FTL286 Easter Blessings & Grandma Series #4 With Love!

Well hello there crafty people. Today's card is for my design team work at the Clean and Simple Stamping Blog, Fall to Layout 286 (FTL286). I took a lot of liberty with this sketch and didn't make it a circle card as Natasha intended but I do have a big circle focal point and enamel dots. 

You can purchase these cards in the Cindy B Designs Boutique.

I also have Grandma Series #4 card for you too, which is too stinkin' adorable. I did a few techniques on this card that I haven't done in years. One of them was making a frame out of a circle Nestability. Instead of turning it blade side down, I used it blade side with my rubber mat so that it leaves an impression. If you look real closely around the elephants, you will be able to see it. I used a pretty new blue Cuttlebug that somehow before I found a home for it in my craft studio, Bella had chewed the end rubber from the crank. I was very upset about that so I'm going to have to find a way to replace that. Bella is a chewer and she's going to have to learn to break that habit. I love my sentiment and how I did that. I wrapped Pool Party Baker's Twine by Stampin' Up! around the card a few times and then poked a hole in both sentiment circles, threaded it through some Studio Calico Color Theory sequins green and blue hue stars and secured it to the top of the circle with a glue dot. Since this is an A2 tent card, I also had to poke a tiny hole in the crease of the card. I paper pieced my elephants using Authentic Precious patterned paper and stamped "love" under the elephants from Paper Smooches Stamps A Little Lovin'. The sentiment concept is to be little a baby mobile where you have the items hanging down from the string above the crib. My "love" sentiment is also from the new Studio Calico Color Theory ink in Mint Mint. It's a dye ink and when you first stamp it, it looks all splotchy but once it dries, it dries true to color and the ink settles filling in the splotchy areas. The two star sequins you see just sort of fell on the card when I was cleaning up (normally you use the rule of 3) and I thought it looked pretty cool so I rolled with it and adhered them to the card where they fell and accented them again with some Studio Calico Color Theory enamel dots the same shades as the sequins. My card stock base is Papertrey Ink Vintage Cream and I used various Spellbinders Nestabilities Circles. I will add this card with my other Grandma cards. My sentiments were stamped in Hero Arts Black Dye Ink. Heat set this or let it dry. Be careful. It smears, duh. I learned this the hard way. I did see this card somewhere on the internet and did the usual 2 changes to it to make it my own so it's only fair to bring that to your attention and to give credit where credit is due. 

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Color Theory is the new flagship of their own line of products by Studio Calico. Presently, the line comes in 12 colors of dye ink, a 12 x 12 color card stock pad, coordinating sequins, enamel dots, letter stickers and buttons. There is also a color swatch book too. I did not see any ink refills on the Studio Calico website. I was not, however, impressed with their kits. I think they are overpriced for what you get. They have a subscription to various kits, but you still have to battle for the add-on kits which I think is ridiculous for anybody to do that. The add-on kit should be a part of the regular kit without a price increase but to make up for the lack of what's in the kit to begin with. I don't think subscribers should have to battle it out at unGodly hours too. I'm on Pacific Standard Time so worst case scenario for me is 9 p.m., but if you're on the East Coast and really want something and it's a work night and then you don't get what you want, it can be very frustrating. I think there's been enough consumer complaints to where many companies are making release times a lot more reasonable. I also don't like it when known demand is not in supply either. I don't think that's fair to the customers and what is sold out usually never hits the shelves again. I joined Studio Calico's Card Kit Club for the 3-month minimum and out of that, only one month did I get what I really wanted and it was still overpriced. I know there's a lot of Studio Calico lovers out there and this is not to degrade the company by any means, but I'm sharing with you my experience and if you read public comments, I am not alone. 

I finally got my Mac to the Apple store in Sacramento and they replaced my keyboard. It was awful with the keys just sticking and not even typing to the keys being all wonky. What a relief. 

Today Bella chewed off her cast, again, right next to me. I thought that I would give the poor girl a night out of the crate without having to wear her hoods or any of the other stuff she's been saddled with for the past 3 weeks, so I let her sleep with me like she always does. She's such a snuggler always right up against me and at times she's been known to push my head off of my pillow with her mug to have it all to herself. She's quite the character. So without her cast, she ran all over the house practically screaming "I'm free!" and then promptly went to her own bed and fell asleep. I think her leg started to bother her. She certainly is her mother's puppy!

I upgraded my WordPress (they upgraded it for me) and lost my usual template that lists my supplies, etc., so I will try to work on that next week. It was getting strange anyway with a lot of HTML that I did not put in there. Weird.

For the challenge card, it's 4-1/2" square on a Stampin' Up! Daffodil Delight card stock that is top folding. I cut a piece of the very pretty Watercolor Wonder Designer Series Paper 1/8" less than the base of my card stock and adhered it to the base of the card. I die-cut two circles from My Favorite Things Pierced Circle STAX Die-Namics. I LOVE the piercing and these die-cuts. So many possibilities. The larger circle was die-cut from Daffodil Delight card stock and the smaller circle was die-cut with watercolor paper, both by Stampin' Up! I have not water colored in a long time and my image, Easter Blessings by Stampin' Up!, looks like it was colored with markers.  I think I just might practice my water coloring a little bit. My three light blue enamel dots to tie in the blue from the designer series paper are from Teresa Collins and it's a perfect match. I tied a double bow with Tangerine Tango 1/4" Satin Ribbon that coordinated with last year's Sycamore Street Series in the 2013 Sale-A-Bration Catalog. For my sentiments, I also stamped these in Hero Arts Black Dye Ink using a new stamp set of Easter Blessings by WPlus9. I like the way that this card turned out and hope that you do too. Be sure to play along with us at our challenge this week. The link is above for the challenge. 

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For my third and last card, I used a new stamp company called Reverse Confetti. I semi-CASE'd a very funky and fun card by Laurie Schmidlin. It was that awesome. I changed the usual two elements on it to make it mine and that was all the color of the hearts in the pastel hues to reflect spring, the cork that I snipped with my Martha Stewart Pinking Shears and I colored in the word "love" with a Strawberry Slush Stampin' Write Marker. I also added a Strawberry Slush In Color Boutique Details flower at the top left of the sentiment panel. This is one of those cards that jump out at you and it got my attention. 

The first thing I did was to make a card base from Papertrey Ink Classic Craft card stock. I cut, folded and burnished this card to make it into a standard A2 tent-sized card. I then used 5 inks of (top to bottom) Strawberry Slush, Calypso Coral, Summer Startfruit, Pistachio Pudding and Coastal Cabana. I found the center of my card and stamped the Summer Starfruit first, then the top and bottom colors, and then the 2nd and 4th rows of color so that they were perfectly symmetrical. I was very happy how that turned out. I stamped this onto Whisper matting with a Basic Black Card Stock measuring 3/16" of an inch from the A2 size and the Whisper White 1/8" less. I tied a black solid piece of ribbon around the center by The Twinery.  There's also a few other hidden layers on the card too. I stapled a piece of torn vellum on top of a piece of cork where I snipped the bottom with Pinking Shears and also snipped a "v" at the bottom of some Basic Black Chevron ribbon. On my sentiment panel, I die-cut a nice-sized black arrow, stamped the sentiment and die-cut it out with a circle and put that up on some foam tape towards the right of the sentiment panel and then added the flower as described above. 

I think that pretty much covers the cards I made. Thank you for stopping by today and God bless you. Thank you for the personal emails and comments too. My blog is anything but boring! I will get a video done real soon.

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1 thought on “FTL286 Easter Blessings & Grandma Series #4 With Love!”

  1. All of your cards are just splendid! Sounds like you are having a wonderful time with your sweet little one! even with all the chewing. 🙂  Have a beautiful day!

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