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.

Just a simple card for the CPS sketch for this week. I haven’t had much time to sit down at my desk this past week – but work will certainly ease off to nice and leisurely by this Saturday. I’m very excited.

I used an orange card base, and two patterned papers I found in the sale section of the scrapbook store. I covered the join with a piece of Scor-Tape, then poured orange microbead glitter all over it. I like that the sentiment could be for any occasion, including every day!

This is the second image from The Greeting Farm’s relay giveaway. It’s snowy and cold here, so I wanted to make something with bright colours – and I don’t think there’s a brighter combination than orange and pink!

Again, I had problems with printer ink bleeding. She’s wearing smokey eyeshadow now! The worst culprit was actually my clear Spica glitter pen. It really made the ink around her eyes drip.

The layout was inspired by this week’s Friday Sketchers. The orange flowers were in a prize from The Stamp Shoppe. I used them all up on this card, but I felt it needed lots of flowers to go with the patterned paper. The brads I just bought, they’re flocked! So the flowers have fuzzy little centres.

I based this card on the sketch from Sketch Saturday this week. I wanted a sentiment that said something about family, but I don’t have an appropriate one, so I left it blank. Blank cards are more useful, anway!

Simon Says Stamp wants you to use a punch (or many!) this week – this beautiful one is called Moroccan Lace, and is an EK Success punch. I even used it to make the little corners! And while I’m not eligible to win a prize (didn’t use one of their stamps, because I don’t own any! yet.) Kraftin’ Kimmie stamps has challenged everyone to make a card with no embellishments. I don’t usually go to crazy with that stuff anyway though.

The stamp I bought from Local King Rubber Stamps when they were at the big craft fair here in November. It came in a set with lots of great safari animals that I’m looking forward to using.

I have also decided to start selling some cards in my Etsy shop! I love making them, but if I don’t sell them, they’ll pile up faster than I can send them. I’ve got a couple listed so far, and have made a Rycrafty Paper Goods section for the store. I’m not too concerned about recouping the money spent on supplies – I love doing it. It’ll be nice to know they are going to be sent, and to have a few extra dollars for more paper. I mean Copics. I mean for the Visa.

You can’t see a lot of the grey patterned paper – I have some leftovers to use on another card though, so I’ll make sure it is all visible on that one. The pink and grey colour scheme is from Cute Card Thursday’s challenge, and the sketch is from Papertake Weekly.

I coloured this stamp entirely with grey Copic markers. I used all the ones I have: C00, C1, C3, C5.

Work has been pretty crazy recently, but we’ve started working 12-8 instead of 10-6, so I actually have some daylight hours in the morning when I can take photos! Hopefully no more ‘sitting on the laptop’ shots for a while. I haven’t managed many more rows on my toe socks. I’m thinking I might make finishing them, and my Druid mittens my project for the Knitting Olympics.

I’m hoping to have lots of Olympic knitting time, because the Olympics are Feb 12-28, and as of Feb 13, all my shows are open, and I don’t have to be at work until 6pm each day.

A lot of the time I don’t quite measure when I’m cutting my paper. For stuff like those panels that have the small border, I usually eyeball it. I measured this time, and it’s all nice and even! Fancy that! I should stop being so lazy.

The ribbon is a brighter pink than the paper, which I think adds a nice pop. The background layer, and the one under the bunny is some handmade paper. The tag called it ‘grass seed paper’. It’s got a wonderful soft texture. I ruffled the edges of the circle under the rabbit a little too for more texture.

I coloured the stamp with my Copic markers, using Cool Greys for the rabbit, and Warm Grey for the hat.

I managed to make the horizontal panel out of the scraps left from cutting the vertical panels out of 8×8 paper. It’s actually two separate pieces sticking out from under!

The stamp is from Impression Obsession, and I think it is so cute. The first thing I wanted to do with it was paper piecing, but I also wanted to see what it would look like kept sophisticated and simple.

The red background paper is from my Christmas stash! I’m going to see how much of that I can use up this year so I can buy new next year. The paper lace was inspired by this tutorial, and is from scrap Core’dinations cardstock, as is the mat under the stamped image.

I grabbed this piece of white paper from the place I throw all my Copic-safe paper scraps. I stamped 4 images until I got one just right, then played with colouring different parts of the hearts. On one of this mis-stamps, I thought I’d see how it looked if I coloured the birds yellow. My Y02 looked very odd, so I turned the paper over and realised I’d stamped on the back of some dark brown patterned paper! Luckily, nothing bled through just using red.

The embroidered paper is handmade stuff I found in a pack at my LSS.

I’ve been seeing JustRite stamps around a lot recently, and would love to get my hands on some. I love that you can basically make your own stamps. They could say anything! I love the pre-made sentiments and borders that you can mix and match. I love stamps that let you build stuff. The prize for this challenge is 2 stamp sets and a $100 gift certificate to JustRite! I can’t believe it. If this is the one and only challenge I win this year, I’ll be happy.

I saw someone use this technique recently, and I couldn’t wait to make a quilted background for my card. Basically, you cut random strips of paper, glue them to a base (very securely – I used gluestick, and ended up having a few little squares pop off!) then cut that in to strips. Then offset as you want as you glue to the card front!

This card was made entirely of scraps – the only new thing I cut into was the ribbon. Even the sentiment is stamped on the backside of the butterfly paper that is in the ‘quilt’. The base I glued the strips to was a large scrap of Christmas paper that I didn’t particularly like, but that came in a pack I wanted.

I freehand cut the sentiment, as this card feels very down-home, country-quilt.

Sentiment is Magnolia, punch is EK Success, button brads have lost their label.

I think I’ll be making a lot of these cards (with better glue) to use up scraps.