The current challenge at Time Out is "Brave!"

I have the perfect card for it made for one of my granddaughters when she gave up a persistent habit that she needed break. As we all know, breaking a habit is NOT an easy task, and even more difficult, I think, for a little one. We had a celebration, and this is the card I took.

With four granddaughters, I was pretty sure I'd come up with a variety of reasons to use this fun My Favorite Things stamp, "You're Super." I started by blending bright yellow ink through the MFT's "Radiating Rays" stencil on white cardstock and added it to a red card base. I stamped the Super Girl image on X-Press Blending paper, colored her with Copic markers and fussy cut it out. I also stamped the silhouette of the city on separate paper and again fussy cut it.

Once I had arranged those pieces on the stenciled background I decided on a strip of white cardstock with a thin border of black for the sentiment. That gave our Super Hero a place to stand.  The sentiment was just perfect for the occasion, and I added a die cut arrow from Papertrey Ink's "Get to the Point" dies. The card was a big hit, and I'm quite sure there'll be other opportunities for a Super Girl stamp set.

It's beginning to cool down here, and our flowers (except the gorgeous dahlias) are beginning to fade. Another sign of autumn's arrival is the number of card challenges focusing on nature, leaves, and autumn colors. Here's my first (but probably not my last) autumn focused card.

The beautiful leaf is from The Stamp Market's "Large Leaf" stamp set. I positioned it in my Misti, and then applied the color directly to the stamp with some Distress Ink cubes, and lightly misted the stamp with water, and stamped it on Altenew's watercolor paper which has become one of my favorites. 

I love the way the inks blend together but the veins in the leaf remain distinct.

I die cut the stamped panel with The Greetery's "Crimped Frame" and layered it on card base of Asparagus cardstock. The sentiment came from a Papertrey Ink Make-It-Market kit, "Color Pops: Autumn" which I haven't used in a very long time. 

I'm entering this in three challenges: Addicted to CAS: Nature, CAS Mix-up: Watercolor & Autumn Colors, and Happy Little Stampers Watercolor: Anything Goes.

My inspiration for both cards today came from the Inkspirational: Challenges blog. You'll see why my first idea wasn't quite right, but I'm happy with both cards, and think they'll be a good addition to my stash of masculine cards. Here's the inspirational photo:

I'm a big fan of black and white cards so this photo called out to me. I also have the relatively new Simon Says "Geometric Builders: Circles" which I haven't used so it seemed like perfect timing. I did not, however, have this photo in front of me when I created the first card.

Although I like the card, it's clearly missing the stripes and there are half circles rather than whole circles. So today I made a second card more in keeping with the photo.

A better representation of the photo inspiration and I like this one, too. Photographing the scored lines, however, turned out to be a challenge, but I finally managed that. I couldn't, however, seem to get consistent, good lighting without shadows this morning. I finally gave up so the card for the challenge could be posted before I leave for the afternoon.

The patterned papers for these cards are all from My Favorite Things. The sentiments on the first card were stamped with Papertrey Ink's "Birthday Bash" set and MFT's "Bitty Birthday Wishes." The sentiment on the second card is from The Stamp Market's "Handwritten Hello."

We've been on the road every day this week going back and forth to the cottage Tracy's family rents every summer on Honeoye Lake. After all the hot, humid days, we've got cool temperatures this week. Yesterday came close to chilly at the lake. The sun's out today, though, so hopefully that will help. We're trying to stay outside as much as possible and masking indoors since we're being extremely vigilant about our behavior having five unvaccinated grandchildren. I must admit, it's frustrating to return to this kind of restrictive behavior after having seen the light at the end of the tunnel earlier this summer. But until the more contagious variants disappear, it's a necessary change.

The time frame for Altenew's Pair-a-Flower contest is narrowing, and I've had an idea for it for several weeks. Here are the details about the contest:  Challenge: Create a project with any Altenew floral design. Pair it with the same flower in real life or a similar floral design and photograph the two side-by-side. My initial idea was to take a photo of a coneflower at the garden center since none of mine came back this year, but when I was there on Saturday, I found this bright orange coneflower and brought it home. Hopefully, it will thrive along our new fence.

There are actually multiple blooms, but I focused this photo on just one bloom as a reference for coloring the Altenew: "Build-a-Flower: Coneflower." Here's the card by itself. It was colored with Copic markers and detail added using my Lyra Rembrandt colored pencils. I've had this set for years and years and rarely think to use it. Today neither the Polychromos or the Prisma colored pencils sets had a dark enough orange pencil. I do have a more extensive set of the Lyra's and should remember to use it more often.

I added some dimension between each of the layers, using dimensional tape for some and extra layers of cardstock under the patterned paper square..

Here's the photo of the card and the flower together which I'll be posting on the Altenew Contest site.

There is at least one card challenge out there that does a different Tic-Tac-Toe challenge each time. I'm alway curious about them, but somehow rarely participate. One of my favorite challenge sites, The Paper Players, has a Tic-Tac-Toe challenge this week. This is a weekly challenge, and I frequently miss those too. This time I was determined to play along.

When I recently went through and purged nearly half of my 6X6 papers, I found some old favorites. One pack was a My Mind's Eye set with gold accents which I loved when it came out. I found this blue and bronze combination which I thought would make a good masculine birthday card. I need two of them in September, and I chose the row across the middle: birthday/die-cut/masculine. 

The 6X6 paper gave me two 3" pieces. I adhered it to the left side of the card, and used another piece of paper from the pack to die cut the word "celebrate" and cut a narrow strip of bronze metallic paper along the side. 

The die cut sentiment is from Papertrey Ink's "Wet Paint II" set.

Thanks for visiting. I hope you have a great week!

When thinking about creating a card, I rarely think to use a sketch. I'm usually more inspired by a photograph, a set of colors, a theme, or a design element. This time, however, when I saw the sketch on The Paper Players, I knew it would be perfect for a piece I colored as part of the 30 Day Coloring Challenge. Here's the sketch:

In a recent reorganization project (more on that to come later) I found some patterned papers I thought would go well with the small stamped piece I had created earlier. 

The paint brushes come from a very old Papertrey Ink set, "Friendship Jar Fillers." The Friendship Jar sets have long been a favorite, and I come back to them over and over. This card is for my nine year old grandson who gave me two handmade gifts when he came to visit. He's a budding artist, so the paintbrushes seemed appropriate. The patterned papers come from an older 6X6 pad by Sunny Studio, "Gingham Jewel Tones."

The paintbrushes were partially stamped to fit on the PTI die, "Spiral Notebook Page," and colored with Copic markers. I used some Glossy Accents to add some dimension on the paint. The sentiment is from The Stamp Market. I embossed it on black and added a narrow cardstock strip to the bottom of it. 

My crafting time seems to get divided between my reorganization efforts and card making. Hoping to get more of both done this weekend.

Thanks to a friend who cut and shared some of her daisies from the Altenew "Daisy Layering Set," I have a card for the current The Flower Challenge—use a die. The entire card was created with dies.

The first step was to create an ink blended background for these pretty daisies. I added that to a Dark Chocolate (PTI) cardbase and then set about creating the daisies. 

Getting the daisies and leaves arranged on the card took a bit longer than I expected. I wasn't sure what to do about a sentiment, but found this "Smile Circle" from Simon Says which worked out perfectly. It was die cut from Dark Chocolate cardstock as well. 

It's good to be back in the craft room. I'm in another purge and organize phase. Sometimes I think that's as much a hobby as card making! But, in fact, I found a few things which inspired some cards. Off to link up with The Flower Challenge which ends this afternoon.