Forgot one!

One last card - this is the one that I made for my niece!

Getting caught up

I have been saving up all the pictures, but I think it's safe that the recipients will be too busy before tomorrow to look at the blog and see their cards. These are my cards for my family.

For the love of Paperlace

I had 2 thank you cards to do today. I really like the Paperlace cartidge for making "the main event" of the card be just the words themselves.

The bottom card just has 2 different flower stamps, and I used clear emboss on them. Simple, but with just the right amount of "oomph".

The last of the Passover cards (for this year!)

I have to find a better place to take pictures of my cards than my comforter. This is the last of the Passover cards, I think they turned out pretty well, if I do say so myself. The bottle and the glass are from "Simply Charmed" cart, and the matzah was just me... In case anyone was curious, the verse I put in most of the cards was the following (Cause I know it off by heart now...) "Praise to God whose mercy token, Beam'd to still the raging sea; Lo, the snare is rent and broken, And our captive souls are free." From "If Our God had not Befriended".

Busy day today

I find that I make all my Grandmother's cards with "A Child's Year". I like the simple, nostalgic images, and I think they are probably easy for my grandmother to see. I joined a scrapbooking/card making group a few months ago, but tonight is the first crop I am going to be able to make. Not being sure what the protocol is, I will be going empty handed. I would like to learn techniques from more experienced crafters. On this card, I think something is missing from the yellow circle, whether it was inking the edges, or chalking it. So much to learn.

Pretty Paisley

This is just a little card to send to someone who has had some recent health issues. The sentiment says "sending you sunshine and laughter". It doens't show up too well, but I used my Cuttlebug to emboss the background paper with a paisley pattern. I think that the embossing works better on plain backgrounds, not so much on patterned paper, just for visibility sake. It's all about the learning curve.

Variations on a theme

This is similar to the purple Passover card I made, but I didn't want to make 2 identical. I like to be different, don't want things to look "canned", and I'm just having fun playing with the cartridges right now. Right now it's okay, because I'm not really making all that many cards, but if I wind up making ALL my Christmas cards, then they might all be the same. I think I am going to have to source out and start buying stamped sentiments - when I do handwriting, they just don't look right.

Another Passover card

This card is for my brother in law and his wife. They are both Jewish, but not too observant. The glasses of wine represent the 4 glasses of wine that are supposed to be drunk during the seder. On the inside of the card there is another glass of wine (you are to set out a glass of wine for the prophet Elijah). The sentiment inside is something to the effect of liking the 4 to 1 ratio of the wine distribution :)

Seder Plate card

It was actually a lot of creative thinking to come up with the images for this card. Again, the phone doesn't show the card all that well, but most of these are modified. Actually, the bone is the only image that I didn't have to play with. Starting at the top, the horseradish is just brown textured paper - that's what the pictures of horseradish looked like when I googled it. The bone is from "A Child's Year". The charoset is speckled brown paper, cut into little bits, and then I added additional brown. The lettuce leaf is a leaf from "Create a Critter, with the stem cut off. The parsley is the same leaf, then I just cut it down a little more. Finally, the egg...I had to cut an oval, and then just make it a little more "egg shaped". I like the concept of the card, but it didn't come out as well as I had hoped. Something to play with for next year, I guess.

Easter Chickie

I think I am going to have to bite the bullet and stop taking pictures of my cards with my phone. While it easier just to e-mail them to myself than to hook up my camera to the phone, I don't think the pictures present the cards at their best. Anyway, just a cute little card for my niece for Easter.

2nd Passover card

I really like the final layout for this card. I bought a circle cutter. What a great little tool Originally, I had only intended to write "Good Pesach" on the front, but it looked so bare, and incomplete. The flourish is from "Stretch Your Imagination", and I think it was the missing element.

1st Passover card

I think I have more fun making the cards for my husband's family than mine, just because it is something new. The same way that he can listen to the Christmas carol channel on the radio at the beginning of November and still not be sick of it by Christmas, it's still a novelty. This doesn't show up too well in the photo, but the background is made of 5 different blue dominant papers. Those were hard to fine! I went to Michael's thinking it would be easy, but nope! I started thumbing through various stack books, is blue that rare a colour? Outside of little boy themed stacks, and that wasn't what I was looking for. A simple, but pretty card.

Start of the holiday season

This is the Easter card that I made for my nephew (one down, how many to go??). I had to make the face twice...I don't have a proper blender pen, I tried it with a foam pencil I have, but the cheeks and the mouth came out too red and blotchy....looked like he had scarlet fever! I think I need to get new markers....I think the writing is too thin for the card. But it was a fun card to make.

Birthday card

I'm finding that the drawback to creating cards, is that it creates a need to get more goodies. I like the idea of this card, but I only had one "fashion" purse icon (Wild Card), but it doesn't quite fit with the overall vision that I had. I'm thinking that "Forever Young" might be the next one on my wish list. I do like the "Happy Birthday" (from Paperlace cart). It's supposed to be the purse "label".

Too punny...

I love it when a plan comes together.... I made this card for my brother in law and his wife. Like my husband and I, they are also an Interfaith marriage (Jewish/Christian). But you never know where inspiration will strike... I was watching televison this morning, and the channel had an ad for back-to-back Harry Connick Jr. movies. As my brain likes to play hopscotch, this eventually led me to thinking about the "When Harry Met Sally" soundtrack I own, which led to singing "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off". In the song, there is the lyric "You say Oyster, I say Erster" (btw, who says Erster?). That led me to putting Oy vey and Easter together - Oy-ster. Ha, ha. Things just fell into place after that. A quick search on http://www.cricutsearch.com/ found that there was a clam on "Create a Critter", which I just happen to own. A quick cut of some glitter paper made a pearl to make the clam into an oyster. A few years ago, my parents gave me a big container of 12 x 12 cardstock, but I had never really looked at it until recently, as I wasn't doing any crafting. It's in an accordian file. I've never gone through it to organize it, but the first slot I started to thumb through had the paper, which looked enough like sand to me. A little glitter glue, a few pop-dots, and la voila!

Needing a reason to create....

I bought the "Cars" cartridge because I found it way on sale at Walmart. Didn't know what I was going to do with it, but couldn't pass up the bargain. So that created a need to do something, so I made signs for 2 of my nephews. I didn't want to leave out their little sister, but (and this is completely sexist of me) didn't feel that "cars" was appropriate for an 8 month old girl....I do freely admit that if she was a boy, I probably would have done it no problem. So I used "Dress Up Paper Dolls" to do the one for her....it really looks, well, lacking, compared to the Cars ones. Maybe I'll have to invest in some more of the Disney carts...

The Cars ones were my first foray into layered and detailed cuttings - one frustration was that I couldn't always tell what I was cutting, or where it was supposed to go, exactly. A little more detail would have been helpful, but I think they turned out okay....