Hello Valentine!

It's a new year and with the new year I thought I would try to be better about posting things to this here poor little blog. :) Every year I participate in a Valentine's Day card drive for St. Jude's Hospital (click on heart icon in right panel for more details). I just sent in my package to Winter Sim's the card drive coordinator and thought that I would share a few of those cards. For these cards I used a Cosmo Cricket 6x6 paper pad and a super cute Valentine's stamp set from Mama Elephant. The cards need to be as gender neutral as possible with nothing that can be pulled off of the card and be a choking hazard so I tried to keep the cards as bright and cheerful as possible and I absolutely loved these Panda Bear stamps!

More Valentine's Day Cards...

Hello all, who else is getting snow today? We are supposed to get between 4 and 6 inches of snow in the D.C. area. My entire company got a work from home mandate today (but me, still being in the mentality of the north, even though I have lived here for 5.5 years, lol, didn't even think to check my email!) It was completely clear earlier, but started coming down around 11 and hasn't stopped since, so I am glad that even though I missed the email telling me to stay home, I was able to get home before the snow started! I am very thankful to be working at a company where the owner seems to genuinely care about the safety of his employees. That is a very rare find these days.

Anyhoo, enough talk about snow…. On to the crafty portion of this weather update… ;)  Today I thought I would share a few more cards that I created for the Cards from the Heart Card Drive for the kids at St. Jude's Hospitals (For more info, click on the heart icon in the right panel). I really struggle with age and gender neutral Valentine's cards, so this year I thought I would go with a new approach. First, I scoured Google Images and Pinterest for potential ideas that fit the necessary criteria and pinned them all to a board specifically for this Card Drive. Next, I went through all of my 8x8 and 6x6 paper pads and pulled out pieces of paper that fit the bill of being somewhat valentinesy (I just invented a new word. hah), but still not overly girlie. Then I pulled out all of the stamps and inks that I was going to use. This really helped when I sat down to start working on cards, because I wasn't having to scrounge around in my papers and stamps to figure out what I was going to use every time I went to make a card. In the end, I think my final count was 21, which is about double what I was able to get done last year, so I'm happy with that. Below are a few of my favorite cards of the bunch…

I used a combination of Inkadinkado stamps, Dear Lizzy stamps, and a Crafter's Companion image. I used my Spectrum Noir markers to color in the images and used pieces from a number of different paper lines (Pebbles, Dear Lizzy, Carta Bella, and Tim Holtz), some Tim Holtz twine, BasicGrey letter stickers, Darice layered felt hearts, Darice ribbon, and Dear Lizzy stickers to pull these together. I also used a Studio Calico wood venire open scalloped circle in this first card to frame the image, and simply added a black dash-line around the edge for a little added pop. 

Overall, I'm pretty happy with the finished products. There are some I for sure like better than others, but I think that by limiting my supplies and having a solid idea of what I wanted to do for a number of the cards definitely helped. Just goes to show, that it doesn't have to be red and pink to be a Valentine's card!!

 (This image is by far my favorite! Crafter's Companion has such adorable stamps!)

Will You Be My Valentine???

Hello All! I hope that you are having a glorious Friday. If not, then, Hey, It's Friday! It's  almost the weekend! And it's noon, which means that the workday is half over! Anyhoo, I thought I'd pop by during my lunch and share a couple of Valentine's Day Cards that I have been making for the Cards from the Heart Card Drive. If you are interested in finding more details for this great cause, click on the Cards from the Heart Card Drive icon in the right panel. It will take you to Winter's blog post!

These are my three favorite cards that I've made so far, I've done about 8 more other than this and hope to get up to twenty before I have to send the package out to make it to Winter on time!

I pulled my papers from various different paper pads that I had. I basically just went through all of my 6x6 paper pads and pulled out anything that would fit a gender neutral card. That way I haven't had to keep digging through my papers for each card. I am finding that it has saved me quite a bit of time and I am able to get more cards done because I don't have to spend as much time searching for supplies. I used papers from Tim Holtz, Dear Lizzy, and an older Bella Blvd paper pad.

The duck stamp is an Inkadinkadoo Valentine stamp set and the little rocket is from a Recollections stamp set. I used BasicGrey mini alphas for the sentiment on the card with the rocket on it. I am going to have to add a sentiment to one of the cards with the ducks. You may not be able to see it in the picture, but I got a small smudge of black ink in the area colored blue and am going to have to put a sentiment in that area to cover it up. I also used some Tim Holtz twine to finish off the cards.

Enjoy! and Happy Friday!!!!

 I wanted to make the rocket ship look almost like it was orbiting a planet, even if the background is a constellation chart, I think that it turned out pretty well. It is a little more plain than I usually like to make, but as there really can't be any embellishments that a little one could pull off and choke on, plainer is better!!

It's That Time Again!!!!!

It's time for the Cards from the Heart Card Drive, run by Winter Sims at her blog, Winter Wonderland! It's a great cause, creating Valentines Cards for the children at St. Jude's hospitals! The card drive runs from January 1 to January 31. If you would like to get the deets on this card drive head on over to her blog post! You can also click on the icon in the panel on the right of this post!

Cards from the Heart Card Drive

Happy Saturday everyone! Well, we finally got some snow this week. It always cracks me up when we get snow. Yesterday I went out to lunch with a friend and on the way out the door someone told me to be careful. When I got outside, there was hardly any snow left on the ground. I guess growing up in the snow belt, I have a much different perspective on when the snow has gotten to a point where I even start to worry about road conditions.

Well, this week I was suddenly hit with the Valentines creative mojo. I made several cards to send out to various different people and also made about six cards for the Cards from the Heart Card Drive hosted at the Winter Wonderland blog. I wanted to make more but the cards were asked not to be gender and age specific. I actually ended up going through my scrap stash and looked for colors and patterns that could fall in to those categories. Below is what I came up with.

The majority of the papers were scraps from various different paper lines. All of the card bases were made from Georgia Pacific 110 lb white cardstock. I used stamps from an Inkadinkado Valentine stamp pack and pink Martha Stewart bakers twine. I kept the cards pretty basic because they also request that there be nothing that one of the patients that receive the cards can pull off and try to swallow. I wasn't able to get them in the mail, but I hope to get them out on Monday so that they get to their destination before the January 31 deadline! I would definitely say that I am more pleased with the results of some rather than others, but I hope that the recipients like them!