A Tradition of Gingerbread

Does your family have any holiday traditions? Ours does, several in fact but one of our absolute favorites is gingerbread. For many years we had a gingerbread house making party. Seventeen to eighteen kids, candy from one end of the patio to the other and icing that hardened on to everything! Truly unforgettable. That's why I'm a sucker for anything gingerbread to this day. When I saw the weekly Card Patterns challenge I knew I had to use it for this design. Here's the sketch:

This card features the gingerbread man from Papertrey Ink's Holiday Button Bits.

He's a cutie isn't he? I made the cookie sheet by dry embossing two lines on the edges of a piece of silver cardstock, rounding the corners and folding it up. I stamped and embossed the gingerbread man but since that's the only stamping done this card goes together very quickly.

Hope your home smells of sweet gingerbread this season! 

 

I 'Heart' Trees

I love the colors of fall. Not that we see a lot of them in the true sense here in South Florida, but they're some of my favorites. So when I grabbed this little tree stamp from the dollar bin at Michaels I knew I wanted to use it for a card. This time it's for Card Positioning sketch 140.

 

 

For real, the stamp was a dollar. The sentiment stamp? A dollar too, but it came with three otherstamps. Such a deal! To make the trees multi-colored, I inked them in Papertrey Ink Summer Sunrise and then dabbed a little of their Melon Berry ink over that before stamping. Quick and easy way to get detail on a solid stamp.I smudged a little chalk at the bottom to 'ground' the trees. Terrible pun huh?

Thanks for looking - 'she shouldas' always welcome!

Believe - in Halloween and Christmas!

With everything busy around here, I'm taking another minute out to post a card for two challenges. This one is supposed to fill the requirements for Card Positioning System sketch 139 and for the Color Throwdown #66.

Check these sites out if you haven't already. Great inspiration from the design teams and participants!

This card made use of cardstock I had in the stash and my new Papertrey Ink set, Holiday Button Bits. The Button Bits series is just too cool for school - fun to use and gives you built in embellishments!

Have a safe and happy Halloween and enjoy the extra hour of sleep tonight. I'll miss daylight savings terribly. I suspect all procrastinators do!

It's Beginning to Look a Little Like Christmas

So I think I've got it together. Found a sketch and a color challenge that I can use with each other and I got them done well before the deadline. Ha. Completely forgot about the photography issue. I've learned I'm much better off outside in natural light. But that same natural light starts to fade quickly in October. What seemed like all the time in the world rapidly became just a couple of minutes. I got the photo and my accomplice looks pretty good in it!


The card is for Scrapmaster's Paradise Color Combo #19 and There She Goes Sketch 24

My accomplice is a hand made bear from my aunt. She rescued pieces of a quilt made in 1886 and created this bear for me in 1986 when my first son was born. Pretty nifty huh? And he's a great help - never says a negative word!

I used the stamp set Winter Swirls from Papertrey Ink and it's rapidly becoming one of my all time favorites. I like all the options it offers - focal points, backgrounds and sayings. And it dresses up and down very easily. I used the snowflakes and Versamark to create a subtle pattern on the purple cardstock. Did that again on the white cardstock before I sponged the blue ink over it to create the hill and sky. And I used the snowflakes one more time with white ink on the brown cardstock. The cute little tree is covered in glitter because Christmas always needs a little bit of extra glitz.

The sunlight here is almost gone and I promised the Emma dog one last frisbee session before it got dark. Enjoy!

Papertrey Ink's World Tour Challenge Cards

In honor of World Card Making Day, Nichole Heady  of PaperTrey Ink  (PTI) created a world tour of card making. First country up on the tour was Japan, using the colors or images Japanese art evokes. 

I used PTI's Greenthumb stamp set to stamp computer printer paper and then folded an origami crane. Sadly, it's the only origami piece I can remember how to fold. The background paper is from Daisy D's and the word 'peace' is from PTI's Winter Swirls. I chalked the paper just slightly to make it a better match for the background paper.


Next stop on Nichole's tour was Mexico. I thought of serapes, stripes and brightly colored flowers.

If the flowers don't look like PTI's, that'd be true and false. They're PTI's, but they're the ornaments from Take A Bough. I really don't know what paper line this is. Again some of the stockpile collected but not used. I fringed the bottom of the paper - shows up much better in real life.

Third stop on the PTI  world tour was India. Nichole suggested we think bling!

The stamp set used here is PTI's Winter Swirls again. I stamped it with Versamark and then chalked over it for what I hope is something of an Indian fabric feel. The background paper is also Daisy Ds and the flowers are assorted Prima's. The saying is from PTI's Everyday Button Bits.

The tour ended in Australia. Tough to reproduce their impressive art so we got a break - use dots or mask. I opted for dots and cheated big time. 

See? Plenty of dots. I just didn't create them. And I don't have any idea who made the paper. I'm not much of a blue person, but I suspect you figured that out. The stamps on this card are PTI's Little Lady. I'd admired this set literally for years. Finally ordered it and it came in the mail the day I broke my leg and ended up having surgery, three screws and a bone graft put in and had to wear a brace and stay off it for two months. Little Lady is not so lucky for me!

Thanks for touring with me, if you're not familiar with PaperTrey Ink I hope you'll check them out.