You'll Be Missed

Embellish Magazine Challenge is one my favorite challenges to partake in, because it pushes my boundaries when it comes to themes & color combos. I'm not a bold, colorful person, and tend to grab blacks, krafts, browns, whites and let the stamping, pattern paper, or color penciling do the color-talking. Anyone else out there feel the same? So this week, Embellish is challenging me to two areas: masculine cards (arg!) and colors.

Another fun challenge that is going on this week is happening on Jenny's blog. The WeeMemories team is sponsored by My Favorite Things, one of many companies whose stamps I adore. This doesn't get any easier, since the theme this week is:

The tricky part for the creation process was wrapping my head around blues, green and red as "masculine" colors prescribed in the Embellish Magazine Challenge. I get the gray and blue, but the red was way too cheery.

You know what I really liked the most of this challenge? The visual poster - two weeks ago you heard me swoon about the macarons; this week you'll hear me swoon about planes. Ashley sure knows how to put these posters together, right? I fly a lot and often find myself living at the airport (for better or for worst) for the past two years or so. The best parts are sitting at the gate and watching planes land and take off. It's quite fascinating to see all the operations go back and forth - the lil truck that pushes the plane from the gate back, the dudes with their glowing sticks to help navigate the plane in and out of the gate, the baggage wagon zooming back and forth. Perhaps I should have been an aerospace engineer or a flight controller. But alas, I detract.

What I meant to say is that this card was inspired by my loads of travel and my joy in finally being able to use my impulse purchase. Yes, I picked up the little airplane punch at Michael's about half a year ago and it hasn't made a debut on any projects yet - hey, it was on sale for $2 and better late than never ;)


Stamps: (Goin' Places) My Favorite Things; (Free Spirit - Sentiment) Waltzingmouse Stamps
Paper: (Paper Basics Card Stock - Spring Moss, Spring Rain, White) Papertrey Ink; (Key Ingredients Kit - Winnie's Walls) Taylored Expressions
Ink: (Memento - Tuxedo Black; Versamark) Tsukineko
Embellishments: (Steel Dies - Cloud 1 & 2 Die Collection) Papertrey Ink; (Airplane Medium Punch) EKSuccess; (Embossing Powder - Ebony) Martha Stewart; (Double-ended Art Markers - Cool Greys) Prismacolor

I started punching out nine little planes and colored them in a monochromatic gray from 90% cool gray up to 10% cool gray. I knew that I wanted to play around with layering them and making it look like a plane was taking off into the sky - exactly against what background, I was still unsure.



Then I remembered that I had to incorporate fun colors and what better way of utilizing these fun, bold colors by breaking in some negative space in the form of clouds? Planes live in skies which have lots of clouds...



It still looked empty at this point and then I remembered I had a fun city scape in My Favorite Things "Goin' Places" stamp set. A little embossing action and a city skyline was quickly created - easy peasy.



That's when I realized I needed to add a sentiment - preferably masculine looking. The "Bon Voyage" sentiment was too cursive for my taste, so I pulled out my handy-dandy and trusty Waltzingmouse "Free Spirit - Sentiments" to make it work. I actually could not find a fitting sentiment for what I was looking for and was about to pull another set out, when a bunch of lightbulbs lit up in my head. You see, I was thinking "How sad, I'm not sure where the little jet plane is flying to..." when it occurred to me, this card is perfect for when someone leaves...and I have plenty of friends that keep leaving the area to venture into other jobs or they go back to their home countries.

If you made it this far - kudos to you reading my ramblings. Hope you like this little card. As you can tell, when I create cards, I often don't have the entire card designed out. I let myself be inspired by my stash. Also, sometimes that perfect sentiment is exactly not the one I had in mind and "making it work" often forces me to think outside the box.

So, what kinds of cards throws you out of your comfort zone?

A Wheelbarrow Full of "Hi"

Guess what time it is? Yep - Another installment of the Waltzingmouse Sketch Challenge! If you have seen the inspiration from the WMS DT team, there was a theme for their WMSC #7 inspirations. I was stalking the WMS DT's sites regularly, since Claire mentioned something about an early August release - and Oh boy are they talented! Let's just say that they did such a fabulous job, I'm tapping my foot impatiently for my sets to arrive. ;) Anyways, we were talking about a sketch, so here is this week's challenge:

Looks harmless, right? Actually, I started with one idea, scrapped that after I realized my "square" was too large for my card. Started a second idea, only to scrap that because I didn't like it. In the end, I was determined to use up my pattern paper stack, and carved viciously at my Cosmo Cricket Earth Love Pack, until this happened:


Stamps: Can Ya Dig it? (My Favorite Things), Rescue Remedies (Waltzingmouse Stamps), Victorian Fripperie (Waltzingmouse Stamps)

Paper: Basic Card Stock - Creme (Recollections), Earth Love (Cosmo Cricket), Textured Card Stock - Grey (?)

Ink: Perfect Match Pigment Ink - Simply Chartreuse (Papertrey Ink), Momento - Summery Sky (Tsukineko), Brilliance - Pearlescent Orange (Tsukineko), Earth Elements - Summer Sun (Stamping Up!), Pigment Ink - Black (Colorbox)

Embellishments: Nestabilities - Labels One (Spellbinders), Softcore Colored Pencils - PC946 Dark Brown (Prismacolor)

After all the false starts, I was flipping through the Cosmo paper pad, to realize that those flowers kept re-occuring in the Earth Love line. I wanted to mimic the colors and the flowers, but just make them bolder. And, using my "must ink up new sets" policy, the little round sand dollars in the Rescue Remedies came in handy. Aren't the stamped flowers a little similar to the Cosmo paper? You don't have to answer ;)


On a more serious note to my fellow crafters, what get's you going at the craft table? When all fails, where to draw your inspiration from?

[Stamping Around] SA05 - WMS Inspiration Challenge

There is this hilarious "Up in the Air" scene, where the stewardess asks George Clooney's character "Would you like the can, sir?" and he understood "Would you like the cancer?" These week seems filled with many such "hard of hearing" moments during my many meetings. So when trying to write up meeting minutes from my notes...well, you can see where my creative deciphering has to come in.

Last weekend I was desperately trying to juggle all the cleaning, laundry, re-packing for my business trip, when I realized to my horror, that I more friends' birthdays looming around the corner. In fact, one of my local girl friend's birthday was last week and I threw a card together that I will save for another post (after she has surely gotten it). 

Another friend lives abroad -- and I wanted to throw a fun card for her together, but I also didn't want it to be bulky. My crafty gals reminded me that there was another fun WMS inspiration challenge which I looked at last week during a quick lunch break. Here is what I threw together


Stamps: "Can Ya Dig It" (My Favorite Things), Flowers from Embossing Stamp Set (Martha Stewart)
Paper: Beige (Recollections), Amy Butler Lotus Faded China Pad (K&Company)
Ink: Momento - Paris Dusk (Tsukineko), Momento - Summery Sky (Tsukineko)
Embellishments: 1/8" Spool o' Ribbon - Light Blue (Offray), Sun Yellow Eyelet (Making Memories), Threading Waters Border Punch (Fiskars)

The horrible thing with this card is that when I looked at the inspiration challenge post (a very long time ago), I remembered "flowers" "a lime green accent that exuded freshness" and "round." Lesson learned? Look up the challenge post again ;)

The focus was on the Amy Butler pattern paper (swoon!). The lime green jumped out at me when I was going through my stash and everything just fell into place from there. Since I tried to keep the card as flat as possible I tried to add dimension by stamping my own pattern paper with different hues of the same color. It's hard to tell on the picture, but I pulled a Martha Stewart flower and a matching blue ink and went at it. The "Sun Yellow" eyelets were actually more lime green, but who am I to judge color. I just cared that it matched and added a little accent ;) The threading ribbon through the Threading Waters Border Punch seemed like a way to end the whole card.

Let me know what fun techniques you use to make a flat card look amazing.