Thanksgiving cards #1...

Can you believe it is less than 2 weeks until Thanksgiving? I cannot believe how quickly it is approaching. And if we think Thanksgiving is coming quickly, Christmas is tight on its coat tails and will be here before we can blink!

I am hoping to finish up my Thanksgiving cards this weekend so that I can mail them sometime next week. That means that my next few posts will be the cards I have managed to create. I tend to make several different "models" of cards, just to make it more fun and interesting to me. I only make about 15 cards, so it's easy enough to do a few different designs.

Here's the first of the bunch:



When I started this card, I was hoping to make the process a lot simpler than it ended up being--but I didn't like the first result, so I kept adding techniques. I had cut quite a few Maple leaves, using the Art Philosophy cartridge. I laid a few of them on a piece of craft cardstock and then lightly sprayed the card with some bronze Maya Road spritz. I didn't think this defined the leaves enough, so I took a black pen and drew in the stitch lines around each leaf shape. It still wasn't right! I then took out my distress inks and added a little color to each of the leaves with a sponge. Finally, I was getting somewhere!

I selected a label shape from Art Philosophy and created a shadow for it on my Gypsy, cut them both out and printed the sentiment on the white label with my computer. The labels are attached with double-sided foam tape. A bit of grosgrain ribbon and a sparkly gold faux brad completed the look.

On the inside, I stamped "Happy Thanksgiving" along with a couple of Maple leaves (which I stamped off first). You can see in the photo at left that "Happy" doesn't look straight.  This can be a common problem with clear stamps - they don't always hold their shape and you have to look at them VERY carefullly on your stamp block to make sure they haven't curved as this one did.  Lesson learned.




I hope you are well on your way to having your Thanksgiving cards done and ready to send. Thanks for stopping by, and remember to laugh--a little or a lot--every day.
Cheryl