Queen and Company Hocus Pocus Shaker Cards

 Hello!

I'm not sure if I have shared here my fascination with Queen and Company's shaped shaker card kits. My friend, Kristie Marcotte, is mostly to "blame." :) She is an enabler extraordinaire. She is on the design team for Queen and Co and makes the cutest cards using her 6x6 paper pad tutorials and card sketches. You can find her blog, The Best Things in Life are Pink here. Last month she shared the 29(!) cards she made using their Hocus Pocus kit. You can see that post here. Kristie donates a majority of the cards she makes to a retirement center. Those lucky residents! I have no need for 29 cards, so I work on her tutorials until I get my fill and feel the nudge to move on to another project. Squirrel! I see so many ideas and have so little time! LOL

Here are the cards I made following Kristie's inspiration. I do add my own tweaks to make them my own. I had a lot of fun. There are so many fun components to the kits and the shakers are really easy and fun to create. Thanks, Kristie for enabling and inspiring! I added some of my own paper and cardstock to the cards. Most of the pattern papers are from the 6x6 paper pad that comes with the kit. The spider web pattern paper (inside the haunted house and spooky card) are from a different company. The black glitter cardstock is from Hobby Lobby.

The yellow embellies on this card are from Hobby Lobby. Paper Studio brand. FYI, that brand is on sale this week. ;)

The embellishment on the witch's hat is from Making Memories from many years ago. 

The buckles on the witch's shoes are an embellishment I found at Michaels a week or so ago. They were part of their Halloween line this year. 

I added some foil from Queen and Co in the upper corner of this card. This foil is neat because you do not need a laminator to use it. It adheres to a sticky surface, like double sided tape. :)

Thanks so much for stopping by. 

Marching season ended on Friday, so hopefully, 

I'll have a little more time on weekends to create. 

Fingers crossed!

Doodlebug Trees

I have recently become a big fan of Paper Smooches stamps. They are adorable and just my style. It doesn't hurt that Archiver's recently started carrying some of their stamps and I've discovered a new scrapbook store that carries many of the sets. I recently picked up Warm Hearts and had kind of drawn a blank as to what to do with all the cute images. My friend Kay gave me some inspiration today and I put my own twist on her idea. Thanks, Kay! Hope you like what I came up with.

I used the tree stamp in Warm Hearts and paper pieced them with some some fun Halloween Doodlebug paper. I added a bit of sparkle with a stardust pen. I drew a line with the same pen to anchor the trees. The stars got some sparkle too. I realized today, after a thorough search of my stamps, that I don't own any cute "happy halloween" sentiments. So, I resorted to an old CTMH Seasonal Thoughts stamp set. A bow with Doodlebug twine completed the look. 

Thanks for stopping by. Hope you are having a happy day!

Doodlebug Halloween Cards

I'm still having fun with Doodlebug's Halloween papers. One of the blogs I follow is Card-Blanc by Kathy Martin. She is on Doodlebug's Design Team and shares adorable cards using their products. Recently she shared a really cute squirrel card with the Happy Harvest paper. I took the same idea, but used the Halloween paper. 

I also came across this blog post and liked the peek a boo effect, so here is my take on the idea.

I like the fun feel of the card, although it took me a try or two to get the open squares lined up when cutting them. Almost everything is Doodlebug with the exception of some gems and the happy halloween which is from an old CTMH set called Seasonal Thoughts.

Thanks so much for stopping by.

Hope you have a great weekend!

Doodlebug Fun

I sat down to try to make a card yesterday, using the new Doodlebug papers/embellishments. I haven't had much of a chance to work on projects recently. My days sure seem to whiz by, but I don't always have a lot to show for it. Ah well...I can only do what I can do. Anyway, in case you are interested here's what I came up with yesterday. I am also sharing a card I made a week or so ago and just photographed today.

This is obviously from the new Halloween pad. I also picked up a little Doodle-Pop embellishment (the witch and stars) and a sheet of stickers (kitty and clouds). No stamping, but I like how it came out. It was

 quick-ish to put together (after fiddling with it a bit).

I saw a card from the Doodlebug blog post where they share several cards showcasing the Happy Harvest collection. If you scroll though, it's the 5th picture. I didn't have the flowers, so I just did my own thing. I like the clean and simple look. 

Thanks so much for stopping by. I hope you have a great first week of Fall!

Happy Halloween!

Well, goodness, I’ve wanted to share this  for days and for one reason or another didn’t get to do so. Guess today is better late than never, right?

My friend, Barb, over at The Buzz has been charming me with her cards featuring Meljens digital images. (You can find her shop here). Barb does a fantastic job coloring with her Copic markers and recently posted how she adds glitter to her cards in this post. This card is completely inspired by Barb’s excellent work. Thanks for sharing and inspiring, Barb!

I used that super cute Haunted Manor paper from Doodlebug. Now, you all know I don’t have many markers and am much more comfortable with colored pencils and odorless mineral spirits. That’s what I used to color in this card. It was a fun image to color. I added the background using chalk and a small pom-pom.  I have to admit though, I think Barb’s skills in creating backgrounds way exceed mine. *Ü*

Next up is a little project Jessica and I worked on together for her class.  

Jessica did a great job stamping the “happy, happy, happy” and “halloween” from CTMH’s Seasonal Thoughts stamp set. She had to practice a little though to get the right touch. As you can see, witches were a part of the project. I found that stamp, a wooden one (gasp) at Michaels last Halloween in their dollar bin. Didn’t use it last year, but it sure came in handy this year. 

Here’s what we (okay, I mostly) made. 

Are these not super cute? I got the idea from Diana Gibbs blog here.  And I happened to have a brown Sharpie marker in my stash. You can see a bit of the Tootsie Pop peeking through. Very fun.

And here’s a funny shot of Amy pulling out pumpkin guts last night.  LOL

Happy Halloween to you and yours. Hope you have a fun and safe time trick or treating or celebrating in your own special way. Thanks for stopping by!

Halloween Cards

Yay, I finally had some success in creating some cards. Halloween cards to be specific. The girls were invited to go swimming with a friend, which gave me the perfect opportunity to work on them. I could probably share one a day for the next several days, but what’s the fun in that? So, here we go…

All of the cards use Doodlebug’s Halloween Manor, the 6x6 pad. Love it!!

 

There’s not a whole lot to this card, but it’s fun nonetheless. The paper is double sided and when I flipped the piece I was using over and saw the spider paper I might have squealed just a little. While putzing around the room, I came across a couple of packs of these blingy spiders and web from Michaels. They are the Recollection brand and I remember getting them last Halloween or thereabouts. I thought they were cute. I think they were on clearance, too. Anyway, either I couldn’t figure a good way to use them or it was after Halloween, so they’ve sat on the shelf for one long lonely year. I saw them and connected that I could use them with this cute paper and Ta-Da! Easy peasy lemon squeezy cute card. No muss no fuss. Gotta love that, right?

One of the papers in the pack has these adorable owls and I was so itching to use the owl paper with the die cut owl on the next card, but it was just too busy. In the end, I held off and came up with this cutie patootie witchy owl.

Okay, I didn’t come up with the owl, Provo Craft did on their Create a Critter 2 cartridge. I just made it super cute with the great Doodlebug papers and a little Doodlebug twine. The sentiment is the phrase cut for this owl, too. Only I had to change the size. The owl is cut at 3 inches, but the sentiment is cut at 1 inch. The circle/happy is supposed to have an overlay so that the letters are black, but I chose to glue those itty bitty letters to the circles. Yes, I know it’s nuts, but I liked the look better. Oh goodness, the time I spent figuring out which papers to use…but it was fun, kind of like paper dolls. And… you don’t know how badly I wanted to add some black Stickles to the mask. I had the tube in my hand and almost started and then pulled back a couple of times. I was so worried that it wouldn’t look as cute as I wanted it to and I didn’t feel like cutting out a second owl. Call me a wimp, I can take it.

 

Okay, this next card…oh my goodness, I can’t tell you how many times I looked at the stamp at Archiver’s after I saw their sample card in the store. I wanted to get the stamp sooo bad, but wasn’t sure if it would be worth it. The store sample is colored with Copics and it was so vibrant. Finally I figured if I couldn’t get the dang stamp out of my head, I’d go ahead and buy it (with a 43% off coupon, whoo hoo), so I did and had fun coloring it with my colored pencils and mineral spirits. What do you think??

I had it colored weeks ago, but not put together onto a card. Ultimately, the image is too large to really do much else but mat it. Doodlebug to the rescue. Gosh, I do like those papers. While I was coloring my copy, both girls colored a copy for themselves. Only, I’m not sure where their versions are at the moment.  I just looked and cannot find them to take pictures…phooey. They aren’t home to ask. The same friend they went swimming with asked if they could spend the night…hmmmmmm…..SURE! *Ü* hee, hee.

Okay, now…when I saw this card on The Creative Closet blog, I fell in love with the image of little Hazel. I immediately went Wee Stamps and purchased the digi image (it’s about half way down the page). Oh my goodness, all of those images are adorable. Anyway,  Cindy Lawrence did an amazing job coloring her. So much so that I did my best to recreate the look with my pencils and odorless mineral spirits. Here is my version…she is just too sweet, I think.

   

I’m pretty dang happy with the results of my efforts on these cards today. I have to admit though, I took a bunch of photos of the two colored cards and they still look a little washed out. Darn. And on Hazel, you can’t really see that I chalked the background, green on the bottom and blue around the top. Oh well. They do look better in real life and you will just have to take my word for it.

And there you go, hope you had fun checking out the cards. You know, today is World Cardmaking Day, I guess I was able to celebrate after all.

Thanks so much for stopping by. I hope you have been able to do something crafty today.