1st Pull from the Inspiration & Challenge Jar

After getting the jar together I had to give it a try.  This is what came out....

Gotta say, these are not things I work with all that much.  So I guess that means the jar's working.  I had some ideas without needing the orange challenge strip so I opted to ignore it.  And a BABY theme???!  I almost never make baby cards. After I thought about it a bit though, I realized I actually have someone I can send it to soon so that's like icing on the cupcake!

For the colored pencil technique I opted to color a stamp.  When playing around with my pencils a while back I found that you can soften them with baby oil.  How cool is that??!  Here's one of the stamped images I colored and what it looks like softened.

This is the finished product.  Not my favorite card ever but I think I can live with it.  It has banners and brads.  Used colored pencils and is a baby theme so I successfully completed the challenge.

If you're feeling up to it, I'd love to see your take on my challenge pull.  Post links so I can go check it out.  If you do play along, the "blog hop" challenge can use any challenge from any blog you follow.  Please make sure to give links for that too.  I'd love to find more blogs to check out.

Have a fabu day!

P.S.  My pics are not very pretty.  I'd like to find a photography class to take to be able to use my camera and do better quickly.  If you know of any, please let me know about them.

Inspiration & Challenge Jar

I finally did it.  This is something that's been banging around in my head for a really long time now but I've just never taken the time to do it.  Part of it was figuring out HOW I wanted to do it and also the idea of making all the lists....  Well, even to a professional list maker such as myself, it was a little daunting.  I have no doubt I've missed or forgotten something.  But the good news is that I can always keep adding to the lists and the jar.  To make sure I don't duplicate stuff I went ahead and typed it all up.  I'm hoping that'll save some hassle down the road.

The idea is to have a large variety of ideas or products or challenge themes all mixed up in a jar and pull out 3-5 slips.  Then you have to create a card using just the items or concepts on the slips.  This should be a really neat way to get out of a rut or challenge myself.  Which are two situations I find myself in much to often lately.

I decided to color code my slips.  This will make it easier when I'm pulling them out.  Pink for techniques to use, yellow for products or items to use, orange for challenges and green for theme.  This way I'll pull one green, and however many of the others I want.  If I only want one challenge I'll pull one orange but maybe multiple of the yellow to use several products.

I have one of those super sized pickle jars from ages ago. Until a few minutes ago it had all kinds of strings of beads in it.  Now it's got all kinds of cool 1" by 4 1/4" strips of paper with writing on them in it.  They could go into a smaller jar for sure.  Or any other kind of receptacle for that matter.  It might even be kind of cool to put each color into it's own jar.  But I like the idea of being able to put my hand in and swirl them all around until I pick one.

I made sure to make extras of each color so it'll be fast and easy to add more as ideas come to me.   Inspiration & Challenge Jar list    I'm not thrilled with the way Google Docs changed this up but it's still at least got all the items noted.

I think I'll probably also decorate the jar at some point but for now, I'm pretty happy to have finally gotten this much done.  If you've got suggestions for the list or easy decorating ideas send them along!

Have a fab day!

Getting Punny.... Part 1

I had a whole other blog post planned but have decided to save it for another day.  :)

Instead I wanted to share the punny valentine's I've made recently.  They'll all be up in my Etsy shop but I wanted to be able to giggle over them with friends.  Since there are so many I'm going to break them up into different "parts".  Hope you get a giggle out of them too.

This group features the sentiment "You're so deer to me."  I had to pair it with the adorable Woodland Deer from Spellbinders.  I die cut, embossed and stenciled it and in the top card I added Sugar Sparkly Fluff to the white on the deer's tail and belly.  It's also been featured with several other die cuts - seems like these woodland animals MUST have that little bit of grass with them.  And I just had to use that Woodgrain die cut - so stinkin' cool!  The whole herd was lifted off the page with foam dots to give them extra emphasis.

These next two were inspired by an adorable card I found on Pinterest.  Here's the link to her original post.  I didn't want to copy it exactly so I let the inspiration percolate just a bit.  And of course song lyrics and movie quotes came to me!  With that I knew exactly what I wanted to do.  Die cut heart shapes and then die cut the die cut hearts (say that 3 times fast!) with a puzzle piece die.  Wah-lla!  Any one able to name the movie and song or artist these two reference?

This last one isn't very punny but I really dig it.  The original card has been pinned for a long time and there's so much about it I like.  The white on white of the front, the circles with hearts cut out and then popped up, the simplicity but totally cool style of it.  For this version, I have NO doubt there will be others!, I opted to focus on the white on white and the circle theme.  It's difficult to tell in this scan (I'm working on getting my photo booth set up and it can't happen soon enough!) but the white interlocking circles are actually popped up off of the card front.  A stamp and a die cut heart finish it off.

Hope you like these.  And if you've got any favorite puns share them!  I'm always looking for inspiration!