Catching up...again

Well, I think my computer is finally starting to cooperate. My email account is still temperamental at best, but for the most part it has been sending out my recent communications. And although it doesn’t work quite the way I’d like it to, I’ve found a relatively painless way to download my pictures. I end up with more work on the back end, sorting and renaming them after they’ve been imported, but at least I get them off the camera. However, with all that said, I can’t promise I’ll be back to regular blogging in the near future, but you never know. And hey, it’s a start.

Back on January 20, I had a workshop for a great group of ladies. This was my fourth workshop with them, and we always have so much fun. They get together to scrapbook or make cards on the first and third Tuesday each month, and they've allowed me to just slip right in every once in a while and do a workshop for them during their regular meeting time. At my first three workshops I put a lot of effort into showing the ladies how they could use stamping in both their card making and their scrapbooking. This time, however, I focused only on cards. In fact, one card done three different ways. Look at the different samples below to see how changing colors, stamp sets, and accessories can totally change the look of the same exact card!

The basic card is a vertically oriented 4 1/4" x 5 1/2" size card with a 4"x4" panel at the top.

The first card we made using the Love You Much bundle, which was a special during January. The bundle is no longer available, but the individual parts still are: the Love You Much stamp set, Heart to Heart punch and Candy Lane DSP. In fact, I have a class featuring the bundle tomorrow night. I'll try to post pics in a timely maner. Anyway, I CASEd this card by bbbp, which she CASEd from sears1130.

Oops, I posted these in the wrong order. Oh well, this was the last card we made, and I took this idea from justcrazy's card here and Super Gram's card here. I know it doesn't really look like either card, but again, I wanted to use the same layout for all three cards we made that evening, so I took the colors and masking idea from justcrazy and sort of rotated Super Gram's layout. After getting the idea close to perfect in my head, I realized that it is difficult to write on the inside of a black card. I know that you can use a gel pen, and Stampin' Up!'s is the best on the market, but I wasn't sure if all my workshop guests would have gel pens at their disposal, so I cut some extra Whisper White CS, and here's how we decorated it.

So this card was the first one we started because we needed to give the chipboard a chance to dry after pressing it into the Cameo Coral Craft pad. Now this particular chipboard flower is no longer available, but I happened to have nine of them on hand, and I also happened to have eight guests at the workshop, plus myself, so it worked out perfectly (our current chipboard flowers are cuter, if you ask me). The basic idea for this card was taken from this beautiful work of art by kaloso05. Again, mine is quite different, but I knew I wanted to use the Dream a Little stamp set (Level 3 hostess set) and I knew I had these chipboard flowers laying around, so when I came across her card in the SCS gallery, I knew I had to CASE it.

Sweet wishes!

Btw, I always encourage my customers to stamp their envelopes to coordinate with their cards, and all the cards pictured above do have coordinating envelopes, but I only took a picture of the first one.