Quick and Easy

I know most of my Gal Pals have seen this card at the shop but I wanted to get it posted on the blog for use later on.  With all the coordinated paper packs I've been picking up here and there, this is a great card sketch to keep on hand for those last minute cards you might need.  I actually got the sketch from the Clean and Simple web site - one of my favorite sites for easy-peasy ideas.  I've got the dimensions for the patterned pieces somewhere on my craft counter - which is kind of a mess right now :-( but will edit this post as soon as I find them.  I've also made a bunch of different versions of this card and will post them too.  Working on the one for Christmas now.

Hope you all have a good weekend.  We'll be at the Brawl of the Wild Griz-Cat game on Saturday.  It ought to be a good one.

See ya' back here next week.

Sock Monkeys

Happy Monday Everyone!

This is a thank you card I made for Tori last week.  She's our next door neighbor's daughter who was home for a month or so on summer break from University of Virginia where she is a Pre-Med student in her senior year. She has been working with me and Allan at UM for the last month on some data work for the Prerequisite Enforcement project. 

There's a bit of a story behind the sock monkey theme. . .I have a sock monkey puppet at the office that I use for those days when I'm bored or I need to cheer someone else up.  Tori and I had been working hard one day and were dizzy from all the spreadsheets of data we were sorting through.  The project involved interpreting some "rules" with a lot of parenthesis like . . . "allow registration if (the student passed their math placement) or (if they had a C- or better in Math 101)".  So I got out the sock monkey to have a little fun.  I decided his name needed to be "Paren"  and he needed to talk with a very French accent.  We giggled and laughed and played for awhile and then got back to work.  For the next few weeks, we used Paren to help us get through the tedious work days. 

Tuesday was Tori's last day on the project so as a going away gift we gave her Paren and this little thank you card.  We hope Paren will cheer her up on those days at UVA when she's cramming for her BioChem tests.

P.S.  Just a few details about the card. . . .it's a sketch I found from Splitcoaststampers Card Sketch Challenge and I used the "KandCompany" paper pack and embellishment pack I got from Memory Lane last summer. 

I used the "Solid Stripes" stamp from Stampin' Up's 2010 Occassions Mini to make the green striped cardstock on the card base.  Loved! how that turned out.  Will have to do that again sometime soon.

Clean and Simple 153

I had some free time in  the craft room Sunday while I was doing the laundry.  It's so nice to have my craft room next to the laundry room.  Great excuse to be in there while the laundry's going -- makes me feel really productive. 

After I cleared off my counter, I checked this week's challenges on Splitcoast and saw this really cool sketch on last Monday's Clean and Simple Card Challenge.  So I decided to play a little.  After about 3 hours I came up with this card.  You wouldn't think finding 3 shades of pink that went together would be so hard. 

I started out intending to just stamp a one-layer card but then the new designer series paper I got a few weeks ago (Everyday Enchantment) just seemed to blend so well I had to do some matting of the stamped image.  Believe it or not, Cricut Man did some design consulting on this one.  I allowed him to enter the Girl Cave :-) and while he was in there he gave me some suggestions that I thought were really good.  Who says a bean counter accountant dude can't be artistic :-)

Happy Monday!

Challenge Crazy!!

After weeks of just sitting on the sidelines and looking at all the submissions to the Splitcoast daily challenges, I finally jumped back in. Did the Try a New Technique challenge AND the Clean and Simple challenge. Here's the links to the challenge so you can read what they are and then I have the cards I made right below.

TLC286:
http://www.splitcoaststampers.com/forums/try-new-technique-f44/tlc286-~-anything-but-bow-knot-~-08-16-10-a-t502707.html

Holiday Cheer:

CAS80:
http://www.splitcoaststampers.com/forums/clean-simple-cards-f239/cas80-sketch-stampingout-8-16-10-a-t502710.html

Love:
Will bring the camera to card night and hopefully will have something new to post tomorrow.

See ya' soon.

Gal Pal Sketch #1

Wow! It's been WAY too long since we've had any activity on this blog. I'm gonna' try to change that.

I'll start by posting our current sketch. I've been so enjoying all the challenges on Splitcoaststampers. Spend most of my mornings surfing around while I'm having my cereal and coffee. Can't say I get too many challenges done but it's fun looking.

So I talked Val and Mona into giving it a try. But Val cautioned that we can't be too overly ambitious especially since our jobs can sometimes drain the life out of us. Can you tell she's thee wise one of the 3 of us? :-) So we're starting with this one.


Use any patterned paper and any embossing folder you like - can't wait to see what Val comes up with since she has almost every single Cuttlebug folder :-). I couldn’t find a shape in Word that looked like the scalloped punch but the hope is that we’ll use the scalloped oval or circle with an inner circle that contains the sentiment. Ribbon (maybe ric rac1 - my favorite!) will be along the mid section / embossed section. (Hope you can tell the "hourglass" was a boo-boo when I took the print screen and shouldn't be a part of the sketch)

We decided we would do our show and tell on it the Tuesday after Labor Day. Hope that gives us enough time.
More postings soon!

Card Sketch Challeges

As I surf thru Splitcoaststampers postings each morning, I've always wanted to do some of the challenges. So week before last I jumped right in. It was fun. Really got my creative juices flowing quickly when I had a pattern to start with. Here's the first card for SC275 and it's associated sketch from SCS:



Here's the one for the following week (SC276) and its sketch:



I'm really hoping on the week's where we just don't have the energy to come up with something new on our own, that we might be able to take the latest sketch and just let our creativity flow. Are you up for it?