping here. Just gorgeous.
{Crafting Life} – This is another fantastic vintage style card. I really love the layers and the inked edges, and most of all that big red heart with the heat embossing. And the button and the twine. Of course!
Sylvia’s Stamping Corner – This is another great one that includes a tutorial, which I appreciated because I’m not sure I’d have ever figured out how she did the background on this pretty card! I love the use of scoring, it’s a fresh approach that I haven’t seen before.
AEIO Missing U
May 30th, 2013
I have been wanting to try using up an entire 6 x 6 paper pad on a set of coordinated cards and I have finally gotten started – not done yet, but about halfway! Today’s card share is the very first one I made from the pad I am using, Authentique’s Strong collection. Most of these cards will be destined for OWH. Once I am finished I will take a group picture of the whole set!
As soon as I saw this crossword paper, I knew exactly which sentiment to pair with it.
About this card: Patterned papers from Authentique Strong collection 6×6 pad. White cardstock is Wausau and gold cardstock is Worldwin. Sentiment from Hero Arts Year Round Sentiments is stamped in Distress Ink Weathered Wood. Large gold brads from my stash (Office Depot I think).
Happy Birthday!
May 28th, 2013
I haven’t posted a Graphic 45 card in awhile so I thought I’d share another one from the 12 card series I am doing using the Graphic 45 Place in Time collection 8 x 8 paper pad for the Haughton House. This is the card for August – my birthday month, so I figured I’d make it a birthday card
About this card: All the papers and stickers are from the Graphic 45 Place in Time collection. The kraft cardstock is Bazzill and has been dry embossed on my Big Shot with the Cuttlebug Swiss Dots embossing folder. I added drops of Liquid Pearls in Bisque to the upper left corner.
Operation Write Home Memorial Weekend Bloghop!
May 25th, 2013
Yay, it’s finally here! The big blowout OWH bloghop that I’ve been looking forward to! We have over 140 blogs this year (wow!) and tons and tons of cute inspiration – and all for a great cause, handmade cards for our deployed troops to use to keep in touch with home. If you didn’t arrive here from OWH, please go to the main bloghop page to visit the other bloggers!
Our task for this bloghop was to use an OWH sketch to create a thank you card. OWH sketches have a special place in my heart since I created many of them and hosted the sketch challenge for two years! I love seeing my older sketches get some love in a bloghop like this! Some time ago one of our awesome OWHers, Kathryn, created a PDF document checklist for folks to use to keep up with which sketches they had tried. Using that, I decided for this bloghop to use the oldest sketch I had never used before, and that turned out to be #21:
I don’t know what took me so long, this is a great sketch! (And no, not one I created, lol!) So enough yakking, here’s the card I came up with:
I recently got this beautiful peacock feather stamp (Stampendous!) and I have been itching to ink it up. I used Distress Ink markers (Broken China, Wild Honey, Shabby Shutters, Vintage Photo) to ink it up, then misted water on it and on my watercolor paper before stamping – gives this great watercolor effect. I heat embossed the sentiment from Technique Tuesday with Ranger gold detail embossing powder to give a little sparkle. Here’s a closer view:
I kept the rest of the card fairly clean and simple, with some patterned paper (mystery source, it was a gift from a friend) and cardstock (Stampin’ Up! Taken with Teal and Crumb Cake). The stamped panel is on dimensional adhesives and I used a corner rounder on four of the patterned paper corners.
I hope you enjoyed this stop on the hop and all the other stops too! Thank you for supporting Operation Write Home!
