Secret Pen Pal Cards

Before Christmas, I was trying to plan the next card making session of a gross of cards to send to Love Letters in Altamont Springs, FL. Not to be griping about making the cards which I love doing, but sometimes just trying to come up with ANY card is mind straining! Especially when trying to get it prepped for maybe six friends to come (I have to also clean house for this event!!) and assemble so many cards.

A friend had given me several discontinued wallpaper sample books she picked up at Lowe's, one of which had numerous Disney characters. I made about 40 quick cards using some rickrack and other trims I had left from making the Little Dresses for Africa previously. Then it occurred to me that maybe the local hospital which is about a mile from my house would accept some cards on an on-going basis for the Pediatric floor. When I went to visit a friend, I went down a floor and asked about doing it and was able to leave the cards I had taken with me. So from now on I believe I will just make about 30 cards a month and hand deliver them to some local kids (and I won't even have to clean house!). This is an example of those cards:







Today, I looked through my stash of stamps and found this really cute beaver that I had bought at Michael's some months ago. This was in the dollar bin and is an acrylic stamp that I stamped then scanned into my computer photo program so I could size it to what I needed. I printed out this beaver as four 3x5 photos on letter size paper and, after I unclicked the 'fit to page' feature, as many times as I needed, then colored them with pencils before cutting them out. I used pieces of Whitman's Samplers' cushioning to make him stand out from the card. The hugs & kisses circle is a download from a digital scrapbooking freebie site that I receive automatically every day as an email.

Card Gallery for February 2010

The winter card gallery workshop was today at Donna's. She and Emily had some wonderfully versatile cards for us! I needed a "welcome, Baby" card for a shower taking place this evening as did another person.



We had a choice of sentiments to use with this card (I have this stamp set but not the coordinating punch).



I love this card! I have the embossing folder and used Classic White stamp pad to highlight the embossing; and added two tiny pearls.



This card comes in handy as our pastor's mother passed away last Thursday in California.



This card would also work wonderfully well as a sympathy card.



What a great masculine birthday card!



A beautiful card for any reason at all:



Another sympathy card choice OR because you really do need to apologise to someone!



Another generic card for any reason:



A birthday card? A get well card?



These two cards were the new 'technique' showcase cards:
Yes, that's tissue paper stamped with the design, crushed, then spread out and cut to size for the card.



We used the same technique to create a very early Christmas card!

Christmas 2010 Scrapbook

Pear Pizzazz, Perfect Plum, and Baja Breeze

About a week ago I received an email from Pals Paper Arts (www.palspaperarts.com) concerning their latest cardmaking challenge using these three Stampin' Up colors.

The two cards are different because I didn't have enough of the colors called for in the challenge to even enter. I used a different green (one with the tiny white dots is from a package of Pooch & Sweetheart Dimensional Stickers embellishments I purchased some time ago); the darker green paper with larger white dots is from a Christmas stack and was left over from making Christmas album pages for my sons' families; the blue jumbo rick rack was left over from making Little Dresses for Africa; and the little flowers were premade with the rhinestone centers. I did use Perfect Plum by Stampin' Up to stamp the sentiment on the top part of the card. I had just enough scraps to make two cards of each style.

Christmas Card #2

After the church gave out the Christmas card list of church members, I realized I needed about 10 more cards (making my total for this year 138). This is the card I decided on. I used Sizzix embossing folders for both the background and the sentiment; then I mounted the sentiment on silver posterboard and then on small squares of the cushioning from boxes of Whitman's candy. The paper was cut in 1 1/4 inch strips and wrapped with some silver fru-fru.

Today was another Christmas Card Gallery at Donna's house. All products used were from Stampin' Up.






This card was the most time consuming: cutting out the redbird, stacking the snowman, doing the two rows of 'snow', inking the background, the cutting out the twigs, the two-piece hat, three 'buttons', the nose.

Operation Write Home

Have any left over greeting cards you have made? This organization welcomes greeting cards that they will then ship to troops serving overseas. Go to the web site and check out the 'rules', then sort through your card stash, or make some new ones, and mail to the organization.

http://www.operationwritehome.org/index.html