My sister's lovely Thanksgiving cards...

My sister sent me a few pics of the Thanksgiving cards that she made this year. I don't have all the specs on how she made these cards, but I think you'll be inspired by just seeing them.

It's great fun to share this cardmaking hobby with my sister. Whenever we visit each other (we live 500 miles apart) we share our most recent cards, tools and techniques.

Enjoy these photos!





I think the geometric design behind the circle is very striking. It really catches your eye.

Love the way she popped these pumpkins up on dimensionals.

Pretty patterned paper on these pumpkins!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A little bit of lace adds such a nice touch!

Love the leaves on this one, and the button is such a nice touch.

 

 

 

 

 

 

It's hard to see, but there is a little glitter on the acorn caps. Just the right amount of sparkle!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Love the embossing on this one!

 

 

 

 

 

 

I'm pretty sure she cut this cornucopia with her Cricut. And I believe she must have used Liquid Pearls to accent it. So pretty!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This one reminds me of a nice, warm quilt.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

She loves to make tag cards. These last two photos are some of the lovely tag cards she made for Thanksgiving.

I hope you enjoyed my sister's cards. It would be wonderful if you could let her know by leaving a comment below.

 

Thanks for stopping by, and remember to laugh--a little or a lot--every day.

Cheryl

A recycled birthday card for my little sis...

First of all, let me get this out of the way:  HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MICHELLE!

I made her a birthday card from the packaging material from two embossing folders that I actually sent to her as a little gift a while back. I'd been admiring the clear cards on many of the blogs I read each day and decided it was my turn to give it a try.  Here's the result:

Clear cards are horribly difficult to photograph, and when you toss in my lack of photography skills and a total absence of knowledge about lighting, etc., this is the best you can expect. I took this photo on my back porch where it was bright but not overly sunny.

The teal patterned paper was cut with a Lifestyle Crafts die and is adhered to the back side of the card front.  The two label shapes (also cut with Lifestyle Crafts dies) and the flower are on the front of the card. The scalloped rectangle is held on with some double-sided tape in the center (under the label shapes) and a tiny glue dot under each pearl in the corners. That way, none of the adhesive is visible.

I cut the yellow flower from the Flower Shoppe cartridge.  The center is made by punching a couple of star-like flowers from white CS, shaping the petals and adding a pearl cluster in the center.  The punch I used is a May flowers squeeze punch by Fiskars. It's one of the oldest punches I own and I use it all the time for flower centers.

The inside is finished with the same scalloped rectangle on the back with a plain rectangle, sized to fit, on the inside. All the adhesive was hidden between the two pieces.

The sentiment is a Fiskars stamp from their birthday collection. I'd tell you how old my sister is today, but since I'm sure she'll be following this advice and lying about her age, I'd better not say anything to keep her little fib believable. LOL





I hope you enjoyed seeing my first attempt at a clear card. It was fun, and I felt good about recycling some packaging material for the card base. I sure hope my sister enjoyed receiving it.

Thanks for stopping by, and remember to laugh--a little or a lot--every day.
Cheryl



Thanksgiving cards #5...

 Continuing with my series of Thanksgiving cards, here's one that uses the dry embossing technique.

I really love this "Bird Call" embossing folder by Cuttlebug. It truly has an autumn feel to it and a certain poignancy with the lone bird looking off into the distance. I've used this embossing folder for men's cards, too, and it works very well for that.

The color in the photo at right is off, but I think you can see how I have used some Vintage Photo distress ink to define the embossing and darken the edges of the circle.





Here are the two cards I made with this embossed image, matted with some gold cardstock. The sentiments were heat embossed with burnished gold embossing powder.

The plaid paper and the green cardstock came from the same DCWV stack and match perfectly. I also added a thin gold ribbon and two faux gold brads on each card to tie it all together.

Thanks for stopping by today, and remember to laugh--a little or a lot--every day.
Cheryl

Thanksgiving cards #4...

Today's Thanksgiving card is more on the feminine side with a flower and lace. The flower was an image that I found online and printed out on some light taupe paper a long, long time ago. I printed it three times and fussy cut a bottom (largest) layer, middle layer and smallest top layer. I colored in only parts of the flower, separated the layers with foam tape, and added an adhesive-backed gem to the top.

I adhered lace to both long sides of a strip of craft cardstock and then adhered a piece of satin ribbon across the center.

"Happy Thanksgiving" was heat embossed with burnished gold embossing powder.

If you look closely at the flower, you will see that I gave it a very light spray of some metallic bronze spritz by Maya Road.






I like this flower image a lot, so I think I need to print some more of these out for future cards.

Thanks for stopping by, and remember to laugh--a little or a lot--every day.
Cheryl


Thanksgiving cards #3...



This is one of the simplest Thanksgiving cards I made--and also one of my favorites. It has an earthy, honest look to it, with a little bit of bling for fun. I think I'm going to make a couple more of these, as it was quick and fun!

I simply cut the branch using the Art Philosophy cardtridge, ignoring the layers that were available. I heat embossed "Happy Thanksgiving" with some burnished gold embossing powder and used a decorative corner punch on the top left corner to balance out the weight of the sentiment.

Here's a close-up of the branch with it's bling. Talk about quick, easy, fun - this card was all three!

The inside was just as simple:  computer generated sentiment, strip of craft cardstock at the bottom and a couple of stamped leaves. Easy, peasy!










Thanks for stopping by today, and remember to laugh--a little or a lot--every day.
Cheryl

Thanksgiving cards #2...

I have another Thanksgiving card to share with you today. These two cards were actually the very first ones that I made.

The decorative circle is cut with a Lifestyle Crafts die and the leaves were cut with the Art Philosophy cartridge.  I just can't say enough good things about that cartridge! The Art Philosophy bundle also came with some high-quality clear stamps, one of which I used to stamp the leaves. All the correct cut sizes are listed with the stamps so that you get an exact match. How cool is that?

Here's a closeup of those leaves. You can see that I've curled the edges up a bit for some more dimension. I even put one of my homemade glue dots under the orange one to raise it up a bit more.  The brown twine was some that I happened to have on hand.

Here's a look at the inside of the card. I inked around the edges of the sentiment card, added a decoratively cut strip of the patterned paper and one of the Maple leaves.







Thanks for stopping by today. Don't forget to laugh--a little or a lot--every day!
Cheryl


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