Happy Birthday Treat Bag

Yesterday, Chrisi & I went to the Great American Scrapbook Convention in Chantilly, VA. It is a great show with tons of vendors. One of the vendors, Darcie's Stamps, had a bunch of templates and really cute stamps. I love any kind of templates or unusual shaped cards! And I'm a sucker for cute stamps. They also had some pre-printed ready-to-make boxes, bags, etc. They looked easy because I didn't have to trace the template on the paper and the images were already stamped & colored. This literally took me about 10 minutes to cut, score & put together. I spent about 15 minutes trying to tie the bow (what a pain), and I'm still not happy with how it looks. I admit I'm bow challenged! The only problem now is I don't know who I'm going to give it to and I don't have any candy to put in it!

More recipe cards...

Here are a couple more recipe cards I've been working on for swaps. I'm hoping by November, I'll have enough extra recipe cards that I can make a few recipe books for Christmas gifts. The first one is for a Crock Pot recipe swap. I used a Campbell's soup can stamp by Art Gone Wild. The second one is for the Iron Chef recipe swap series I'm participating in. This month's requirement was red/white/blue (either the food or your card!) and my category was desserts. I found the twinkie guy image online. This was a super easy card, no stamping, no coloring, just put it on a page.

Recipe Cards!

I had a nice relaxing weekend. For once, I didn't have a hundred things to do this weekend! I slept in and was able to spend a lot of time in my craft room. I worked on a lot of swaps that I've signed up for recently, and I'm happy to say I am caught up on all of them. It feels good to be done with those commitments. Here are a few recipe cards I've been working on, the first one is for a pizza recipe swap. The second one is for a side dish recipe swap that I am hostessing. This is one of my favorite dishes, my family makes it for every holiday meal. It is wonderful, just making these cards was making my mouth water for it! Hope you had a nice weekend too!

Cupcake Shaker Card

I have a lot of friends with June birthdays. I think I've sent out at least 6 birthday cards this month already! This is one of the cards I made. The stamps I used for this card are by Art Gone Wild. Each part of the cupcake is a different stamp, I think they came as a set but I can't remember. I bought them years ago. I ran the polka dot paper through a corrugator to make it look more like a cupcake wrapper. I don't think you can tell that from my picture though. I cut a box in the cupcake "frosting" and used foam tape to create the shaker box and put actual sprinkles inside!

Hope you all have a good weekend!

Finally finished the birthday book!

One of the classes I took when Dee Gruenig was at my LSS was an acrylic birthday book. I didn't finish it in class, and I've been working on it almost every night. Well I finally finished it, and wow! Now I don't want to give it to anyone! I think I might send it to my mom, she turns 60 in December this year. I know it's safe to post, she has no interest in papercrafting and doesn't read my blog. All the paper was given to us so I don't know who makes the paper, but I was at AC Moore the other day and I saw the paper there for sale. All the stamps are Dee's new duet stamps. You stamp the image and then an outline of the image in black. It really makes the images pop. The page with the pocket is really a pocket, it can hold a gift card. Hope you're all having a great week!

Dee's visit last year

Okay... you probably think I'm Dee obsessed or something by now.. but I'm not, I promise! I just happened to find this card when I was searching in my stash 'o cards for a wedding card for a co-worker. When Dee came to my LSS last year, I took her Vertical Inspirations card class. This is the card I made. I think this stamp set is so darn cute! Inside, there is a pop-up using one of the Judikins pop-ups. Isn't the green background and blue beneath the "Chill" awesome? It's made by just rubbing one of her blending block inkpads (it has 4 different shades of ink in one inkpad) directly onto the paper. I love the effect. Hope you're having a great week!

More Dee Gruenig....

I haven't finished my project from Dee's class I took on Sunday (it's probably going to be a few days before I finish it) so thought I would share some more pics from the Saturday class. In my last post, I shared a pic of the white library pocket tag card that we made. We also made one with a black background. This is what I came up with. The cake and balloons are stamped on sticker paper and then placed on the black piece. The squiggles and Happy Birthday words on the tag are stamped with white staz-on ink and then embossed with Judikins opaque white embossing powder. Then we used Dee's brush art markers and colored over the embossing powder. The embossing powder has little nooks 'n crannies and holds the ink from the marker. It looks really cool against the black, I love the effect. The other pics are of Dee doing some demos for the class.

Dee Gruenig Weekend!

Dee Gruenig is at my LSS this weekend teaching classes. I signed up for two classes, library pocket cards and an acrylic birthday book. I took the library pocket card class yesterday. Dee came to my LSS last summer, and I had such a good time I couldn't wait to take classes from her again. She is so nice and gets super excited about stamping. I better keep this short, I need to get myself ready to head out for the book class shortly. I'll post more tomorrow sometime.