Happy hot and sticky Monday!
Summer decided to come in with a bang I guess...I am not a fan of heat and humidity.  It's like all brain function ceases and I just melt...so I'm crossing my fingers and praying that this all passes very Very soon!

But, we are starting a new challenge today at Paper Makeup and this week we want to see Butterflies!!
I love adding butterflies to my cards.  They're so whimsical and elegant and just beautify everything!

So I've been having a little bit of fun with my stamps lately.  Really trying to stretch them outside of just their basic use.  There have been a few new releases lately with these really cute scribble circle flowers that I've just loved.  But I can't afford to buy every stamp set I love :)  So I decided to try and see if I could do something similar with what I have.

I had bought a fun stamp set from Simon Says called Lots of Dots, and it's just that...all kinds of circles.  I played with them a bit and found that I could stretch the outline circles just a little so that they weren't perfectly round!  Offset each one a little bit and ta-da!  Scribble flowers!  Sorry...I was really proud of myself for that :)

I stamped a few out in different shades of pink and layered some leaves underneath.  Then printed off and colored up some butterflies from the Color it Summer set from Paper Makeup and scattered them around.

The sweet sentiment is one that I just adore from Paper Makeup called Happy Get Well Note.  It's just so perfect, and a little more thought out than just Get Well.  I printed it off on the bottom of my card and then followed the week 3 sketch from Viva La Verve for the rest of the card.

I'd like to enter this card into the following challenges:
    Card Mania #50-Circles
    Crafty Catz #237-Anything Goes
    Creative Inspirations #271-Clean and Simple
    Delightful Challenges-Seize the Daisy
    Robyn's Fetish #218-Stripes or Dots
    Simon Says-Anything Goes
    Sweet n Sassy-Anything Goes
    Viva la Verve Week #3

I hope you will stop by Digi Makeover this week and join in the fun!!
Thanks for visiting! <3

Happy Monday!
I've scheduled this post, so hopefully it shows up properly :)

We have started a new challenge at Digi Makeover and this week it's Thinking of You!
My cards have seemed to focus more on this theme lately.  I find them more versatile that way, and easier to send for any occasion.

This weeks card turned out super simple but I love it anyhow!

The sun rays look super neon in the picture...they really aren't that bright :)
I've used the adorable sun from Jen's Sunshine, colored in with my pencils.  The middle has been cut out and mounted with some foam tape for some dimension.  I did a little stitching at the top of the blue banner, and layered a few more flagged scraps under the sun.

For the sentiment, my original plan was to use one from the Jen's Sunshine set, but of course I forgot to print it on the card panel before assembling everything...so I had to dig around my stamps for something else.

I ended up piecing a few together, but I think it works out perfectly!

Stop by and join in the fun this week!  We'd love to see your Thinking of You cards!! <3

Happy Friday!!!
Lots to do today before we head out for camping this weekend!  But first to share with you our newest release from Sami Stamps!
Oh what an gorgeous release it is this time around!  It's all about butterflies!  Does it get any prettier?

I had to play with 2 of the images this week - Butterfly 3 and Butterfly Flower.  The idea just popped into my head as soon as I saw the images and I had to give it a shot.

It's not exactly what I had in mind, but extremely close.  Matthew helped me out a bit with the placement of the flowers.  I really wanted it to be like looking at a flower bed with all the different flowers weaving together.  I couldn't get them lined up quite right, but Matthew read my mind and pulled it all together :)

Then I sat down with my markers and just started coloring.  Took me a little bit of time, but fortunately the World Cup soccer games were playing, so I had all the time in the world  :)

I love the 2 tone coloring on the flowers.  I get a little nervous trying to blend 2 different colors, but I think they came together perfectly here.  Once I finished the flowers, I knew I had to make the butterflies Monarchs.  It brought me back to middle school when my mom had a huge garden and several butterfly bushes.  And the monarchs would just swarm there.  I think we even did the jar thing with a few of the cocoons.  They were just so beautiful!

Once I had the image all colored up, I fussed around with it for a few days trying to get the right card layout designed around it.  I really wanted the image to take center stage, but didn't want the rest of the card to be completely empty.  After fussing, and fussing, and fussing some more, I finally just mounted and walked away.  Yeah, I feel it still needs something, but I can't put my finger on it and I don't want to ruin how beautiful it already is.

Anyhow, be sure to stop by Sami Stamps to check out this gorgeous release!  And be sure to join in our fun Stripes challenge running this month!

I'd like to enter this card into the following challenges:
    Fussy and Fancy #116-Things with Wings
    Send a Smile 4 Kids-For the Girls
    Word Art Wednesday #137-Anything Goes

Thanks for visiting! <3

Happy Thursday!
I'm so excited that the weekend is almost here!  We get to go camping down in New York with the family and I can't wait!  Hoping that it won't be too hot again this year.  Last year when we went camping it was over 100 degrees the whole weekend...miserable!  But I know it will be fun either way :)

So we start a new challenge today at Meljen's Designs!!  I'm in this weird boy card mood.  Not normal for me as it's out of my comfort zone, but it's been kind of fun to see what pops out onto the paper :)

When I laid eyes on this cutie a little while ago, I knew I had to have him!  He's just so perfect!
To start my card, I distressed all the edges with my scissors.  Something about boy cards requires distressed edges to me.

I cut a star background with my Silhouette from a transparency to make a stencil and then colored up some embossing paste with a really light yellow ink.  I didn't want them to be too bright.  But I love how they turned out!!!  Seriously, how fun is embossing paste!?

The sentiment was a little tough for me.  I really wanted something nerdy to add to the card, but nothing seemed to work out properly.  So I stuck with a regular hello, cut out several times so that it's a bit thick and sticks up off the card.

My cute Nerd O Saurus is colored with my Spectrum Noir pencils and blended out with baby oil.  I added just a touch of glossy accents to his glasses to.  And a bunch of sparkle to the Hello cut outs :)

Hope you will join us for this fun challenge!!

I'd like to enter this card into the following challenges:
    Delightful Challenge-Hello Friend
    Incy Wincy Designs-Bright Funky Colors
    Inky Impressions #164-For the Boys
    Simon Says Stamp-You Gotta Have Friends
    Sweet Sunday Sketch #223
    That Craft Place-Men

Thanks for stopping by! <3

Happy Tuesday!
We have a fun new challenge for you this week at Tuesday Throwdown with an awesome sponsor!  Our theme is celebrations and the sponsor is MilkCoffee!  I just love their sweet little images, and they were perfect for our theme.

So often a celebration card just focuses on birthdays, but I wanted to reach out a little bit and celebrate something a little different.  Something that always makes me smile :)

New pets!  Unfortunately it's not my celebration :(  I'd love to get a new little cuddly kitty but 3 is plenty for us, and I don't think Matthew would be too happy if I showed up with another one.  But the fun and excitement of getting a new pet is always something to celebrate, and this image was perfect for that occasion!

I used Tiffany in Victorian Dress for my card and colored her all up with my ShinHan markers.  The coloring didn't turn out quite the way I wanted.  It was supposed to be a bit more pale tan-ish...but came out a little more yellow.  But it still works well with the card.  Used my Silhouette to cut out some flowers and then a Lin & Lene heart border die cut along the edge.

I think this is the closest I will ever get to making a vintage styled card :)
Be sure to check out the rest of the design teams creations this week!!

I'd like to enter this card into the following challenges:
    Craft Your Passion #218-3 or More Embellishments
    Stampin for the Weekend-Anything Goes
    Sweet Sketch 2

Thanks for stopping by! <3

Happy Monday!
Time for a new challenge at Paper Makeup!  This week we want to see stitching on your projects!

I kept my card pretty simple.  My sewing machine has been acting funny lately, not sewing properly and leaving a lot of loose stitches...really bugging me.  So I didn't want to add too many layers.

I started by using a stencil to lightly emboss the background of my card.  Very subtle but I love it.  Then added a few little scraps and did a zig-zag stitch between them.  My sweet image is Felicity the Fawn from Paper Makeup and I colored her in with my Spectrum Noir pencils.

The sentiment is a couple of stamps from Simon Says pieced together in the order I wanted, and then tucked behind my little fawn's foot.

Stop by the challenge and join in the fun!  We'd love to see what sort of stitching you add to your projects!  <3

I'd like to enter this card into the following challenges:
    Deconstructed Sketch #155
    Loves Rubberstamps #107-Clean and Simple
    Ruby's Rainbow #81-Flora and Fauna
    Simon Says Stamp-Stencil It

Happy Monday!
I hope you all had a fabulous weekend!  It was bright, sunny, and hot here in Montreal!  I just love seeing the trees fully leafed out, and all the flowers in bloom.  Just makes the world seem so alive!

So we are starting a new challenge this week at Paper Makeup!  We want to see your projects for the men!  Perfect for Father's Day this weekend!

I just love this sentiment!  I can't seem to find it in the store right now though...sorry :(
It really is true!  I know I've said this in my previous Father's Day posts, but I love my dad :)  He really is someone special in my life!!

I used a scrap piece of marbled paper that I made up earlier in the week with some Distress Paints.  It just fit so perfectly on the card.  The star panel is cut out with my silhouette, and I pulled the star theme up to the front with a few large stars cut from some green glitter paper.  I really love how this card came together!  It has a lot of layers and details, but they just work so perfect together!

Be sure to stop by Digi Makeover and check out the rest of the design teams creations!!

I'd like to enter this card into the following challenges:
    Artistic Inspirations #95-Anything Goes/All About Dad
    Catered Crop-Manly Men
    Crafts 4 Eternity #179-For the Boys
    Craft Your Passion #217-Father's Day/For the Boys
    Deconstructed Sketch #154
    Ooh La La #158-Father's Day/Male
    Simon Says Stamp-Father's Day/Masculine
    That Craft Place-Men

Thanks for visiting! <3

It's Friday, it's Friday!!!
I hope the day has started off fabulously for everyone!

We have a soft and fuzzy new release for you today over at Sami Stamps.  This one touched my heart because I just love my kitties, and Sami drew us a whole release full of them!

I chose to use Persian Kitty #2.  I had to do a little searching online to get some coloring ideas because I didn't want to just have a white cat on my card.  It may not be the exact coloring of a Persian, but I still love how it looks.  Reminds me of my little kitty that I had when I was younger.  Her name was PurrBox because that's all she did was purr :)

This card turned out very soft and elegant..love it!  That wasn't the plan but it sort of went off in that direction on its own, so I rolled with it.  I tried something a little different with the background.  Instead of just using an embossing folder to get texture, I tried out one of my stencils.  Ran it through my Cuttlebug with one of those rubber mat things to see if I could get a good impression of the stencil pattern, since I really wanted that pattern on my card.  And it worked!  It wasn't a strong impression, just subtle enough to know it was there.  I decided to go back over it again with some vanilla ink just to highlight it a little more too.

The punched border is from Martha Stewart and I paired it with some pretty striped paper to go along with the new challenge we have started at Sami Stamps :)

For the image, I wasn't entirely sure how I wanted to put it on the card.  My first thought was to have some sort of bed of flowers behind it so that the kitty was just sitting in a flower garden.  But none of the flower images I had really worked all that well.  I pulled stuff off my desk and laid it on the card, trying several things, until I pulled one of my left over circle frames over and tried that.  It clicked!  I wanted it to have a wooden feel though, so I cut 3 layers out of some Kraft cardstock and then lightly inked them in brown for some dimension.

Printed and colored up my kitty, and used an image from a previous release (Spring Branch) for a little floral decoration on the circle.  A few pearls, and a sweet sentiment from Winnie & Walter, and it was done!!  I adore how this card turned out!!

Now, run over to Sami Stamps, check out the rest of this cuddle worthy release, and then join in our Stripes challenge!!

I'd like to enter this card into the following challenges:
    DigiStamps4Joy #93-Girly/Feminine
    Loves Rubberstamps #106-Anything Goes
    The Paper Shelter #161-Flower Power
    Winnie & Walter-Join in to Win
    Word Art Wednesday #135-Anything Goes

Thanks for stopping by! <3

Happy Thursday!
We are excited to start a new challenge for you today over on the Meljen's Designs challenge blog!  This weeks challenge is Sew Perfect...oh what fun!!  I love sewing on my cards.  Took me a little while to try that out, was scared to screw it all up.  But once I got all the settings right I've been sewing every card in sight!! Lol :)

I went a little sew-crazy for my card today...because...well..it's just fun!

I'm in full on Father's Day card mode so this Number One Dad image was perfect to use today!  I paired it with kind of manly paper...that seems to be lacking in my paper collection, so I struggle sometimes with getting papers right for my cards.  But I thought this pattern worked well.  Colored in the image with my colored pencils and then got to sewing!

I sewed around all the edges and did a zig-zag stitch down the side.  Then decided to follow the stitched line that was around the image with my machine.  I ended up hand cranking the needle through the whole outline because I wanted to be sure it was lined up correctly.  It turned out super cute!  I just love the extra fun that the stitching adds!

To finish it all off, I made up a few coordinating buttons and tied some twine through them.  Perfect for dad!!

So go check out the Meljen's Designs Challenge and then join in the fun!!!
Oh and be sure to check out the Store as well!  Melissa has started a sale from now until July 4 for 50% off everything!!!  So if you need to get your Meljen's fix, now is a great time to load up!!

I'd like to enter this card into the following challenges:
    Charisma Cardz #12-Father's Day
    Color Me Creative #93-Father's Day/Boy Stuff
    Fab n Funky #219-Father's Day
    Retro Sketches #117
    Ruby's Rainbow #80-One for the Boys
    Simon Says Stamp-Father's Day/Masculine
    Totally Gorjuss #238-Stitching
    Word Art Wednesday #135-Anything Goes

Thanks for stopping by! <3

Hello everyone!
Thanks for visiting!  I love all of you and so appreciate that you take the time to visit my little corner of the world to see my work!

If it hasn't been obvious in the past, I'm addicted to Lawn Fawn stamps.  Can't get enough of them, and yet don't have enough money to buy them all :)

But I was able to purchase a few new sets recently and have had a blast playing around with them!  This card sort of just fell together.  I had all these pieces laying out on my desk, left over from other projects and as I was moving them around (you know...trying to get organized and clean up :) ) the little pile they made gave me the idea for this card.  So I got to work...who needs to be organized anyways, right? :)

I adore these sweet little elephants from the Love You Tons mini set!  They're just so precious!  I used the Stitched Journaling die for the main focal panel and stamped some grass tufts from the Critters on the Savanna set.  Popped my colored elephants up on some foam tape above the grass. 

My original idea was to try and have one of the elephants holding a bouquet of little flowers, but I couldn't get that vision to come to life, so I pulled out the Hello Sunshine set and did a balloon instead.

The chevron background was cut with my Silhouette in two shades of yellow and then pieced together, alternating the 2 colors.  It's a little hard to see the two colors in the picture, but it helps change up the background a bit from just a solid color.

And of course, I used my new heart border die from Lin and Lene (Joy Crafts).  The first few times I used this die, I just cut it out.  But as I was cleaning up and shoving it back into it's package, I saw a sample picture on the back that showed some embossing as well!  How cool!  So I did the full cut and emboss this time around.  You can see the embossing a little bit on the little row of hearts on the bottom. 

The last little bit of detail was the sentiment, which I stamped and then embossed in clear.  Oh and Wink of Stella glitter pen...no card is complete without it! :)

I'd like to enter this card into the following challenges:
    7 Kids College Fund #101-Anything Goes/Embossing
    Chocolate Coffee Cards #66-Embossing
    Lawnscaping Challenge-Embossing

Thanks for stopping by!!! <3

Happy Tuesday!
We have another fun challenge for you this week at Tuesday Throwdown!  We want to see you use paints/mists on your projects!  These seem to be very popular right now in the crafting world.  All the watercoloring that I've seen has been amazing and so inspiring, so I'm really excited to see what everyone enters into this challenge!

I decided to stick with my Distress Paints.  I've been having a lot of fun playing around with these and really learning how to use them.  It was a little bit of a struggle to figure how to use them on this card, but with some help from my wonderful husband, we worked something up :)

I had originally started with a pink/purple/white marbled background, but it just didn't look right and wasn't working out very well.  So after fretting to Matthew about it, he suggested doing more of a sky background with blue and swirls of white to represent clouds.  So I gave it a shot and really love how it turned out!  Amazing how gorgeous 2 simple colors can be together.

My image has been provided by our sponsor-Robyn's Fetish.  It's the Fall Bouquet image, and I've colored it in with my new Spectrum Noir pencils and have used baby oil to blend them all out, which I've really loved doing.  It's not quite as fun as watercoloring with the Inktense pencils, but still fun to smooth out the colors and make it all pretty :)

I kept the card simple with just a scallop frame around my "sky" background, a Martha Stewart border punch across the middle, and a little bit of twine and a button for my tag to sit under.

I'd like to enter this card into the following challenges:
    Card Mania #48-Flowers
    Catered Crop-Garden Party
    The Crazy Challenge #172-Bingo (Punch, Digi, Flower)

Hope you will join us this week!  Thanks for stopping by! <3

Happy Monday!
Time to start a new challenge at Digi Makeover, and this week it's Anything Goes!  Along with our July Guest Designer call!!  So swing by and join in!

I decided to try something new for my card today.  I recently received a little order of die cuts that I have adored playing with.  So I pulled them out again to give this little technique a try.

The Joy Crafts Butterfly Border was a little temper-mental going through the die cut machine, and didn't cut out all that great.  Maybe it was because they weren't in the middle of the plate...I'm not sure, but I had to do a lot of extra work to get them to cut.  But basically I printed off my sentiment from Paper Makeup Stamps, then lined up my die along the top of that sentiment and put only the part of the die that I wanted to cut on the cutting plate so that the bottom would stay attached to my card.

I think it turned out super cute, even with all the extra work I had to do to get it cut out :)
It's kept pretty simple since the butterflies add a lot of detail and the paper is all sparkly.  I just added a few liquid pearls to give a little more definition to the butterflies.

And this one turned out so cute, I decided to make another one :)

This one is with a Lin & Lene Heart Border die cut.  I LOVE this die and have not been able to stop using it since it showed up in my mailbox :)  I had a little trouble getting this one lined up properly on my cutting plates, but nothing that a little bit of ribbon couldn't cover!

I'd like to enter this pink card into the following challenges:
    A Creative Romance-Girly Creations
    Crafty Catz #233-Anything Goes
    Simon Says Stamp-Anything Goes
    The Squirrel and the Fox #70-Let's Hear it for the Girls
    Stampin for the Weekend-For the Girls

So stop by the Paper Makeup challenge blog, check out the rest of the design teams creations, say HI to our guest designer - Jo, and then join in the fun!!  <3