"Sweet" Birthday Card [PTI Color Challenge]

Another anniversary challenge from Papertrey Ink. This one is to use a color scheme from one of the designers and create a card. Perfect, we have a birthday party for a super-special six-year-old this weekend!

The cone has 6 toppings. I was debating about labeling them 1,2,3,4,5,6 or with the actual years, but decided that would just be too busy. So I put a "6" behind the ice cream cone.

This color scheme is put together by the fabulous Betsy Veldman.

The white label is wrapped around the card, which gives me a good place to use a "from the heart" stamp on the back.

This was a good challenge for me, as I don't normally use more than a few colors on any one project.

I was reminded by some other fantastic cards posted in the PTI galleries to do a small design on the inside too. When you think of it, the inside accounts for half the real estate of the visible portions of a card, right?

The card base is embossed with the Woodgrain impression plate.

Here's the card without the number on top. The "simple" side of me prefers it this way, but I do need to branch out!

Thanks so much for looking!

Supply List:
PTI Sweet As Can Be Stamp and Die
PTI Card Stock
PTI Woodgrain Impression Die
PTI By The Numbers Die
American Crafts Texture Stamp
Spellbinders Nestabilities Die

3D Floral Bouquet Card [MIM #52]

With the anniversary festivities at Papertrey Ink this week, I have a few card posts! This week's Make It Monday challenge is to stamp on both sides of a die cut element. Flowers would work well for this technique, so I made a 3D bouquet.

I punched two holes in the white cardstock to thread the floral wire stems through. This eliminates the need for adhesive. The card recipient can also pull out a flower or two if desired. The ends of the wire are curled using needle nose pliers to get a tight circle.

I snipped the petals of the flowers and bent every other one forward to give them some dimension.

To assemble the flowers, thread an inch of floral wire through the pearl. Bend both ends down. Stick the two ends through a hole in the middle of your flower as far as it will go. Now you have the pearl on the top of the flower, and a short and long piece of wire on the bottom. Take the short wire and wind it close around the base of the flower to keep it in place. Again, no adhesive needed! The long wire will now go through the two holes in your card stock for the bouquet.

Thanks for looking!

Supplies:
PTI Flower Fusion 7 stamp and die
PTI Tiny Tags sentiment stamp
PTI aqua mist cardstock
Jewelry tag
Pearls
Floral Wire

Linking up to:

Whale Wishes Baby Card [PTI Favorite Things Challenge]

Happy 5th Birthday, Papertrey Ink! The festivities this month include several challenges, the first being to make a card based on one of the PTI designer's favorite things. I was inspired by the elements crossing the frame on Erin Lincoln's card and came up with a Welcome Baby card.

Here's Erin's card:

Strips of varying blue circles form the "waves" in the ocean, and are placed across the opening in the card.

Unfortunately, I don't have a coordinating blue ink to stamp the whale with, so I ended up using blue cardstock and then stamping with white. Not what I intended, but ends up working OK, even mimics the blue outline of the banner below.

The hearts are cut out and glued to fishing wire suspended between the top of the frame and the whale. You can see a little glint on it here, but it's hard to see in real life. Looks like the hearts have just been blown out of the whale (OK, stop Kelly, this is just a card).

Thanks Papertrey for so many great products over the years! And Erin, I absolutely love your style. You've provided a ton of inspiration over the years. Thanks for all your efforts!

Supplies:
PTI Simple Circles Border Die
PTI Mat Stack I Die
PTI Double Ended Banner Die
PTI Whale Wishes Die and Stamp Set
PTI Fresh Snow Ink
PTI Cardstock
American Crafts Pattern Paper

Valentine's Day Banner

I love having a versatile, neutral banner that can be used for any occasion. This one is up all year. Just update the message. To make a banner like this cut triangles out of different neutral fabrics (textures like burlap, terry cloth, linen, velvet work great) and use eyelets to reinforce holes on each end. Thread a ribbon through to hang the banners.

Die cut some letters (Cricut's Plantin Schoolbook alphabet), and there you have it. After each holiday I keep them in their own folder to be used the next year.

Bling is always fun to add. Old chandelier crystals from the flea market dangle on the end of each banner.

Sometimes you have to play around with the message to get it to fit on the number of banners you have. On this one, "valentine's" is all on one banner. For birthdays, "birth" is on one banner. Christmas, "christ" is on a banner. And you can use punctuation if you need another filler.

Again, a quick and easy way to stay updated on all the special occasions in your house.

Linking up with the Sunday Showcase Party:

Clean Up Time: Tags for Tots

No excuses. Time to put your toys away! What, you don't know where they go? Impossible, there's a picture of them tied right on the bin! Now get to it and make Momma proud.

Doesn't always happen as smoothly as you'd like, but I must say that having the photo tags on our toy bins GREATLY improves the speed and frequency of clean up time. And they are quick and fun to make.

It's fun to get the kids involved too. Ask them to pick out their favorite item in the bin and use that for the photo. They can help pose it the way they want. Then take your photos (as close-up as possible), stamp or write out the labels, add a decorative strip of paper if you want and attach it all on a tag. Given that this project will be used, all the time, by kids, I thought lamination would be a good route to go (thanks to friends for letting me borrow for your machine!)

Also, I made these tags double sided because I knew it would drive me nuts to turn over the tags all the time. That extra investment in time was well worth it.

And here they are, after pick up time : ) Now, this storage system isn't meant to be all pretty, decorative, stick-one-cute-toy-in-a-slot-so-it-looks-nice-and-designer-like. Nope. It's a hard core, heavy-duty storage system that uses every inch of space available.

The unit is your typical Ikea Expedit, two 4x4s next to each other. The smaller green bins are Land of Nod's I Think I Canvas bins (super strong and indestructible) and the larger white bins are from Target (not as indestructible, but great use of space). I like having a mix of 1)small bin, 2)large bin, and 3) no bin. Helps balance it out.

We've had this for about a year and a half and it's worked well. Having categories that will grow with your kids is smart so you don't have to redo tags. A side benefit is that it made clean up easier for visiting moms and friends if they wanted to do so. All in all, it's been a wise investment in time. And hey, when they're done with toys (sniff) I will probably cut the tags off and stick them in a little memory book!

Linking up with the Sunday Showcase Party:

Valentine's Day Banner Card [MIM #51]

This week's Make It Monday challenge from Papertrey Ink is to make a dimensional banner on a card. And why not wrap it around a heart for a cute Valentine?

Super easy, just cut a strip of paper 1/2" wide and wrap it around on an angle. Papertrey Ink has a good tip to make a pencil mark on the two sections you want to stamp your sentiment on so it's not confusing when you unwrap it later to do your stamping. The background paper is from an old dictionary I found at a flea market. Hello, lifetime supply of background papers for $2!

The owl is from the PTI Tiny Treats Valentines Day stamp set, well kind of...

The original image is too small for this scale project (it's meant to be used on tags) so I drew a larger size and colored it in. I know, I am way behind the curve with the Copic markers, still using the old school watercolor pencils. [if anyone knows where to get a good deal on the Copics let me know!]

The sentiments are from PTI Tiny Treats, and I used the Sunshine Impression plate on the red felt heart.

I like the banner idea, and think it's pretty versitle. I always enjoy having something dimensional on a card. Thanks for looking!

A Month in Photos [January 2012]

Memory Keeping. It's always been a goal of mine, but quite honestly I've fallen way short of where I want to be over the last few years. But this is the year. Doing instead of thinking about it. Completed pages instead of unopened supplies. Recording my memories instead of surfing through others' memories (fun as that may be). I will be scrapbooking. Regularly.

There are two projects that I've decided will help me with this goal:

1) Becky Higgin's Project Life.
2) Rebecca Cooper's A Month in Photos.

So there you have it. It's "out there."

Now, my first set of results! The month in photos for January.

- time to leave the Art Institute (much as the Impressionist Masters were calling me)
- pirate snowman, complete with a snow sword outside the frame of this photo
- flying off the benches at an empty Crown Fountain
- beautiful farm-fresh eggs
- Logan helping Jackson to crash down the snow-deprived sledding hill
- striping on the streets, a sure sign that snow is coming soon
- Jackson and I goofing off in Millennium Park

I'm very excited about the Month in Photos project. It's easy to complete with the free template. All you do is drop your photos in, and save. This also gives me a great opportunity to use the photos that didn't make it in my weekly Project Life project. I feel good leveraging the time I spend taking and managing photos for Project Live with another project.

Hopefully I'm sure this will be the first of twelve posts for 2012's Month in Photos!