So Much For Productivity!

Well, friends ... My post on Sunday showed a card I made in less than fifteen minutes. You'll now see one that took several hours!

Egads, so much for "productivity"!

Today, I just wanted to stretch creativity -- and come up with a birthday card to meet a particular need I have.

Annually, one* of my very best girlfriends and I swap birthday cards during our August birthdays. Joan and I haven't seen each other in years, but every time we do see each other, we pick up right where we left off as if our last sentence was just spoken.

Our birthday cards are usually crammed with a long personal note in which we catch each other up over the happenings in the past year.

So this year, I decided I'd create more of a package for that note and I came up with this little pocket card.

I cut the card from a sheet of 12x12" white paper. Then, I used K&C Company's Citronella pack for the floral design in yellow and pink. The paper is two-sided, with the lime green leaves on the reverse. The complimenting checkered paper came from a Kids' stack in my stash.

I lined the pocket with yellow cardstock onto which I printed the sentiment on the left, and I printed the "Make it a spectacular year" on plain white cardstock. For the cut "Happy Birthday" sentiment and the cut flower, I used Cricut's Calligraphy cartridge. I embellished with Basic Grey's appliqued flowers and an additional fussy cut flower from the Citronella paper.

I had a little trouble cutting the very thin "Happy Birthday" from the sturdy paper. The letters kept breaking and the Cricut blade dragged the paper. To solve this, I LOWERED the pressure, reduced the speed, and used Cricut's multi-cut feature.

Now you might ask, "Ellen, just how long did it take you to figure out how you wanted to make this card?" Well..... the baseball All-Stars' game went on TV at about 8 p.m., which is when I went upstairs to craft. It took through several innings. As I'm posting this, the National League is in the lead. It's 11:15 p.m. Time for bed. Yup. One card ... 3 hours.

And that is a labor of love! Happy Birthday, Joan!

(*My girlfriend Joan doesn't yet know about my new card making hobby, so I'm revealing her card here prior to her birthday. To my dear friend Star who reads this blog and who also has an August birthday, you'll have to be surprised!!)

With Sympathy

I am experimenting with some of my photographs to see how I might be able to incorporate them into my cardmaking. Here is a card that I made this morning, offering sympathy:

To make the background for this card, I used a digital image of a flower that I photographed while on a trip to Costa Rica. The flower was interesting against the stark backdrop of the grey brick wall, but the bug-eaten leaves would require some PhotoShopping to make them look card-worthy (in my opinion, at least).

So instead, using the PhotoShop program, I "filtered" the view of the flower to the "Artistic - Cutout" version, which you can see here in the picture at right. I printed out the Filtered version of the photograph onto standard cardstock paper.

I then trimmed the card to 5"x7", embellished the flower with a loopy orange flower from Creative Charms, and added the text from the Cricut Calligraphy cartridge.


When I do this card again, I would likely print the paper on either a finer texture paper, or use my laser printer, and/or print on gloss stock to see if the dramatic colors would snap on the background. I think I would also use a shadow effect on the text, or perhaps set a different type for the same message, to give it a little more substance. What do you think?

Tata, June!

The month of June is almost history -- it was a busy one in which I celebrated the best parents in the world! On June 9, my mom Dorothy celebrated her 80th birthday -- a special day that in 2009, none of us ever thought she'd live to see. And less than 2 weeks later, we toasted Dad on Father's Day ... honoring him for the role he played in raising us 4 kids to the people we are today.

There's Mom, upper left here, looking gorgeous at Emily's October 2008 wedding ... and just four months later, Mom suffered a near-fatal brain stem stroke. Most people don't survive an occlusion in the basilar artery; Mom not only survived, but she's come all the way back to her vibrant, beautiful, able self. In September, she and Dad will celebrate 59 years together!

Mom taught me over the years to "bloom where you are planted." And she's instilled an eye for art and has placed value on creativity. So for "BIG-O" birthday, I wanted to give Mom a garden. Mr. Smiley and I flew to Florida for a five-day weekend with Mom and Dad, and bought Mom a large ceramic planter for her patio, crammed full with flowers. And here is the card I made for her:

The card is an "Explosion Box" that I've seen done on several of the inspirational blogs I've followed over the past few months. The base (royal blue, here) is cut from a 12"x12" piece of cardstock. I made a "party favor" box from brick-colored paper to serve as the flower box. I hot-glued it into the center of the base, then cut dozens of assorted flowers to glue into the box. The leftover paper from which I cut the flowers (I call them "gadribbles") were so pretty that I stacked them together to use to decorate the inside of the box. I found a nice card print/clip-art picture online that applied ("Bloom Where You Are Planted"), so I used it for the center rear of the box. Happy Birthday text was cut from Cricut's Calligraphy cartridge.

I kind of guessed at a box lid (didn't follow any templates), and decorated its edges by cutting it with one of my go-to Martha Stewart Around-the-Corner punches, this one in double loops. Folded up the edges, capped it with the lid, tied it with some ribbon and VOILA!

I hope you like it as much as I had fun remembering how Mom's helped me blossom throughout the years.