Happy Birthday To My Blog Peeps!

There I was: the beginning of summer, a wonderfully long vacation stretched out before me.  And what better way to spend the first days of vacation than stalking the Splitcoast CAS DT search thread, right?  Especially when Miss Boo forgot that she was supposed to post the results that night!  Anyway, there were quite a lot of laughs that night, and quite a few of my loyal followers are from that thread (and some have even made it to the DT team!).  But the two loyalest of followers and interweb friends are none other than Angela of Paper Cupboard and Emily of Art from the Heart.  You may also remember them from such posts as Birthday Goodies, I'm Awesome, and Paperworks Summer Challenge. Other than their opinions on cold tolerance and meat tolerance, both of them are totally in my head.  And they both make awesome cards that wow me all the time.  Annnnnnnnd, both share the same birthday, which is today! 

I'm hoping Angela might have a chance of getting her card today, but I'm pretty sure Emily won't, so enjoy a sneak preview, gals:

Happy Birthday, Angela!  I just loved this sentiment when I saw it online, and I love it even more spelled out in Echo Park letter stickers.  The green paper as well as Zero the dog are Echo Park papers, too.  Zero is from Eat Cake Graphics, and the party hat is from The Cat's Pajamas, colored with prismacolor pencils.  I used the sunshine impression plate on the red nestie label one because it looked like a party by itself.  This was a hard card to mail off!  Take good care of him, Ang!

Happy Birthday, Emily!  This was another sentiment I saw online that I thought was perfect.  The image is from Rubber Romance.  I've had it forever and this is the first time I inked it up.  I colored the image with my aquapainter and SU markers scribbled on a CD case.  I printed the sentiment in dark brown (no black on this card at all, even though I really wanted to add black hair to one of the girls) using Dream Lover font (which, btw, is a perfect match for PTI's Enjoy the Ride).  And for the rest of you, bless your hearts, we would never judge y'all. ;) 

Hope it's a great day, gals!

Caution: Extreme Sweetness Ahead!

Don't say I didn't warn you....

Good thing my DH is used to such sugary sweetness from me. I've had this photo in my google notebook for ages-it was posted on the Pioneer Woman Photography dog photo contest. And then when I saw the sentiment sticker in my Echo Park paper pack, it reminded me of this mug I just bought for DH, the inside of which reads, "Life doesn't get any better than this." So everything came together in one perfect storm of a card! The boy and girl image is from Rubber Romance, colored with copics. Her dress is paper pieced from one of the Echo Park papers--it even has little hearts on it. His pants are cut from kraft. The dog is from Eat Cake Graphics, I masked his foot and her leg before I stamped her. I colored her with copics, then used prismacolor pencils to add some fur texture.

The frame is another birthday gift. It is the Spellbinder's polka dot frame die. I cut it from PTI Dark Chocolate, then sponged PTI Hawiian Shores for the polka dots. I really wanted to use the frame, but it was originally too small for the image. So I cut it half and used some extenders that I then covered up with the sticker and ribbon:

I decided to just leave it as a frame piece and not make it into a card, so my final step was adding a stand to the back-just a 2x6-ish strip of cardstock scored about 1/3 of the way:

You can also see where I stuck the sticker onto a piece of scrap paper. ;)

I hope everyone is enjoying the extra day off. I think I may stay in my craft room and give today's CAS challenge a try! Thanks for stopping by today!

CAS DT Search: Round 2

Woohoo! I made it to the second round of the CAS DT Search on SCS. Our challenge was to use patterned paper, which normally wouldn't be a problem. Of course, once I was told I had to use it, I couldn't figure out what to do. I also was tempted by this month's Wplus9's Color Cue of aqua, gold, red, and white (one of my favorite card color combinations of all time). I ended up pairing SU Sweet Slumber dp with forty-five minutes of cutting balloons and created this:

Can you guess the movie I was inpsired by? If you can't guess it, I'm not sure I can be blog friends with you. I cut the house out of So Saffron; the doors, windows, and roof from Baja Breeze, and the chimney from Riding Hood Red. I used this Rubber Romance stamp that I got in a RR grab bag for the balloons. I started by stamping it on So Saffron, RHR, and Baja Breeze and cutting out the entire bunch. I planned where I wanted to have the balloons and drew the string lines with a fine-tip black marking pen. Then I stamped the balloons onto various papers from the Sweet Slumber DP and just started gluing them down. I knew if I started to actually plan where I wanted each design, I would end up fooling with it for 3 hours, so I just used my glue stick and stuck each balloon down as I cut it. I added the heart since this will be for my DH.

Thanks for dropping by--I can't believe I've gone almost another week without posting. School is in full swing this week with tests to grade and such, but I keep hoping things will calm down soon. I need to (a) start making some more cards and (b) start scheduling some mid-week posts!