Just a little Love

Hello blogland!  I have one more valentine's card for this week made from the scraps on my desk:

The scraps were from a Crate Paper valentine collection, the heart stamp is from StampersBest and the love stamp is from Unity.  Tie it up with a little bakers twine from Martha Stewart and I was done in no time flat :)

Next up, Crafting by Designs has two great Guest Designers this month for our new features A Year in Cards and Get Ready for Christmas.  Take a peek:

Heide Dronchi  challenged us to make a sympathy card based on this card - sympathy cards can be hard to make, but this this is a gorgeous card.

Gwen T. challenged us today to make a few Christmas cards based on her  card - simple design with just the right touches.  Want to join us?  Sure you do - there's still time to make some projects for our January challenges at Crafting by Designs - go HERE to join.

Operation Write Home Deadlines

Hello blogland!    I've been working on a box of cards for Operation Write Home and I thought this would be a good time to remind my bleeps of some deadlines coming up FAST:

Easter - due Feb 15

Bunnies and chicks, as well as religious cards are welcome! Please separate "spring" from "Easter" in your packages, as we want to be certain anything for Easter specifically gets mailed in time.

Mother's Day - due March 31It's not too early to start thinking about Mom and Dad cards! Consider sending in a half dozen of these while sending in your other spring cards, just to get our stash built up for the first Moms Day boxes! Also - if you can separate your cards out so that the ones that say "Happy Mother's Day" are separate from the ones that say "Love you Mom", that helps us be able to get the Mother's Day cards targeted to mail first, and fill in with the general ones!

A few special notes regarding holiday cards:

1. With the reductions in overseas deployments, we need fewer cards. (We still need a lot, but much less than before.) Therefore please take your time, and focus on quality over quantity. We get a lot of cards tossed together as multiples - speed is no longer an issue, so we can take time to play and really get creative now!

2. If you're making a lot of cards for any season, multiples OR just a large number, remember to get your cards in TWO WEEKS BEFORE any posted deadlines; sending a couple hundred cards right at the deadline really makes it nearly impossible to get your cards mixed in the last couple boxes!

3. Make "general" cards that can also be used for a holiday - those are the MOST useful to our heroes. Love cards during Valentines season, spring flowers at Eastertime, snowmen at Christmas. No sentiment gives the card a longer shelf life and makes it more flexible for our heroes' use.

Remember, just because the military is finally out of Iraq doesn't mean that OWH doesn't still need cards!  Please consider making some cards for this wonderful organization!  Go HERE for all the details.

A birthday card from scraps

Hello blogland!  I've been catching up on my scrapping and was on a roll this weekend!  I got three layouts finished yesterday in no time using the "Happy Day" collection from Simple Stories - love it!  Today I wanted to clean off my desk and decided to make a birthday card for my next box to Operation Write Home from the scraps sitting there and here's what I came up with:

I distressed the edges to make it a little more vintage looking and popped up the sentiment and banner with some pop dots to give it just a little bit of dimension.  One-two-three and it was done and is already in the box ready to go to one of our heroes.  Don't forget to stop by OWH and check out today's sketch challenge HERE.

More CAS cards and fun techniques

Hello blogland!  I had another fun day at Day 8 of the On-Line Clean and Simple class and have two new cards to share with you:

This first card is from Jennifer McGuire's  Mirror Image Stamping technique and was tons of fun.   I'm not crazy about the stamped images I chose and think I'll be re-doing this one.

This second card is a cut-out shape on the front page and masked that image on the inside of the card.  This was very quick and easy to do but tomorrow I'll be adding a large stamped image onto the front of the card - just too plain like this. 

Can't wait for Day 9 of class - this has been so much fun and given me so many great ideas for CAS projects.