The other night, I decided I needed to colour a bit, so I made a few cards with the kit.

I just have to say that Robin Hood is one of my very favourite historical and/or fictional characters, and probably the first book character I ever had a crush on, so this stamp made me extremely happy.

Just some simple cards to get back in to the swing of things. This doesn’t mean I’m not still working crazily on the shawl… there is a deadline that I’ve set myself for that to be finished, and that’ll come up quickly.

That background was inspired by Crissy Armstrong’s tutorial video on how she does her fabulous backgrounds (you can find  it here). I was made aware of the video by Happy Thoughts & Inkspots.

A rather large order from Paper Garden Projects arrived yesterday, 15 minutes before I had to head to work, so I was itching all day just to get back here and play with my new markers! I used BV04 &BV02 for the dress, and YR16, YR02, YR04, YR07, & YR09 for the dots. The thank you stamp is also from PGP. I love it, but the only purple ink I had was a dew drop-sized one, and inking that stamp felt more tedious than the dots! I loved doing the dots, I think I’ll use that technique a lot!

I really like orange and purple together!

I bought the shamrock ribbon, and rhinestone shamrocks at Michaels. I just grabbed all my green papers and went to it. My favourite part is the grass I put on two of the cards:

While at Michaels, I saw that Martha has a spring ‘Grass’ paper punch out. I am getting quite the collection of punches, so I opted not to buy (I felt so strong!). I came home and dug out my Martha Stewart ‘Icicle’ punch. If you punch it in green, and stick it on the card the other way up, it looks like grass! I sponged the grass for the two cards different colours, so it would blend nicely with each. I’ve used up all my shamrock bling, but I still have a ton of that ribbon.

My other favourite thing is how I cut the stem of Tilda’s shamrock so I could put it on either side of her hand, to make it look like she is hanging off it.

And lucky for me, All That Scraps is looking for St. Patrick’s Day cards! Stamp Something is also looking for green (and cream) on your cards.

Yet another challenge card – I find a few restrictions can really inspire my crafting – a couple rules are good! This challenge was a ‘recipe’ from Magnolia Down Under: you had to use 3 papers, 3 flowers, 2 buttons, and 1 bow. I decided to count the flowers in my paper – I’ve got poppies, lilacs in Tilda’s basket, and the daisies on the oval behind her. My three papers are the poppy paper, the oval behind her, and some fuzzy handmade stuff for the very bottom mat. Buttons are vintage, from my button jar, and the seam binding is from my vintage stash too.

I coloured her to match the papers as best I could, I just didn’t have the right grey-ish teal. One day I will own all 200+ Copic markers. One day.

The sentiment is actually from the googley-eyed fish stamp set I keep using. I thought it a bit of an odd choice, for fish stamps.

And for those who are despairing, I am still knitting. I’m on the second-to-last row of squares on my linen shopping bag. I got a fair amount done at work, but now work is over, and I’ gearing up for the craft fair, so I feel guilty if I’m not making cards! I think tomorrow or Friday I’m going to do a test set-up on my kitchen island. I haven’t done a fair in so long!

I suppose you’d only notice if you’ve bought Magnolia stamps, because the eggs on this card are cut from Magnolia’s packaging! I’ve been saving the little sheets, because I thought I wanted to use them to paper-piece a dress for Tilda. I still can, I have a few. I used the smallest sizes of my oval Nestabilities, and cut out the pink striped eggs. I also used some of the handwriting from the other side of the paper, and there are a few eggs with lacy borders.

I’m also proud because both papers came from my scrap pile – I can’t remember where I used the blue dot, and the green print is actually the back side of a Christmas paper!

The clouds and the little bubble around ‘Happy Easter’ are from a fabulous build-a-sheep set from Local King Rubber stamps. I wanted a cartoon-y Easter look, and I think I did very well at that. The card was inspired by the fact that Magnolia Down Under has an Easter challenge on right now, and the fact that my first craft fair is March 13th, and I have no Easter cards yet!

Today’s card was inspired by some old journaling tags that I bought  last year and haven’t yet used. Not sure why I bought them…. probably for use in my recipe scrapbook, but they’re much too small for recipes! I thought ‘Today is the day’ would make a great birthday card, for the Just Magnolia birthday challenge.

I also wanted to use this Magnolia stamp that I hadn’t inked up yet.

I love the sunflower and her little tiered dress. I had trouble getting all the cross-hatching on the bottom tier to stamp properly, but it fades out naturally I think. I think someday I’ll use this stamp, but cut the sunflower off and have her holding a balloon or something else, I think it’ll be very versatile!

I also had a go at making some paper flowers – I punched these circles from an old, falling-apart book I have. I’ve been meaning to do this for a while, but it took a challenge from All That Scraps (book/newsprint) for me to do it!

I just used brads for the centers; I think it would be nice to use some of my vintage button stash, but I couldn’t be bothered to find needle and thread when I was making them, I just wanted to keep going! One flower is just rounds, the small one I fringed with my scissors, and the other one I folded then rounded the corners to give a petal shape. I rubbed a gold inkpad around the edges so they’d have a bit of shine too.

I don’t usually decorate the inside of the cards, but I stamped Happy Birthday inside this one with red ink. I used a brown Spica glitter pen for highlights in Tilda’s hair, a clear one on the lace at the bottom of her dress, and yellow Distress Stickles on the centre of the sunflower.

I love combining stamps from different companies almost as much as I like combining papers from different lines. I decided that this window stamp from Local King needed someone peeking through it. I don’t have any people stamps except Tilda, so there she is!

I stamped the window in brown ink on to a kraft paper envelope that was in my scrap bin, then coloured it with Copics. The bricks are R27 with a bit of W00 for shading.

I inked up just the top part of Tilda with Bike, and stamped her in brown on white Copic paper. I coloured her red to match the bricks, and those red pears in the background paper.

The sentiment (seconds minutes hours days weeks I Miss You) is from Penny Black. I stamped it in brown on to some twill ribbon. It’s easiest to read from a distance, I wish I had a fine brown multiliner to touch it up, but I only have black.

I coloured in Kitchen Tilda to match the paper. I rarely do this, I usually colour images with no idea what I’m going to do with them, then try to fit them to papers.It is much easier to get a cohesive card when you do it the other way, though!

I broke down and finally bought some Nestabilities dies, and I have to say I love them. I bought the set of 4 oval sets, thinking they’d be the most versatile, and I love using them already. I have a Cuttlebug machine, and they go through perfectly.

The buttons are all vintage buttons from a jar I bought at an antique store, and the ribbon I coloured with a Copic marker so it would match too. The Blue button was a shank button, but I managed to break the plastic shank off with pliers so it would lie flat. The thread in the little turquoise button was already in it!

I’ve used the Sketch Saturday #90 sketch for inspiration, Magnolia Down Under wanted to see ‘Flowers, Buttons, & Bows’ on your card, and Simon Says Stamp wanted to see ‘3 types of embellishments, 2 patterned papers, 1 image’, so this is a 3-challenge card!

And yes, for the record, I do find baking quite blissful. Cooking dinners and meat? Not so much. I’d take cake or pie over steak any day.

I’m entering it in another Stamp Shoppe challenge, which is to make a card in ‘Swedish Style’. Magnolias are Swedish stamps, and there is a particular look to the cards in Magnolia magazine, but it’s a little hard to imitate without quite knowing exactly what it is. I think the secret is layers, ribbon, and flowers, which I have, but I do feel my card is still much more simple. I liked the pink kitchen-pattern paper though, so I let a lot of it show.

The spoon and the tag were cut from some of my oldest supplies – it was a sheet of various vintagey things.

I gave Tilda a gingham dress by colouring like normal, then going back with the colourless blender and drawing a grid of lines.

I might have to purchase this stamp for myself – I love the whole line of kitchen/chef Magnolias.

If you feel like you’ve seen this card before from me, you have! I made this card and wrote about it here on January 27th:

That original card was one of my first attempts at colouring a digital stamp, and well before I had tried photocopying my images so the ink wouldn’t run. I tried to turn the smudges in to eyeshadow, but it wasn’t enough to make me happy with it, so I just pulled her off the card.

The base has sat around on my desk since them, while I tried to decide what to do with it. I had ordered Tilda and bike on my last Stamp Shoppe order, and suddenly remembered this sentiment from a Local King stamp set. I thought it’d be great to put all 3 of these things together – the card has flowers all over it, Tilda has a bunch of flowers, it’s perfect! I think the sentiment shows love, even though it doesn’t literally have the word ‘love’ in it, so I’m submitting this to the Just Magnolia ‘Love’ challenge.

“If happy thoughts were flowers – I would send you a bouquet.”

Re-using this base got me thinking about my two favourite hobbies – knitting and paper crafting, and how we crafters go about stuff.

As a knitter, if I knit a sweater (or sock, or mitten, or anything) I didn’t like, I would probably pull the whole thing apart to reuse the yarn. It might take me a while to get up the courage to do it, but it is always a definite possibility in the back of my mind while knitting.

As I’ve been a knitter and hanging out with knitters online much longer than I have with papercrafting, I don’t know what stampers do in such situations. Just about every stamping blog I read (you can see my feed list here) has daily posts of perfectly lovely cards. Does anyone ever feel unhappy with their cards? Do they ever say ’screw this one!’ and salvage what papers and embellishments they can?

I feel like with knitters you get way more of the ‘behind the scenes’ of the project. Then again, knitting a sweater can take months, and cards can be anywhere upwards of 5 minutes – but I think that’s a whole other set of musings about crafts.