Make a Wish

Today's post is to give support to GinaK and her new "stamps for a cause" stamp for the Make a Wish Foundation. GinaK will give $7.00 of each set sold to this wonderful organization. We here at Flourishes take today to offer our support to Gina in her efforts to give back to the community. I've found stampers overall to be extremely generous and giving people and Gina epitomizes this character and generosity. Thanks Gina, for all your wonderful work.

Please click on over to Gina's site, make a purchase for this great organization and tell her the ladies at Flourishes sent you.

This card was made combining the Make a Wish Set and the Flourishes Cake Decorating set to create one cake image. The cake and pedestal are from Flourishes, the shooting star, star background and sentiment are from GinaK. The colors were pulled from the colors found on the Basic Grey designer paper.

Elegant ATC Swap

In yesterday's mail I received a package from the "Elegant ATC Swap" I participated in. The swap was hosted by Kelly - aka Littlekel90 at SCS. These ATC's are just so pretty. Thanks to everyone who participated and created these elegant cards!

So, what do you do with the ATC's that you receive? It seems a shame to just file them away in a binder, so what I have done is included some in my scrapbooks, in a personal journal and I've even used several to place on a card front as the focal image for a card. Tell me what other uses there are for these great mini works of art...

Top 50? Top Listed??

Recently I removed the Stamping Top 50 and Top Listed Stamping widgets from my blog. In the past 6 months I have been moving up in the standings reaching the low 200's when, for no reason at all, I lose my standing - getting the old "user not found" error message. E-mails to the Top 50 site go unanswered and I am forced to resubmit and start all over again, with my ranking over 500. After the third time with this happening, I did a little soul searching. Was I trying to win some popularity contest? (visions of high school - ugh..) Was I trying to build my ego up? (perhaps) I realized that the incredibly gifted and creative people who have made it to the Top 50 are deserving and I needed to just enjoy blogging, creating and sharing what I do with my friends, family and those who are kind enough to visit my blog. SO - the pressure is now off!! No more worrying about ranking. I replaced the widgets with a world map, which shows the location of people who visit (this is so cool - besides I like maps) and a slide show of my works.
If you blog, how do you feel about these ranking sites?

Belly Band Card

In June (has it been that long ago?) Cindy showed us a template of a wedding invitation she was working on - a tri-fold card with a belly band. It was my best intention to make a bunch of these for a swap, but we are meeting tomorrow and I've only made one!! Here is how I made this one:

-Take a piece of 12" x 5 1/2" cardstock and score at 4" and 8 1/2" - this gives you the tri fold. I used Making Memories designer paper.

-Take a strip of vellum enough to wrap around the entire card and about 1 1/2" wide - this is the belly band.

-Punch an oval (Marvy punches) from cranberry card stock, stamp patterned stamp with ruby red. The patterned stamp I used was from Impression Obsession - Damask floral.

-Take a 2" square of blush and use the Square Steps punch on all four corners, but turn back and cut off the two sides.

-Stamp "Happy Birthday" - from Flourishes - in Rose red on blush and sponge. Mount on cranberry.

For the inside of the card I mounted blush onto cranberry. Here is a photo of the inside and a closer look at the belly band.

Masking Tutorial

Here is a video I made on masking. It's just under 6 minutes long and is a quick tutorial on basic and reverse masking. I hope you find this helpful. I uploaded it on Google Video - I'm still trying to figure out how to embed it directly onto this post. This was my first attempt at using my webcam and my first try at any type of tutorial - so I was producer, director, writer, editor and star!! Please let me know what you think.


http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=masking_0001

Cake Decorating!!

Here is another card using the Cake Decorating 101 set. This set has so many possibilities...if you haven't seen some of the great creations using this set, check out the Flourishes Designer Gallery on the Flourishes online boutique.

This card started with cameo coral as the base, with a strip of cocoa and Basic Grey Blush decorative paper. I used the Spellbinders nestability set to cut and emboss the vanilla rectangle on which I mounted my cake and pedestal. Here is a closer look at the embossing feature for these die cuts.

Both cake and pedestal were stamped on BG Blush series with cocoa. For the cake, I overstamped SU's filigree to get a more decorative look. A white signo pen was used for highlights. "Happy Birthday" is from the Flourished Words set and was also stamped in cocoa. This is the third card I made for our stamping meeting this week.

Hat's off to CASE'ing

I'll be the first to admit when I CASE a card, as in the "case" with this one. Some time ago Cambria Turnbow's blog had a wonderful tutorial on different ways to use the Square Steps Punch and I just love what she did, so I cased her template for this card. I used a pale blue card as the base (can't tell if its bashful blue) as well as for the 2" square needed with the square steps punch. Pale plum was used for the narrow strip across and for the smaller square (1 3/8" punch). I stamped a flower from the Sassy Stems set and watercolored with moss and rose red, then used a 1 1/4" circle punch. I thought the Sassy Stems flower went well with the decorative paper. The decorative paper is Basic Grey's oh so pretty LilyKate. "Happy Birthday" is from the Flourished Words set and stamped in rose red. This came out so nice that it will be one of the cards we will make during our August stamping group meeting - ladies I hope you like this!!

Using designer paper

So often we buy pretty paper only to have it sit in our stamp rooms collecting dust, waiting for that "perfect" card to pop into our heads or for that special occasion. I'm determined to use my stockpile of paper!! In looking over my stash, I often find sheets of paper that were "must haves" at the time, and now seem out of style.

I was looking for inspiration for some cards to make for our monthly stamp meeting this week, and came across the pretty SU designer paper. I love this paper, but never got around to actually using any!! So, this week our group will be making one of these cards and I hope to make a few extra's for RAK's. The cards were inspired by a few of Tracy Durcan's creations found on the designer gallery at Flourishes.

The paper is all SU - designer paper, vanilla, moss and cocoa. Inks used are cocoa and moss and the ribbons are from JoAnn's. The stamps are from the Flourished Words set from Flourishes.

And the Winner is...................

Jennifer Kronberg!! Congrats to Jennifer as the winner of the blog candy I am offering as part of the Grand Opening of the Flourishes online boutique.

Jennifer will receive two cuttlebug folders, 4 each of metallic blue and red cards, 8 white linen card fronts, and 5 yards each of silver cord and gold thread.

This will be placed in the mail tomorrow - I hope you enjoy the package!!