Clean and Simple 4 Class, Day 1

I love Online Card Classes so much, and I've taken quite a few of them. The current class is Clean and Simple 4, and I've been having so much fun playing with the techniques taught in class. My goal in every class is to make at least one card from each day's lessons, but I was enjoying Day 1 so much that I just kept going:

Multiple colors of embossing powder on one stamped design:

Allover embossing with masked area in different color, Love this technique. I wish the white on white showed up better in the photo.

I blew this next one by trying to use a wood block stamp and line it up a second time. Don't know what I was thinking. It made an OK card anyway, as long as you don't try to pretend I did some shadow inking.

Tiles -- these were so much fun I made two of them!

I finished a couple more cards today from later lessons and will post them as soon as I get my act together.

Valentines

Every year I send a special valentine to each of my kids, grandkids and siblings, not to mention my sweet husband, just to remind them how much I love them. I just finished up the last of them, and saw today that the theme of this week's Simon Says Stamp's Wednesday Challenge is "Have a Heart". What fun! A few of this year's hearts qualify for the challenge and I'm entering them there.

Here are all this year's valentines, with or without hearts. It's safe to post them here because...nobody in my family ever reads my blog!

Operation Write Home Top Cards of 2014

Just for fun I thought I'd take part in this blog hop to showcase contributors' favorite cards.

Many of the cards I make are the result of trying new techniques or products, or CASEing cards I like. Here are some of the ones I made during the past year that I liked best:

Playing with gelatos:

Misted distress ink using a stencil as a stamp:

Stenciling, and stenciling with texture paste:

Fun with die cuts, including penguins created for a special call:

Stamping on stamping and stamping on stenciling:

And lastly, a cute little paper-pieced squirrel sitting in a stamped frame. The background was the fun part, where a pattern was heat embossed in clear on a patterned paper background and then distress ink was worked in -- one of the favorite techniques I learned this year.

Simon Says Stamp Work It Wednesday

I've been playing with some new-to-me techniques and it just happens that I used the color palette chosen by Shari Carroll for the current Simon Says Stamp Work It Wednesday

The first card used misted distress inks. I added some Liquid Pearls and a Simon Says Stamp die cut "hello".

The second card used a technique that I recently learned in one of the Online Card Classes -- stamping a pattern in clear embossing powder on patterned paper and then working in some distress ink. I liked the effect and will definitely use it again. The little squirrel is a Hero Arts set benefiting Operation Write Home, which I paper pieced and added to a Hero Arts stamped frame.

I have a lot of fun trying new techniques like this background, and then figuring out how to work them into a card.

11/26/14 update:  Look what I saw on today's Simon Says Stamp Blog:

The following three participants were randomly chosen to win a goody bag from Simon Says Stamp:

Chriss Blagrave
Adele Holcomb
Ancema

I won a prize pack in the random drawing! Awesome!

Simon Says Stamp Challenge

I don't enter the Simon Says Stamp Challenge as often as I would like, but this time the Wednesday challenge is to create your own background, and it just so happens that I have been busy doing exactly that, using stencils and ideas I've seen on various blogs.

First, I loved this hombre card made by mashing a bit of Gelato into embossing paste, and I CASE'd it. The hombre doesn't show up at all in the photo, but it goes from yellow to orange.

I guess, truth to tell, I've CASE'd all the rest of these too, trying out techniques and products I've seen somewhere and pinned to Pinterest.

This last one was a bit of serendipity. I started with a large card front, but didn't like the stenciled squares so I redid them in different colors on another card. Then I couldn't make up my mind what color I liked for the "happy" word, so I kept stamping it on my reject card front. When it was done, I kinda liked it, and thought it would be OK cut down with a stitched rectangle die and mounted on a kraft card base. I often find a way to use my mistakes and that's very satisfying!

Stretch Your Stamps 2

I LOVE OnlineCardClasses.com. This is perhaps the 5th class I've taken, and I always feel like I've gotten my money's worth in just the first couple of days. The instructors are fun and inspiring, and judging by the student cards posted in the Gallery, we've all managed to turn out some pretty nice cards!

Today is Day 4, and although I've watched all the videos and downloaded all the .pdf's, I've only managed to complete two cards, both from Day 1.

I'm at work on a card from Day 3 and I hope to get more done tomorrow when I get home from my knitting group. Love these classes!

Maddy's Scrapbook Page

Maddy spent some time in my craft room making a scrapbook page about her trip to the Loxahatchee River Center. There was a touch tank and it took her a while to work up her courage to touch the sea cucumber, which looked like a giant slug to me. I certainly didn't touch it!

Anyway, the sole extent of my help was to print out the picture she wanted to use, and help her find whatever products she had in mind. Grandma, do you have any lace? Where are the rub ons? Are there any pink letters? The design and execution are all hers and I think it came out nicely. I notice she talked about herself in the third person in the journaling, like I would, but then signed the page in the bottom corner.

I think I'm going to encourage her to scrap every time she comes over and keep her layouts in an album of her own.