Shake your tail feathers!

Yup, variations on a theme! I love the back of this cute chicken!

I wanted to use the sentiment "I Miss Your Face" but after searching my stash, apparently I don't own that set. I tried to put one together from an alphabet stamp set and I really need a lot more practice with it to get the letters lined up correctly. Or even in a pleasingly crooked fashion.

These are 2 more for my last Operation Write Home box which will go out at the end of this week.

Two more down! Jars and coffee cups!

Two more virgin sets got used today. I am determined to use as many unused stamp sets as I can before I pack up my last box to Operation Write Home. That box really needs to go out in less than a week now. Yikes!

The coffee cup and its sentiment are from The Alley Way Stamps. the Jar and the scripty "Thanks" are from Lawn Fawn. I will confess to rushing these to get them done. I can't believe how I HAD to have that set with the jar in it, and once I got it I never used it. I actually have another jar stamp from a different stamp company that I got for the critter that came with it.

It's good to have goals, I guess.

So, with Operation Write Home winding down, I reflected by looking through all my stamp sets, which I had to have. HAD to have.

There were a lot of sets I had never even opened. And of those I had opened, some of them were only for one image or sentiment, one time.

Yikes!

My goal, between now and July 15th is to use each of the stamp sets I've purchased and never used. I'll never make it, as slowly as I work, but at least I'm not drifting from one thing to another without a plan.

So, Friday and Saturday, July 3rd and 4th, I created 3 new cards. Big deal, right?

This card is created using Paper Smooches' Vegetastic set. The papers are from a mat stack set I got at Target over a year ago.

This card features Lawn Fawn paper and sun die. The cool face is from The Alley Way Stamps new mini set called Neener Neener. It has all faces, and when I saw the cool sunglasses I knew he belonged on a shiny sun. The sentiment was a bit trickier. The letters are mostly from TAWS new alphabet set Express Yourself. I haven't got the hang of the individual letters in this set yet, and couldn't get through the whole phrase without messing up or smudging at least one letter. So I went old school and cut out the words from different attempts. The "you're" came from something else.

This is a summer card, obviously. The milkshake is from TAWS' Slurp set. I think I may have used something in this set before, but I can't remember so I added it to the virgin packages.

So that's my weekend so far, at least crafty-wise. My goal is 3 or 4 more sets to be broken into today. It counts if I use more than one set on a single card, right?

PS, I have 24 unused sets. Don't judge me.

Robots can be sentimental too!

I'm making some more cards for my last OWH box. Sniff. I'm going to miss them, even if the reason is a good one.

I have been looking for a good place for these screw brads for a couple of years now. So, yay for robots.

The robot image is from The Alley Way Stamps' Lighter Than Air set, and the sentiment is from, ugh, I think it's from TAWS' Jibber Jabber. Maybe.

I hope I can be productive over this 3 day weekend, but I'm off to a very slow start.

Narwhals narwhals swimmin' in the ocean.

I have had that commercial stuck in my head for days now. Yeah, just try not to get it stuck there. Anyway, this narwhal card is for the OWH Our Daily Bread Designs monthly challenge.  If there are 50 entries each month ODBD pays for 2 boxes of cards to be shipped overseas to our armed forces. Yay! As of this morning we needed 5 more entries, but by the time I got this one made and photographed we were up to 49.  Yay, if I get this in this afternoon I may actually be #50.

The challenge was to use embossing. Super easy!

Oh, and check out the inside of the card:

And because I didn't just stop there, here is the other card I did this morning:

The walrus and narwhal are from The Alley Way Stamps, and I used an embossing folder from Sizzix and a cloud die from Lawn Fawn. The custom sentiment, inside and out, was printed on my computer.

Monster wishes for You!

I've waited for this bunch of monster stamps to come back in stock, and they are finally mine! This is from Oogles (The Alley Way Stamps) and it includes several funny monsters and this adorable guy. This card could be for a birthday, and that's my story and I'm sticking to it!

It's going to Operation Write Home, as soon as I have enough for a box to send. This could be months at the rate I craft them up.

Flying by to say Merry Christmas -- with glitter!

I don't normally use glitter, since cards for Operation Write Home can't have it, so this was a little bit of fun for me.

The airplane is from Lawn Fawn's Bon Voyage stamp set, and the houses are from Sizzix Townscape die. More of that difficult silver elastic twine forms the tow line for the sentiment, which I believe is from The Alley Way Stamps' All Wrapped Up. I had fun heat embossing the greeting in metalic embossing powder. There is Wink of Stella glitter on the airplane, as well as glossy accents in the windows.  Glitter! Glitz! Wow!

Forcing things to work

Sometimes your mojo gets up and goes away.

I was playing with acrylic paints a couple of weeks ago, and made this interesting green background. I liked it very much, by itself, and it seemed to work with the dragonfly which was colored weeks ago.

I still haven't figured out how to use a sketch properly, and no matter which way I put the parts, they didn't look right, or took off too much of the green background, which was the point of this card in the first place.

So I messed and messed with it. I took out lots of paper and made a big mess on my desk, and in the end stamped a flower and put the bug on one of the blossoms. Then of course that wasn't the end after all, as the black stamped flower looked odd, so I found these old little flowers by Jolie to put over the plain black ovals.

Now I'm calling it done even if it isn't my finest work.

The dragonfly is from The Alley Way Stamps Fly By set. The card is going in the box to Operation Write Home.

Several other things went wrong last weekend, like my garage door, and my pressure washer. I tried to force them to work too, and they just broke for my trouble. I was under a deadline to get my driveway clean and Murphy was doing his thing with me. Maybe that affected my creativity? That's my story and I'm sticking with it.

Experimenting is fun, not necessarily productive.

So, I experimented with a bunch of stuff yesterday, and I only have this one card to show for it. And it wasn't even the product of most of my experiments!

One thing I did play with was rubbing Distress ink over an embossed background, and that worked out nicely. Then I decided the butterfly (The Alley Way Stamps, Fly By) needed a flight trail. Well you can't stamp the trail after you've embossed, so I tried to "wing it" (lol, I can't help myself). So I hand drew the flight trail. Hmmm.

Most of the rest of the experiments involved texture paint. Since I want to stain them later, they are all over the surfaces where I put them to dry yesterday. It may be a while before I get back to them.

Today I experimented with different backdrops for  the card photo.

How's this? Not so good? I thought so too.

It's another card for Operation Write Home, which is winding down a little. I still have this box I have been working on all year. Yes, I'm slow!

Dog dreams

Here are a few more cards I made a few months ago, uploaded for a furry critters challenge at Operation Write Home for their virtual card making party. All I did this weekend were feathered, so I found some old ones to feature!

All the stamps are from Lawn Fawn, Critters at the Dog Park and Critters on the Farm.

It's all about the blue!

My cards are mostly girly, so I decided to go blue. Not that a girl wouldn't love a cute blue dragon or blobby, but these are also suitable for little boys.

I went digging around in my paper and found some blue paper that wasn't the least bit green (hard to find in MY stash) so it wouldn't clash with the blue dragon I colored during the week.

 I've been concentrating on "missing you" cards, since that is what is most needed these days at Operation Write Home.

Then I did 2 more blue cards because I could.

The dragon and the blobby are from The Alley Way Stamps, and the dog, and the sentiment bubbles are from Lawn Fawn.

Maybe next time it won't be raining, and I can take pictures outdoors again. They are so much nicer in natural light.

Really big thanks!

I'm still loving the funny birds from The Alley Way Stamps. These two are from the set Bird Brain. The big sentiment is from Big Chatter. The little quote bubble with the heart is from Lawn Fawn's Chit Chat.

Today's confession: I did it again! I cut out a whole page of birds with the Cameo on the wrong blade setting and they didn't cut through. Again with the scissors, she said!

Four blobby friends

So, what should I call these little blobby guys? This stamp is from a set called Buggin Out from The Alley Way Stamps, and represents some sort of infectious disease. Cute, but something you wish you hadn't caught.

Somehow I seem to have trouble doing multiples of the same card. Part of it is the limitations of the 6x6 paper pads. This one is a combination of Summer Fresh from Simple Stories, and something else I can't remember (the green circle). You can only get one of the pointy bottomed banners from one sheet, and typically there are 2 of each design in a pack. So, each of my sets seem to be variations on a theme, which is OK by me.

Anyway, these blobby boys were cut from plain white cardstock after a rather spectacular fail at cutting the same shapes printed on a texty background. It was, as I suspected, kind of a challenge to color them once they had been cut. This brings me to my next lament. OK, I'm full of it today, but here goes.

I'd love to have a file with the print and cut lines included. I bought a bunch of cut files for stamp sets before my Cameo arrived, and didn't realize they didn't include a printing file. The website did say there was a .jpg and a .png, but they are only for reference, not printable. I get it, that would preclude the sale of the physical stamps. So I went back and ordered the stamps. I would have anyway. But, once you have the physical stamps, you can easily make your own cut files from a scan of the image. And, as I mentioned before, they are a lot easier to color if they are still on the page, prior to cutting. Like last week's snakes!

The blobby is from Buggin Out (The Alley Way Stamps), the speech bubble and background dies are from Lawn Fawn. All these cards are going to Operation Write Home, where they are specifically looking for "miss you" cards at the present.

Here's my blooper picture. This seriously didn't work. First the registration failed, and when I finally got it to "work" it was completely off. I did stop the Cameo before it could shred the entire page.  Yes, I know I can hand trim them, but that was kind of the point of the Cameo, right?

9 snakes and a hippo

I'm making cards for Operation Write Home, and playing with my new Cameo Silhouette, too.  I had some issues cutting the Xpress-it cardstock and ended up slicing 2 snakes completely into bits and pieces. Poor snakes. Anyway, I decided to sneak a pink hippo into the group. She can't say "misss you" because hippos don't hiss when they talk. I'm just saying.

So I've learned a thing or 2 this weekend. If you emboss the front of the card, the inside front must be lined if you expect it to be writable. If you line the inside front of a kraft colored card with white, the other side needs to be lined too, or it looks bad. I ended up making kraft panels and applying them to the fronts of cream colored card bases, which kind of negates the whole "clean and simple" concept.  If these cards were for personal use I'd leave the fronts embossed and unlined. But these are for troops to write home on, so they need the extra space.

Oh, and the hand-trimmed snakes with a small white border look better on the kraft background, so I'd better get cracking on learning how to do a whole page of them on the Cameo. I'm trying to decide what critter comes next.

The snakes and hippo are from The Alley Way Stamps set called Tropic Topic, the misss you thought bubble was cobbled together with Lawn Fawn's A Birdie Told Me and Harold's ABCs. The hippo's quote bubble is Lawn Fawn's Chit Chat.

Happy bird-day cards

Yes, I have birds on the brain. I am loving this set from The Alley Way Stamps called Birds of a Feather.  What's not to love?

I make cards for Operation Write Home, but I am so slow I won't fill a box until September at this rate. I guess it is a good thing I did all those Christmas cards in January, because they might just get in under the deadline!

Social nerdy birds, part 2

I just can't get enough of these birds! When I wanted to participate in a color challenge, I new exactly how I wanted to do it. Naturally I cased my own card, why not?

The challenge was for yellow and purple, over at  Operation Write Home.