Deals of the week #4

This week's deals are available until 11pm on Tuesday 30 June. Great savings!

• Square Ice Rhinestone brads (109113) were $19.95 NOW $11.97
• Circle Ice Rhinestone brads (109111) were $19.95 NOW $11.97
• Square Fire Rhinestone brads (109112) were $19.95 NOW $11.97
• Bashful Blue 1” double-stitched grosgrain ribbon (111848) was $19.95 NOW $10.97
• Certainly Celery 5/8” grosgrain ribbon (109050) was $14.95 NOW $8.97

Contact me for orders!

Deals of the week #3

This week's deals (and I didn't put up the last two weeks, sorry!) are discounted stamp sets. Here's the list and the discounts. Order before 9pm on Tuesday 22 June! You can view images of the sets on the Stampin' Up! Customer website catalogue.

Très Chic!

Oo La la! So for various reasons I challenged myself to think beyond the 'Cutsy' square for punch art... What's not cute? Sophisticated! Chic! French fashion, Chanel, etc! So I went searching for some images online with "Chic" silhouettes... And the rest, as they say, is history! Here's what I came up with:
I liked the bold red and black theme for this lady. The original image showed her walking a dog, but I kinda like the bag too. And the shoes! And the legs and the skirt!
Among the pictures I found the 1920's fashion... Hats say chic fashion to me.
Next on my list to try is an Audrey Hepburn look. I adored her in her movies... Sabrina, My Fair Lady, Breakfast at Tiffany's, Funny Face and Roman Holiday. And she was the quintessential stylish, graceful and poised lady. One of my favourite quotes of hers is:

For beautiful eyes, look for the good in others; for beautiful lips, speak only words of kindness; and for poise, walk with the knowledge that you are never alone.
-- Audrey Hepburn

Mother's Day card catchup

So here's a sample of the cards I constructed for the Mother's Day stall at my kids' school... First was super easy to pump out using the Manhattan flower embossing folder only available from Stampin' Up! I've used Melon Mambo ink on both the envelope and sentiment. This is a longways half A4 to allow the ribbon to wrap around the top. It was super easy to make 20 of these cards! I used the "my Mum" sentiment from "Occasionally" together with a little heart from "Tiny Tags".

Next, I made these Fifth Avenue Floral cards. Actually quite time intensive as there are three ink colours, but effective and popular with the kids! 10 at a time in assorted colours - also easy to construct.
And lastly (or should that be "firstly" cos I did these ones first!) the inspired by nature daisy silhouette in various colours with a spot of crystal effects and some chunky sprinkles for a bit of interest. These work with almost any sentiment (possibly not Father's Day!!) and I used my much loved Occasional Greetings for "Happy Mother's Day".
Hope that's inspiring!

Guess who came to visit?

For quite some time I've been toying with the idea of a TARDIS card. Obviously fairly simple as its simply a series of straight lines and boxes etc. Well, today I did it!!! The base colour of the card stock is Not Quite Navy with a Night of Navy inkpad swiped across it (faux wood-grain style) and MANY layers! Here's my DL (99mm x 210mm) TARDIS Card!
The writing on the top I printed out in Word using white bold Century Gothic font expanded by 125% in a black background table with three columns, no spacing and fonts re-sized to fit and look like the TARDIS. The text on the door-panel is just pencil scritchings made to look similar to the writing that's on the police box. As last week's BBC episode involved one of the "cracks" being observed through the keyhole of the TARDIS door, I had to include the lock complete with black for the keyhole. Note this is the most recent TARDIS, including the St John's Ambulance round white emblem. When the family had a look at the card, they immediately opened it to look inside. Well, I thought, I really need to go the whole nine yards. So, here's the punch-art I made for inside:
Don't ask for instructions at this point! I spent about 4-5 hours on this today and it was a case of punching, re-punching, shaping, re-shaping to get the look I wanted. The Doctor's and Amy's hair, the Doctor's braces, Amy's shirt are made using various parts of the Extra Large Two-Step Bird currently available in the Autumn Winter Stampin' Up! mini catalogue. The Doctor was going to be holding his sonic screwdriver, but it looked a bit rude when I put it in a hand, so I tucked it in his jacket. His jacket flicks out hugely because I built him from shirt outwards and had gone to the trouble of adding his red braces, so had to make sure they could be seen! There is actually another one under his jacket on his left as well. The picture itself was inspired by a drawn picture by Kinky-Chichi. I find it much easier to work from a drawn picture for these things - someone else has done the hard stuff, simplifying colours and structures down to more basic elements. I'm quite pleased with the results! Feel free to comment!

Inklings Team Bloghop!

Welcome to The INKlings’ Team’s first ever blog hop. You may have arrived here from Christie's Creative Corner or just be visiting my blog, whichever way once you’ve checked out my creations you can continue the hop through the link at the end of this post to the next team member.

What style of cards do we frequently get asked for inspiration for? More often than not it’s masculine cards, be it little boys or grandfathers everyone seems to struggle with cards for the males in our lives. So as a team we thought we’d help you out by providing you with 20 team members’ fantastic blogs that you can hop through and get lots of fantastic ideas from.

Want to win some Blog Candy? Simply leave a comment on each blog and then email Michelle D and let her know you’ve done so and you’ll be in the running for a fantastic prize of 20 handmade cards plus other goodies. Sorry Blog Candy prize not available to Stampin' Up! demonstrators.

Now to the meat in the sandwich! Here's my contribution, a punch art up-sized version of the little "Get well soon" robot in Lots of Bots. I had loads of Kraft cardstock left over after doing those many many pillow boxes for Mother's Day, so I've used up some scraps to make Mr Bot here. He's so forlorn and sweet! Anyway, I've repaired his arm so he's not looking quite so broken...

The pieces I used:

Well that’s all from me. Next stop on the INKlings’ Team Blog Hop is my fellow Children's Hospital volunteer, Fiona Brown. Have fun and don't forget to leave a comment on each blog to win some great Blog Candy.

Anything but Mother's Day cards

So I was looking for inspiration for a card the other day and wondered if any Elite Challenges had been posted. I'm a member of Angela Sargeant's downline and every month Carol Dunstan posts challenges in which any member of the Elite team can participate. So here's my answer to the May colour challenge, Razzleberry Breeze, and also to the stamp set challenge. I was so glad to be making something other than Mother's Day cards, and other than chocolate boxes!
So here's the reason I wanted to do something different - these are the chocolate pillow-boxes I made for my children's school Mother's Day stall last week. All the tags have the "One of a Kind" (c) Stampin' Up! stamp on the back, which I find endlessly amusing when I'm stamping out 300 Mother's Day items!
These are bath salts I put together at the last minute. Neroli, Lavendar, Rose and Patchouli. I should have done Lime for the last lot - Patchouli didn't sell well! The labels were printed up on the computer.
While I was sitting selling raffle tickets with my leg up and an ice pack on my ankle (short version: I sprained it on the way into the school while carrying the box of chocolate things), I made some more tags. I'd already stamped them out and run some tape along the back of the card-strip, so it was just a matter of punching them out. We sold them 2 for 50 cents and they were quite popular. I have stacks left over though.
I didn't manage to take a picture of the 100 Mother's Day cards I pumped out. The camera battery went flat! They were all single layer cards without embellishment and with matching envelopes. They sold reasonably well too - I've some leftovers, so I'll post the results when I've taken photos!

Pillow box bird house

So the specifications were to make something "Ryn-ish" to demonstrate at my upline Michelle's Stampin' Up! Autumn/Winter Mini catalogue launch today. This is what I came up with this morning using the pillow box die:Train of thought was "little bird houses are neat, how could I make one?" followed closely by "How could I make one demonstrating the Big Shot and using my available Sizzix dies?". So, is it decidedly Ryn-like? Michelle thought so and I'm hoping she loved the choccie eggs inside.

Full instructions are available at my demonstrator site.

What? You want INSTRUCTIONS?

Just kidding! ;)

So, Tina has asked for instructions in the comments to my last post. I guess this means I gotta start taking pictures of the elements of my punch art!! Thing is, most of my creations are a one off and involve piecing together as I go to get the look. However, just because you asked, worthy minions (argh, channelling Ming the Merciless for a moment), I will see how I go. Might be another couple of days before something pops up on my blog, but I guess most people who read it are "followers" so will pop up when it happens. I'm assuming that you, Tina, are particularly interested in the Bakugan version.

Ah, it gives me a chance to finish off the dragon card and make a slightly happier one too. Thanks peoples!

Challenges addressed

Carol's challenge was for me to do a punch-art dragon. As she went ahead and did one herself, I was a bit stumped as to what type of dragon I could do... I have a few very gorgeous little ceramic figurines called Pocket Dragons and one of my favourite little characters is one called "I Didn't Mean To". So this card is based on that dragon. I "borrowed" Carol's cave idea and the line of red under his bottom is sticky strip ready to pop chunky glitter on. Didn't quite finish it...

t_lockhart5 suggested I make a card with Bakugan and waved a red flag at me by suggesting it possibly couldn't be done. Well, here's one! Perhaps not terribly refined yet, but I've printed a few images to work from. Also, both my darling sons enjoy playing (arguing, fighting, shouting?) with bakugan so I can borrow some to use as templates.

Finally I did a very simple Google search on Cartoons... Woodstock and snoopy are two of my favourite peanuts characters. And the sentiment fit perfectly with this image! I think I need to do Snoopy's head again - I wasn't careful enough with drawing his eye and mouth. Would love to do one of these with him lying on the roof, or one with him being the Red Baron!
Thanks for the challenges everyone! I'll continue working through the excellent suggestions!