Happy Valentine's Day!

Tis that time of year again... Once again, I participated in Winter Sims' Caring Hearts Card Drive that sends Valentines to sick kids at St. Jude's Hospital. Thanks to my dear cousin, I was able to rotate some new images into my valentine card selection.  I used the "Purrfect Pair" stamp set from mama elephant.com, the "Sail Away Sayings" stamp set from the Sweet Stamp Shop, the "Love From Above" stamp set from mamaelephant.com, and a few other sets, as well as a few ephemera packs from Pebbles. The papers came from a number of paper pads, i including "Yours Truly" by Pebbles, and several scraps from various collections...

Sending Hedgehugs

Hello all, I'm back, sharing another set of cards that I sent in for the Caring Hearts Card Drive for the St. Jude's Children's Hospitals. For these cards I used a super cute Lawn Fawn stamp set and a Cosmo Cricket and Dear Lizzy's Neapolitan 6x6 patterned paper pads. Like the previous cards, I kept embellishments to a minimum so that nothing can get ripped off and choke on anything. I was not in the mood for coloring with my Spectrum Noir markers and instead broke out an old set of colored pencils.

Valentines Galore!!!!!

Hello All, I'm back with a few more Valentine's Day cards that I sent out for the St. Jude's Hospital Caring Hearts Card Drive (click the heart banner on the right for more information). For these cards I used Mama Elephant Honey Boney set along with some miscellaneous DCWV papers and a few other pattern papers that I'm not sure of the manufacturer for. I finished several of the cards off with some enamel dots.

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!

Will You be My Valentine?

Hello all on this frigid Wednesday...I think that the weather got confused...4 days ago I was walking around without a coat on and now its 20 degrees outside?!?!?!?!?! Thankfully, I only had to go out for a quick appointment today and was able to come home and hide under my nice flannel blanket! lol.

Today I have four valentines cards that I put together. Valentines day is not a holiday that I have a great deal of supplies for, but I do have a few stamp sets and last week I had to make a run in to Michaels and several of their Memento Dew Drop four pack ink sets were on sale for 5 dollars each, so I grabbed the set that had some pinks, a gray and another black ink. Side note - I am loving memento inks, now that I have finally started breaking down and adding them to my craft arsenal - they are SOOOOOOO much better than any other brand I've tried so far and I really like the dew drop sizes. It makes it so much easier to use multiple colors for using multiple small stamps on one acryllic stamp block (as I did for these cards.)

Anyhow, since I don't have any valentines papers and our printer was out of ink when I put these together, I simply grabbed a wedding stamp set I had from Hampton Arts and pulled all of the hearts off. I placed three of them together on one block stamp and then used my "Angel Pink," "Rose Bud" and "London Fog" memento inks to ink the different stamps. I then stamped the hearts at a diagonal up the page over and over and over again until my entire sheet of white cardstock was filled - another side note - Georgia Pacific's standard white is working great for stamps, and only 6 dollars for 150 sheets of 81/2 x 11 cardstock. After I finished stamping the hearts, I used two inkadinkado stamp sets, one for valentines day and another a general sentiments set, to stamp the images and sentiment for 4 cards. I used several spellbinders dies to cut out the images, sentiments, and coordinating color cardstock and then cut down the handmade patterned paper to size and matted it with additional colored cardstock. I also used some ribbon from my stash and some pearls from Q&Co. Now I just have to get them packaged up and in the mail!

Valentines Care Package

Hullo all, I finally got some pictures that I took with my phone about a month ago downloaded on to the computer and I thought I would share a quick post with you on sending care packages to college students. My sister is in her first term in a college in Florida by herself. She went to bible school for two years, but she was only 3 hours from home that time and my parents and brother could visit her there. Down in Florida she doesn't have that, so I thought I would send her a care package for Valentines Day.

I tried to mix things that were relatively good for her/necessities and also some fun, ridiculous things to make her laugh. Not all of the items are shown in the picture below as I bought them as I was on the way to the Post Office to mail her package!

When sending a care package it helps if you know what kind of items the person could use, especially with food and toiletries. I try to choose non-perishable/non-breakable items that will travel well and be useful to the recipient.

My Sister's Care Package:
1. Box of Sponge Bob Square Pants fruit gummies
2. Spong Bob Square Pants candy dispenser (got for like 15 cents in the Christmas clearance aisle in the grocery store. This is a great place to check after holidays. Things are UBER cheap and you can pick them up and either save them for the next holiday, or re-purpose them for something else.)
3. FiberOne Pretzel snack bars (something relatively healthy for her to snack on)
4. Hot cocoa packs (a must in a care package!)
5. Dove Chocolate Raspberry bar (It was Valentines day!)
6. Lip gloss
7. Bright green stuffed animal frog (If you knew my sister, you'd understand ;) )
8. Toothpaste and a toothbrush (She doesn't have much spending money, so my mom and I have been trying to give her every day supplies that she needs. We both gave her giant bags/baskets full of toiletries right before she went off to college as well)
9. Valentines Day Card
10. Sticky Note/Pencil holder (She loves the color pink ;) ) - I can't claim credit for the flower though, that was repurposed from a gift that I was given

I took a lot of the stuff out of their original wrappers for two reasons - I could fit the things in a smaller box with the items in bags instead of boxes and because it looked cuter all prettied up with special packaging.

Jumpin on the Valentines Bandwagon....

Hola amigas! Sorry I have been posting so sporadically. There has been a lot going on. I can't share about it quite yet, but lets just say the Lord is a Lord of miracles and he can change situations in the blink of an eye. :)

Anyhoo, I did get a little bit of crafting time in this weekend. (After my hubby put up some curtains for me...after realizing that we had lost some pieces to our rods in the move this summer and having to go out to get the right pieces...We got one set successfully hung in the spare room, but we're going to have to get a different rod for our office.... and the curtains need ironed... BADLY!!!) But anyway, I did get some crafting done, but no pictures yet. Sorry!  

I do have a couple of things to share. Seeing all of the valentine creativity around blog land and Pinterest, I decided to whip up some printables. You should be able to just click on them to blow the images up and then right click and save to your PC.

The first is just some fun different colors that you can blow up and print out and frame, or use for valentine cards.

The second has a couple of images to write notes, and just some fun images to print out and use for valentines cards. 

Hope you likey. :) 

If you have trouble getting a clear picture, I have PDFs of the images too.

Valentines

Since I've been out of school, I don't usually give valentines day cards to anyone besides my husband. This year I wanted to make a card for our niece, Lexus. That, in addition to the fact that my mom bought me valentines day card supplies for Christmas, encouraged me to set myself down to make some valentines day cards last night while we watched Gilmore Girls.

I've made three so far. On the card on the right, I tried cutting up the image, like I've seen on a lot of blogs. I've wanted to try it for a while and finally felt like I had a good image that would slice well.

This is a close up of the card in the back so you can see the entire card.

Supplies:

Paper: Basic cardstock from Michaels, patterned paper from a friend

Images: Rub-ons, I believe they are from K&Company

Embellishments: Ribbon from a friend (I have been blessed with crafting gifts by so many dear friends - if you are one of them, please know that I appreciate your thoughtfulness so much! They have really helped me explore different crafting techniques, that I otherwise might not have even tried yet!)

Sentiments: Freehand