Hoppin' Good Birthday

Good morning, everyone! I hope your week has gotten off to a great start.

Today, I have a super cute card to share with you that is a part of our new Simply Birthday pack. The entire card is based around a sketch - the Week 1 Viva la Verve sketch for August, to be precise. After admiring our creation when finished, we also realized that it works for the current Wee Memories Dare to Color challenge - after all, there are certainly more than 4 colors going on here!

Knowing that we were designing a birthday card, we wanted the colors to be bright & cheerful so we began digging through our patterned paper stash. That's when we found this adorable fish paper, which got our wheels turning ... the sketch lent itself perfect to an ocean scene! And we just happened to have some really cute ocean-themed, glittery foam ... and, well, you can see what happened from there. We used some new PTI dies to make the sun and we pulled in a strip of cork to give illusions of the sand on the beach.

When all was said and done, Whitney and I were both over the moon with how c-u-t-e, CUTE this card turned out! I would love to get this in my mailbox. Wouldn't you??

Thanks for swimming by today!

Coral?? Really??

Howdy, everyone!

I hope you're staying cool. It sure is h-o-t, HOT here and I know it is in other parts of the country too. Sure, we're used to heat but not for a month straight! My poor a/c is running all. the. time. Which means that it's a great time to be inside making goodies!

Up for you this evening is a card for our new Simply Birthday pack. We want our pack to be as diverse as the people who will receive them, so we're mixing it up with images and color schemes.

Today's color scheme comes from this week's ColourQ challenge - early espresso, calypso coral, pool party, island indigo, and white. I'll be honest, I loved it all until I saw the coral. And you wanna know what I groaned to Whitney? "Do you think we can substitute an orange without anyone noticing? Orange is so much more ... I don't know, birthdayish." *snicker* Needless to say, I found this color scheme pretty challenging!

But once we started pulling papers and possible stamp sets to use, it all kinda came together. We saw this card by Mariana Grigsby in our browsing this week and decided the layout was just perfect for our card. We knew that our blue hues would serve as the anchors, while the key to making it all work would be to make the most challenging color - coral - the "color pop." What can be coral-colored? *insert Jeopardy theme* Of course...flowers! And that pared down our stamp choices considerably. We used the brown, along with pop dots, to make our sentiment panel stand out against the busy background and the scalloped grossgrain ribbon added a nice touch to finish it all out.

When all was said and done, I was surprised to find that I liked the card so much ... coral and all! So thanks, ColourQ, for making me spread my wings and break outside my very boring color box!!

Critters in the cake!

Heelllloooo Everyone!

We are so happy to bring to you an amazingly cute card we put together this week. We got some new Lawn Fawn stamps in, and after seeing Kelly Marie's you tube video using Bake Me A Cake here, we decided that paper piecing this cute card would be perfect! We also have some recent animal inspiration and thought we would go with that to bring extra cuteness to this birthday card! The polka-dot papers worked great for this fun cake...or stack of presents, whichever you see it as, and the orange, yellow, and blue accents seemed like good bold accents between the multitude of colors this card has going on! A simple layout inspired by the sketch over at Sweet Stop proved perfect for this cute little scene! A touch of color on the animals, a few pink noses, and it turned out better that we could have hoped!

Thanks so much for stopping by! We have more cute stuff coming over the weekend! So see you back here soon!

08/03/11: Thanks to the ladies over at the Lawnscaping Challenge who spotted this card on their patrol this week and gave us a shout-out on their blog!!

Birthday Blast

Hey, everyone! Our April showers have waited to fall in May. So I guess we'll have June flowers?! *snicker* We've gotten lots of rain over the last week or so. My grass is growing like crazy!

Today's card is the first in a new series called Birthday Boy. Up until now, I believe that we've had a great assortment of birthday cards good for all ages and sexes. But when you really get down to it, none of them were perfect for the kiddos. With the addition of a number of new stamp sets, a new line of cards is born! Over the next several weeks, you'll designs geared towards all those little girls and boys in your life.

Let's get to it, shall we? Today's card is based on this week's Mojo Monday sketch. Whitney used a super cute new stamp set we found on sale at Michael's. And I love, love, LOVE how she framed the focal image with the stars, which is our creative take on the 365 Cards Day 61 challenge to use a frame anywhere on a card. (It may not be exactly what they had in mind, but I think it totally works. *wink*) I love how the stars give the effect that the rocket is flying through space. And I love how Whitney then reinforced the journey into space theme by embossing stars in silver on the bottom panel.

One thing you may not have noticed at first glance is the rivet detail on the rocket. Just a small strip of silver beads there at the nose. That one element really shows you that you don't have to color an image to make it work. In fact, sometimes it works better to leave an image nekked (in the words of HRR Julie Ebersole). And this is certainly one of those times IMHO. All of the little details in combination with the simple, yet stunning, color scheme really makes the whole thing *pop*! We thought that the sentiment on the outside might be a little too distracting so it's inside and it reads, "I hope you have a BLAST on your birthday!"

Thanks for popping in today. I hope you've enjoyed your visit! Hop back by this afternoon for a special BONUS post.

A Little Monster!

Hello Blogosphere,

Boy, has it been a while. Susan and I have been swamped with stuff in our personal lives, and unfortunately the health and wellbeing of our daily lives and families comes before blogging! But here I am, reporting on some cute cards we made LAST weekend, but have yet had a chance to share. These little babies are SOOO much fun and super cute!! Susan and I found a pack of these adorable monsters in the clearance bin at the local craft store, and we both agreed that they would make great kid birthday cards. We have yet to come up with a line of cards for the young at young at heart, and this was the perfect fit. We chose some adorable patterned papers we had in our stash, and TADA! We added some stickles and googly eyes to pack some punch and they turned out mighty cute if I do say so myself!! We had too much fun with these little guys. Thanks for stopping by! We are ready for the weekend, that's for sure. Too bad it's only Monday!

More Snowday Fun

Well, after being snowed in again yesterday, I made good use of my day home by playing in the craft room on some new product designs. Once again, Whitney and I had to resort to Skype to talk through some ideas since the road conditions didn't permit her to come across town & enjoy the snowday with me.

We started with two challenges in order to solidify the layout and color scheme for this card. The Sweet Stop Blog had an excellent sketch up this week that lent itself very well to a birthday card. With the layout chosen, it wasn't difficult to select the perfect color scheme from Papertrey Ink's Anniversary Color Challenge. I am a HUGE fan of Dawn McVey and always look forward to her posts. She's such an amazingly talented stamper AND designer. And one of my favorite things about Dawn is her fantastic eye for color!! So it was no surprise when my eye gravitated to her color palette.

After choosing Dawn's fun color scheme for my birthday card, I went through my stamps in search of the perfect image. And that's when I came across this chickie. I'm a huge animal lover, which is one reason why I love Whipper Snapper stamps. And I'm most especially fond of sets designed by Anna Wight. Talk about another crazy-talented stamper!! This is her Gift Chicken stamp and the sentiment is from her Crazy for Chickens set.

For a change of pace, I paper pieced the chicken image rather than watercoloring as I usually do. This took a bit more time since I'm cutting out little pieces of the image, but it made it much easier to get the colors for the challenge just right. I did watercolor chickie's beak and combs b/c I thought that would look more natural than paper pieces. To make the hay nest a bit more lifelike, I glued some DNC floss under the lil' gal w/ my two-way glue pen and then, once the glue was dry, spread and "fluffed" it a bit for even more realism. I used a Sizzix die to cut the sentiment panel and then dressed it up w/ some pearls & gems. To give the entire card a bit more *oomph*, I popped up the image and sentiment panels.

I hope you've enjoyed your stop in today - we certainly appreciate all of you who are kind enough to comment on our creations! It's still freezing cold here today, but at least we can get & around and go places. Right now, I'm off to warm my hands by the fire!