Boy, after weeks of rain we are being spoiled by wonderful warm sunny weather. That means more time outside and less time in my dungeon of a basement craftroom. Still, I need my daily crafting fix so I took a few minutes…7 to be exact and made this card and video so you can see how easy it is to squeeze a few minutes of stamping time in daily during the busy summer months.
Stamps: Large Butterfly, swirls (Tattered Angels), Text background (Stampfrancisco), Frame, sentiment, small butterfly (Papertrey ink)
This card only uses a few supplies, a half a sheet of cardstock, chalk pastels (AKA decorators chalk) and a couple of colors of ink, some stamps and a clear embossing ink pad or glycerin. See how easy it is to use clear ink and chalk to make the above card:
Happy Memorial Day! When I was a teenager I loved to spend hours painting funky designs on my fingernails and I forgot how much fun it is! My girls are always asking me if they can use my nail polish and I decided to paint mine as well, what do you think?
I only had the standard boring colors of red/pink/bronze so I took my girls in to the Dollar Tree and we picked out a more interesting selection:
Cuz really, what is there to go wrong with nail polish, dollar store nail polish is just fine and the LA Colors brand we bought are all cruelty free (it is very important that my products are not tested on animals!)
Top 5 reasons I love nail polish:
It is cheap fun, how else can you spice up your look for a buck?
It’s not just for nails, try altering brads and other metal embellishments with this versatile durable paint.
Some of these colors you will only find in nail polish and it is so nice and shiny!
Every had a run in your nylons? A dab of clear polish will stop it in its tracks.
Finally, even if you do not have time to paint your nails often the bottles of polish look so pretty sitting in a bowl in your powder room, dont’cha think?
I have to admit I am the worst person to have a manicure, I use my nails to open pop-top cans and envelopes and peel stickers off the floor (if you have kids you know all about peeling stickers off the floor!) I untie knots in shoelaces and tackle the peel-off safety stickers on DVDs. It is a wonder I have nails at all! I have to say that this time I used a clear top coat on my nails and 24 hours later my nails are chip-free which is a record in my book!
Have a safe and happy memorial day, drive safely and have fun and til next time happy crafting!
I hope you are having a nice weekend (A long one for must of us in the States) and to celebrate everything at Lindsay’s Stamp Stuff is 25% off Saturday and Sunday!
I have a brand new set in the shop too: Bag Bonanza! You get 7 SVG and printable templates, look at what you can make:
Now here is Cassandra with her pretty coffee themed tag using the Coffee Talk digistamp set:
Thanks for sharing part of your weekend with me! Remember the 25% off sale is going on until Sunday at midnight at Lindsay’s Stamp Stuff. Happy crafting!
I started reading The Book of Awesome the other day and it is all about noticing and appreciating the little awesome things in everyday life. Here are some awesome things for me:
A clean craft space (ha ha doesn’t happen too often but today it was!)
Spraying ink through a stencil-awesome!
Inking up virgin rubbah! Nothing like the first time!
Spraying ink on paper and running it through and embossing folder while it is still wet, nothing better and the results are awesome!
And here is one from the book: Finding out the thing you were going to buy anyway is on sale! AWESOME! I decided to buy a set of Rock-A-Block stamp mounts because the large background stamps I used on my layout (beautiful but low quality and had to get a good impression with) were so hard to stamp-I had to put my scrapbook page on the floor and stand on my acrylic mounts to get them to stamps! So I search for rockablocks and they were 40% off at joanns.com, score! I’ll let you know how they work when I get them;)
Thanks all for today-have and AWESOME day & happy crafting!
This week the woman who has been out town librarian for 29 years retired. Here is the card I made for her using products from Lindsay’s Stamp Stuff:
I rubber stamped and embossed an envelope to match the card! I used a library-style band stamp to spell happy retirement on the removable library card.
She will be missed but hopefully we will see her at the library as a patron now 🙂
Here is a look at the sets I used. They are perfect for teacher gifts this time of year too!
Thanks for stopping by and til next time happy crafting!
It’s easy and inexpensive too! I made this shelf {and the video} yesterday and it only took about 20 minutes and two of my favorite craft materials: Foamboard and hot glue:
You will need 3 dowels 3/8″x48″, a 40″x32″ sheet of foamcore {foamboard}, a hot glue gun and glue sticks, a saw for cutting the dowels, a yardstick, x-acto knife and pencil and white acrylic paint.
Watch the video to see how it’s done:
I kept the dowels a bit longer than my box because I wanted to hang my ribbon scraps from them. I wind up short lengths of ribbon on little paper bobbins and put them on a large binder ring sorted by color. I can hang the rings off the end of the dowels for more storage! You can download a bobbin template (printable & SVG) for free here.
Now my ribbon will stay organized and dust free and I have some room to grow my stash if I wish (or I can just make another ribbon holder!) Here is the cutting diagram from the video if you want to print it out:
Happy Sunday! today was supposed to be sunny….well, not so far! I haven’t seen the sun in over a week and it is getting on my nerves 😦 But at least I can look at all of the beautiful work from the Lindsay’s stamp Stuff design team, that always cheers me up!
Cassandra also made this tag that was too beautiful for words using the fancy flower kit:
Wasn’t that fun to see? You can find the digital stamps used in these projects as well as SVG templates, paper, party kits and more at Lindsay’s stamp Stuff. Thanks for stopping by and til next time happy crafting!
Howdy! Today is Saturday and I am getting ready for a day of face painting and crafting at the Parent Teacher Groups Spring Fair but first I want share a fun card to make and a few crafty tips! When I saw the challenge at the Papertrey Ink blog I had to play along. They challenged up to make spray ink. I misted the kraft cardstock with gold {homemade} spray ink and the ribbon was dies with spray ink too:
I mixed gold pearl-ex, water and a wee bit of gum arabic in mini spray bottle and sprayed my cardstock them ran it through my BigShot in an embossing folder. I thought I would be cleaning ink out of the nooks and crannies of my EB folder after that but amazingly it seemed to all stick to the paper. After the trip through the embossing machine the cardstock felt flimsy so I needed to re-enforce it with other paper, I chose a double-sided cardstock from K&Co and since I hate to see one side of the pretty paper covered up I freehand cut a fancy edge to revel some of the paper below.
and here is the inside:
Tip: to make a fancy symmetrical edge on a card simply cut one side and that the cutaway piece and line it up on the other side and trace it then cut on that line for a perfectly mirrored shape!
I also used homemade spray ink in a few colors to die my seam binding (I have rolls of this stuff in white and natural and I dye it as needed to match my cards. Just mix some water and a few drops of re-inker or watercolor in a spray bottle, shake and spray! I use a heat gun to quickly dry my ribbon. I also made my own stick pin by placing a drop of glue on the pin near the head and sliding on a bead. A great way to use up leftovers!
Whenever possible I like to either make a matching envelope or decorate a store-bought one. I cut a scrap of paper I used on the inside of the card to fit the flap and stamped butterflies and dots from Papertrey Ink on the envie, it makes the card all the more special don’t you think?
Well that’s it for today, thanks for stopping by and til next time happy crafting!
Have you ever needed a light box? Chances are sometime in your crafty career you will need a light box for embossing, tracing or as I am going to show you in this video lining up stamped images to make perfectly spaced backgrounds. I have so many little filler designs that came on full plates of stamps from About Art Accents and I always wanted to make pretty stamped background paper but I always went a bit crooked. I used my homemade light box and was pleased with the paper I stamped like the ones on this card and tag…OK don’t look too close, Mine is not perfect per se but better than any other attempt I have made and this was my first try 😛
As a bonus if you put a sheet of white vellum or thin copy paper on the light box you can use it to view slides…remember them?
All you need is an acrylic “box” frame and a string of white Christmas lights. I love these frames, I use them to store wood mounted stamps and projects in progress, I bought a ton of these at a dollar store once and it had been a good investment! I said in the video that I would share the link to the website where I printed my graphs: http://incompetech.com/graphpaper/ I used the Square Multi width graph paper and the circular Polar Graph one. There are other grids and graphs to choose from and play with too, have fun! I adjusted my line weight (thicker) to 3px, 2px and1px for the square grid and 3px, 1.5px and .5px for the circular grid. I changed the colors to black for both of them because I wanted to make sure I would be able to see my lines through my cardstock. If it doesn’t look right just try agin, it is free and fast to use. You can even save your grids to your computer if you like. I printed my grids on ink-jet transparency but vellum and light weight white copy paper would probably work just fine:)
Here is a close up of the sentiment I used on the card. All stamps are from About Art Accents, seam binding is from Sew true and the pattern paper I used is from the Kioshi line from Basic Grey.
The Frugal Crafter Blog 