"Art is my vehicle through life; may we share the ride together." Ron Wickersham

Thursday, September 2, 2021

Scrapbooking and Cardmaking

 The past few weeks I've been busy catching up on the four scrapbooks I'm creating for my grand boys. We spent a week all together in Angel Fire, NM, at the end of July and then they went to camp and returned to school in August, so I had lots of photos to document. 36 12"x12" pages later, I'm up-to-date! Hopefully there won't be any more milestones until Halloween!

I've also been making some cards. August is our family's birthday month with five of us having birthdays within one week! So I had quite a few birthday cards to do.

I made this one for my oldest daughter. I had seen a similar card which had been made with Stampin Up stamps, which I didn't have. So I decided to recreate it freehand using some new watercolors I had bought.



Her significant other turned 50 and I made him this z-fold black and gold card. (I didn't take a photo of the one I made but this is the one from Pinterest that I used as inspiration.)




Here are two more abstract watercolor cards I made several weeks ago. I doodled in black pen and added gold watercolor accents.








One of my daughters and her family sent me Tiff's Treats (warm, freshly baked cookies delivered to your door) for my birthday and the box was wrapped with a pretty blue paper embossed with "Happy Birthday." It was too pretty to toss, so I made two cards with it! I simply wrapped it around a white embossed panel and layered on a card.



This one I made for a challenge this summer. I had seen where you could use colored pencils on black card stock, so I tried it with gold-embossed flowers. The sentiment is on a strip of vellum. This turned out really well with just regular Prismacolor colored pencils. Unfortunately I needed it this week so I was glad I had it in my stash.



Here are a few simple ones using up paper scraps, duplicate stampings, a leftover sticker and a beautiful intricate die cut from a friend. (Can you tell I hate throwing anything away?)








Our online group donates cards bimonthly to St. Jude's Children's Hospital and for September we are doing Halloween cards. I repurposed several cards I've received in the past by removing the front of the card and adding to a new card base. It's a way of getting more mileage out of handmade cards and spreading more joy! Here are a few that I repurposed, sometimes adding stickers, Stickles, or other embellishments.











I am also making several of these Halloween cards for the children. I saw several similar cards, but they used a one-inch punch and had three squares across and four down on the card front. I only have a 1 1/4" punch so used three across (I had to trim off a tiny bit off one side of each square for them to fit) and three down. I used the bottom portion for a sentiment. The circle embellishment is stamped with an old Michael's $1 stamp which fit in a 2" circle punch perfectly, layered with a 2 1/4" circle. This is my prototype and I will try to mass produce several more. It is a good use of paper scraps and could be used for any holiday or season. I've even seen a sample using white card stock squares embossed with different embossing folders all on a white card for a wedding, anniversary or even a sympathy card. (I just might have to break down and buy a one-inch square punch!




No comments: