random reflections

Picture Plenty

Many years ago, I participated in a photography prompt class with Tracey Clark though the Big Picture Classes. I happened on an Instagram post by Tracey and signed up for Picture Plenty--a photo prompt a day for November as well as a class site to share and comment on others' photos. As the title of the class suggests, the prompts were oriented toward expressing gratitude and acknowledging abundance. Her prompts were thoughtful, and inspiring. I created a new, small gratitude journal for one of the prompts, and it's been good to be back writing down my daily expressions of gratitude. 

I thought I'd share a few of the photos with the prompt titles. 

Still Life

Table Scraps

Colors of the Season

Blanketed

Picture Lyrics (from a favorite song:  Judy Collins Both Sides Now)

Pocket of Sunshine

Obscure

Fill the Frame

Comparison

A lovely community developed on the site for the class, and the prompts were so interesting and thoughtful, Tracy started asking me about them every morning. Just as I was contemplating how to continue a photo-a-day through December, Tracey opened up at new class:  Picture the Holiday. I'm quite sure I took a much earlier ideation of that class, but I'm grateful to have another month where paying attention inspires both gratitude and appreciation for the little things. 

Color Hues #54

It's my turn to be the hostess at the Color Hues Challenge this month---and it is a month-long challenge. I chose Navy and Cream, knowing I'd need more holiday cards and that my Jewish friends would find Navy and Cream a good combination for Hanukkah cards as well. And, because the holidays will be over before the challenge ends, Navy and Cream will work for many occasions beyond the holidays.

As I did for our last challenge, I created a set of cards. This time I varied the sentiments. 

I began by die cutting a rectangle from Papertrey Ink's Dark Indigo paper, and then cutting an arch with Ellen Hustson's Essential Arches die. 

On the cream card base, I stamped the Bethlehem silhouette in Dark Indigo ink as well as the sentiment. I embossed a gold star and added a rhinestone for some sparkle before overlaying the navy arch.

The beautiful silhouette is from Spellbinder's Three Kings stamp set as is the first sentiment. The card below uses a different sentiment from Pinkfresh Studio's Our Home to Yours.

I hope you'll take advantage of the month-long challenge and join us at Color Hues. For some inspiration, head over to the blog to see what the Design Team and our guest designer have created.

One Embossing Folder--Three Designs

During one of the pre-Black Friday sales, I picked up a new embossing folder from Spellbinders called Ski Lodge. I think it has lots of possibilities for winter cards, but I have three today that are all holiday cards. I used it to create three different colored backgrounds which I used below, and I have a few extras left for more cards.

The embossing folder is large enough to accommodate a 5x7 piece of cardstock but I almost always make an A2 size card or a square one so I precut the cardstock before running them through in the embossing folder. The detail on this is just lovely. I added the sled and wreath from Honey Bee's Sleigh Bells Ring set which I purchased a year ago, and had not used.  

The sentiment is from Reverse Confetti's Christmas Card Greetings--also new. I purchased it when they closed their business earlier this fall. 

For this card, and the next, I cut strips from the embossed cardstock to create the card designs. Matching up the patterns was easy to do. 

The sentiment was hot foiled with Pinkfresh Studio's Perfect Sentiments: Holiday, and I added a few of their Champagne Glitter Drops. 

Lastly, a similar card but with a different pattern:

Here I cut my favorite part of the Ski Lodge pattern in red and added two narrow strips of the green paper. This sentiment is also from the same Pinkfresh Studio hot foil set.

Some days I'm successful at photographing the wonderful shine of hot foil. This time it was less successful, but here's a sense of it.

I recently came across two new (to me) card challenges. I love the name of the first one: Let's Squash It! It's a card challenge focused on embossing folders so these cards are perfect for their current challenge: Make a Christmas Card.  The second new challenge is Sunday Stamps, and their current challenge is a color challenge. There are five colors, and you must use three of them. I'm sending the last card to Sunday Stamps where I used the red, green, and white.

I'm linking the second card to the current TicTacToe Challenge where I chose the top row across: December Holiday, Use a Die (die cut sentiment,) Embellishment, and of course I'm sending the first to NBUS because this was the embossing folder's first runs through the die machine as well as the sled's debut.

 

Freshly Made Sketches

Last night when I finished with the Christmas decorations, I found some pieces laying on my crafting desk from my crafting session with the Winter Globe. I immediately thought of the current Freshly Made Sketches challenge, and there was still time to play.

For some reason, I often find sketches hard to execute, but this one came together in no time, particularly since I had almost everything I needed already die cut and on my desk.

The black circle was the middle from Papertrey Ink's Winter Globe, and the snow also comes from that set. The house and trees are from the Gina K Winter Wonderland die set and I had a small envelope of those die cuts ready and waiting, too. I backed the windows with a scrap of yellow paper for the lights, and embossed the circle with Spellbinder's Stargazer embossing folder. 

The sentiment, embossed in white and die cut with MFT's Itty Bitty Strips, is from The Greetery's Sentiment Suite: Christmas. 

It would be wonderful if all my cardmaking came together so easily!

A Snow Globe Birthday Card

There are two important male birthdays in December---my brother's and my brother-in-law's. Their birthdays are separated by exactly one week, and they often get the same card. That will be the case this year as well. I finished one of them yesterday just under the wire for the Inkspirational Photo Challenge which ends today, and later this weekend I'll make a second card. 

All except the stamped sentiment and the background coverplate (Pinkfresh Studio's Snowflakes Coverplate) are from Papertrey Ink's Winter Globe set. Papertrey has two different globe sets, but this one seemed the most versatile to me. I have some ideas (which I hope you'll see soon) for using the globe with other die cuts in my collection. 

The beautiful birch trees are a circle die cut and the snow (die cut with white shimmer cardstock) is adhered to the top of it. I ink blended the background with five different Distress Oxide Inks in purples and blues.

I die cut two of each deer and layered them for some dimension, but then added a small piece of dimensional tape in addition. The sentiment is from Ellen Hutson's Essentials line: Cake, which I embossed in silver on the bottom portion of the globe.

Hope your weekend is off to a good start! I'm hoping to get the house decorated for Christmas and get a little more crafting done.

A Double Celebration

For those of us in the United States it's Thanksgiving Day, and for most of us that means turkey, potatoes, and pies at the very least. Tracy's family has a pretty set menu: turkey, mashed potatoes and gravy, squash, Waldorf salad, and pies. The pies are my assignment, and this year I made two, but as I was finishing up I realized that neither pie was vegan. My sister-in-law is vegan, but luckily Tracy managed to snag an apple berry pie from a local orchard while I put my pies in the oven. My first pie was the mandatory pumpkin pie and the second was a new recipe from The New York Times -- Bourbon Pecan pie. The pecan pie was a huge hit, and I must admit, the best pecan pie I've ever had. That recipe is definitely a keeper.

After dinner at Tracy's mom's with his family, we joined Betsy's family to celebrate Ella's 8th birthday. They had a huge crowd for Thanksgiving dinner--good friends and parents of the friends, and so. much. food. Fortunately, I was too full from our meal to even consider eating more there. I even skipped the birthday cake.

Ella got a coordinated gift and card this year. It's funny, though, when I showed up with the gift both Skylar and Ella commented that I had used the same wrapping paper for Skylar's gifts in September. I'm not surprised. I love the paper, and now there's just enough left to wrap a few small gifts.

Last year I made an Out of the Box card for Maddy, and earlier this year, one for Skylar, so it was definitely Ella's turn. She loves unicorns so the theme was an easy choice. The wrapping paper has sparkly silver stars all over it. I die cut the sky for Ella's card from the wrapping paper.

In addition to the unicorns and the rainbow from My Favorite Things "Fairy Tale Friends" I die cut a cake and some presents from two other My Favorite Thing sets. All were colored with Copic markers and then die cut. I attached all the unicorns to the box with strips of clear acetate so the movement of the unicorns wasn't lost. The sentiment is also from My Favorite Things.

Here you can see the box from the other side as well as the decorated envelope. 

The stars from Simon Says "Be Joyful" were stamped in navy blue and embossed on a silver envelope.  I added three tiny rhinestone stars as well. Ella is my "sparkly" granddaughter.

And, finally, you can see that the card fits into a standard A2 envelope--and the metallic sheen of the silver envelope can be seen as well.

I'm entering this in the Happy Little Stampers: Anything Goes with Dies challenge. With the exception of the sentiment, everything was die cut.

If you celebrated Thanksgiving today, I hope your day was blessed with family, friends, and good food. 

 

The Flower Challenge

The Flower Challenge is looking for floral cards with embellishments. In addition to creating sets of Christmas cards throughout the year, I've made a few single cards. 

I originally pulled out the Memory Box "Blooming Poinsettia" die for a big project as a Guest Designer. In the end, I made another card for that project, but had a quite a few poinsettias left over. The vellum circle was cut with Papertrey Ink's "Shape Shifter: Circle 1." I die cut the flowers from pink and white cardstock, but added some light ink blending in pink to the center of the white poinsettia. 

I added silver pearls to the centers of the poinsettias, and an additional three to the vellum circle. The sentiment is one of Waffle Flower's "Essential Christmas" premade die cuts.

Thanks for stopping by! 

 

Fanciful Snowflake

A coverplate that had been out of stock for months arrived in-house at Papertrey Ink last week. When I put the order in, I added the Fanciful Snowflake hot foil plate as well. Yesterday I spent some time just foiling with holiday and background hot foil plates. I should have done some of it much earlier, but I now have a wonderful stash of foiled holiday sentiments which you'll see later for sure. I love this beautiful snowflake, and although it's large, it makes a wonderful clean and simple card. 

I used a holographic foil from Spellbinders for the first time, and it's just stunning in real life. You do get a good sense of it in the photos, though. It's also a bit hard to tell that the card is a dark navy blue.

It really didn't need any embellishment, but I added one iridescent jewel from Pinkfresh Studio to the center of the snowflake.

I didn't trust my hot foiling skills enough to try and hot foil a sentiment onto the card front. This sentiment is from Gina K's "Blizzard" which I embossed in silver and die cut.

I'm entering this in several challenges. First, CAS on Friday where the challenge is Sparkle (and this is very sparkly in person). Next to The Paper Players who are looking for CAS Christmas cards. Then Simon Says Monday Challenge: Fun with Foil, and finally, the Merry Little Christmas challenge (my first ever entry) where Anything Goes that's Christmas. 

 

Peace, Love, and Joy

Last week I die cut a series of JOY die cuts from Waffle Flower's "Oversized Joy" set and created a series of cards all with different backgrounds that I had already created or started. This is my favorite of the bunch, and when I saw the Just Us Girls challenge for creating matching envelopes, I knew exactly what I wanted to do. 

The background for this card had already been gold embossed. Although the stamp comes with coloring stencils, I opted to color it with Copic markers this time around. For the envelope I gold embossed just the flap of the envelope that is so much prettier in real life than in the photo.

The Waffle Flower set comes with many different sub-sentiments and this one was gold embossed on black and trimmed out. The gold "joy" was die cut from my favorite gold metallic paper that I purchase at Michaels in the scrapbook department. It's resting on a die cut shadow cut from vellum.

Here's a look at the beautiful textured gold paper. This is off to JUGS as the challenge closes tonight. I've been inspired, though, so I think you'll see more matching envelopes.

 

Coffee with Friends

Coffee with friends is always a good idea, and I wanted to get a card into the Coffee Lovers Blog Hop. I found three stamp sets with cups and coffee sentiments, but chose to use one I purchased some time ago and never used. Along with the Coffee Lovers Blog Hop, I'm making my second entry into the Just Us Girls challenge to make a matching envelope. 

I chose a piece of woodgrain paper for the card base, thinking it would represent the table. The cute doily under each of the cups is from a very old die set from Papertrey Ink called 
Doily Details. So I have very old and very new represented on this card. All the images on the card as well as the sentiment are from the new set from Simon Says, "Cup of Love." The tag is also very old and goes back to the days when I was on a design team for an internet scrapbook company. I acquired a lot of Spellbinder products during those days that have held up against the test of time. The image on the envelope came from another older set that was part of a Simon Says card kit, "Coffee and Tea." I found the heart in a Papertrey Ink set, "Be Mine."

The cups, leaf sprigs, and spoon were all stamped in black and embossed with clear after adding the latte designs with Cocoa Bean ink. (Pretty perfect ink name!) I added some Nuvo Crystal Glaze to the heart. 

I love this Coffee Lovers Blog Hop logo, and I'm sending this off to Darnell's November NBUS since Cup of Love had never been used before.

I have one last card for the JUGS challenge, so I'll be back again tomorrow!