Woodware/StampingScrapping Blog Hop!

Hi friends!  I'm SO excited you're here, and I hope you are too because there are a couple of fun prizes for two lucky winners!!  I've mentioned before that StampingScrapping.com now sells Woodware stamps, so we thought we'd do a little blog hop to celebrate our union!  :)  

My card features Mary of the Woodware set, Mary and Friends.  Isn't she cute?!  I colored her with my Copics and paper pieced her dress.  The sentiment comes from the StampingScrapping set Label Accents, which I adore because they coordinate perfectly with your Nestabilities and have every sentiment covered!  

I added some Prima flowers, brads by Kaiser Craft and some purple floss from my stash.  The layout is this week's Sweet Sunday sketch:

Now for the blog hop!  We're going to start you off at StampingScrapping and have you finish up at Woodware.  You'll see a whole lot of inspiration along the way!  Be sure to leave a comment on each blog for a chance to win the prizes.  Woodware USA will choose a winner from comments left on their design team blogs and StampingScrapping will pick a winner from comments left on their design team blogs. You will have until 11:59 PM Sunday, May 1st to leave your comments. The winners will be announced via email on Tuesday, May 3rd.  Okay, ready to get hoppin'!?  Off you go!  

http://stampingscrappingstore.blogspot.com/

Cindy Echtinaw

Alicia Ekermans  

Anary Baumgarth

Anne Harada

Billie St. Clair

Dawn Knight

Cindy Close

Harriet Skelly

Dawn Saenz de Viteri

Kerry Urbatch

Janine Blackwelder

Nancy Bush

Karen Stark

Suzanne Schmidt <-- YOU'RE HERE!  

Leanne Garner

Sheri Willshire

Wendy Stamey

Stephanie Hester

Wini Bell

Woodware USA blog

Thanks for joining us, we hope you have lots of fun!  Good luck!!

-Suzanne :O )

PS:  This is the Woodware prize package:

PPS:  I recently stumbled upon Ted's blog, and he's offering a $10 gift certificate to PaperTrey Ink.  His challenge is to use purple and green, and four of something (I used four flowers).  There are still a couple of days left if you want to play along for a chance to win!  Happily Ever Challenged #16

Cocoa's thinking of you!

Hi friends!  I'm playing along with my first Cocoa challenge- isn't he cute?!  He's one of the star attractions at Sweet 'n Sassy stamps, and I couldn't resist picking up a bunch of his sets, so you'll be seeing a lot more of him in the future!  This particular set is called Love from Cocoa, and I also used Gifts from Turtle for the sentiment. The challenge was to make a "thinking of you card", and I also paired it up with The Sweet Stop sketch:

In my continual effort to de-hoard, I attacked one of my many DCWV paper stacks. These papers are from one of the summer stacks, but I thought they had more of a spring feel, so out they came!  I have 11 more of these to make, so I can start to restock my Etsy store.  Cocoa was colored with my Copics, but I'm just realizing now that I forgot to add the flower embellishments!  Oops!  I got so carried away with all of the layering I forgot to finish my sketch, but that's okay.  I'll probably add some buttons or something later.  :) I hope you enjoy my card, thanks for stopping by!

-Suzanne :O )

Hapy Parfait to You!

Happy Monday, friends!  I hope you all had a lovely Easter!  I'm very excited about this week's Woodware post, because it was a sketch challenge!  Kerry came up with this fabulous layout:

I've been wanting to make these ice cream cones for a while now, so I pulled out my Sweet Tooth set and stamped three cones on my main image panel.  The ice cream that comes in the set has a line where the sauce should be, but since I wasn't making a sundae, I flipped the stamp over and used the back, which was just a solid image.  Can you guess what my flavors are?  I tried to emulate strawberry, chocolate, and mint chocolate chip- did you guess right?  To get the strawberries and chocolate chips to stay inside the ice cream, I stamped the ice cream on a post-it, cut it out, and used the negative image to cover the ice creams that were already stamped on my main panel.  That way any sprinkles that went outside the line of the ice cream went only on the post-it.  (Hopefully that all made sense!)  My cones were colored with Copic markers and then I used lots of cardstock scraps to repeat the colors of the ice cream flavors.  The pink and mint green cardstocks were run through my Cuttlebug for a bit of texture.  I'm not sure that this card turned out the way I wanted it to, but I think that's because I'm used to using patterned paper!  :)  For my sentiment, I pulled out my Ice Cream Parfait set.  I realize that an ice cream cone is not a "parfait", but I really wanted the other sentiment in the set to be on the inside of the card:  "have a cool birthday"  :)  


I hope you'll have a chance to play along with Kerry's sketch this week!  Rumor has it that there may be a blog hop on Thursday with prizes involved, so stay tuned! ;) Hope you all have a great week, thanks for stopping by!


-Suzanne :O )

Easter Parade of Cards, 2011

Happy Easter, everyone!  Below are the rest of the Easter cards I made this year.  I used lots of scraps, some more Cosmo Cricket Honey Pie papers, and my new shaker pouches from Impression Obsession (finally found a use for the confetti and seed beads I didn't know what to do with!).  I hope you enjoy my cards and have yourself a lovely Easter!


-Suzanne :O )


PS-  Stay tuned this week for my carrot cake in a jar project!  :D

Birthday Bear

Hi everyone!  This is my submission for TCP Tuesday 155, to use this sketch:

I found this to be a tough sketch, but that's why I like playing along with challenges.  I didn't know what to do with that long panel, but as I was going through my TCP stamps, I got the idea to give PJ a woodsy birthday celebration.  I have a small pack of camping-ish papers by K&Co, so I pulled those out and matted the snippets on white cardstock, which was then matted on burgundy cardstock by DCWV.  I'm not great at creating scenes, but I think I did alright here, using the clouds, pine tree, and PJ from the Happy Camper set, and the cake and party hat from the A Beary Good Year set.

I used my Copics, but I wish that I had more colors, especially the lighter ones, when it comes to things like blending the sky.  Hopefully I'll pick some more markers up at next month's scrapbook convention.  :)  You can see that I then mixed at matched the sentiments "please feed the bears" and "happy birthday" from each set to create my own "please feed the birthday bear" sentiment.  I don't know if it's as funny as it was in my head, but there it is.  :)  PJ's belly was paper pieced and he and his accessories were popped up on foam tape.  I added some Offray yellow ribbon and yellow brads from my stash to finish off the card.  I hope you enjoy my quirky little card!  

It's a rainy morning here in NY, so after I get Chris off to work I'll probably stay in and get crafty.  :)  I hope you all have a great day!  Thanks for stopping by!

-Suzanne :O )

Carrot Cake Cupcakes

Hi friends!  I've been going through the older pictures on my camera, and I found these goodies from last year.  I had picked up a package of bunny/egg cupcake picks and liners at Walmart the year before last for something like 24 cents.  I love getting steals like that and then saving them for the next year!  ;)  I made up a batch of carrot cake cupcakes and iced them with my homemade cream cheese frosting.  

I had also picked up these treat boxes at a card store; I think they were about a dollar for 3 boxes- another one of my snatch and save purchases!  :)  I wanted to give each of my co-workers a few cupcakes, and if I recall correctly, each box held 3 cupcakes- not too many, not too few.  Here are the front, side and back views (aren't they super cute!?):

Stay tuned- I have another project involving carrot cake that I'm giving my co-workers for this year.  I hope you enjoyed my little goodie boxes, thanks for stopping by!

-Suzanne :O )

HOOse birthday is it?

Hi there!  I'm still sick with a cold, but I feel a bit better after leaving work early and taking a 3 hour long nap.  Hopefully this cold doesn't linger too much longer!  :)  I'm playing along with my first Sweet Stop Sketch; with the sketch we were instructed to use "winged things" for a fun spin:

I stretched the sketch out a bit, but I think it's still recognizable.  As I was going through my new Sweet 'n Sassy stamps, I realized the only "winged" creature I had was from the free set they gave me (whew!).  I could have played anyway, using an image from a different company, but I don't like to do that.  I feel like if a company goes through the trouble of hosting a challenge, the least you could do is use their stamps!  :) Anyway, this little owl friend comes with different accessories, and you can see here I chose the party hat and balloon.  All of the papers are from Cosmo Cricket's Delovely line.  I wasn't a huge fan of this line (one of those, why did I buy this? moments), but I'm loving those super bright hues paired up with the black matting!  This sketch was a great way to show off a lot of different patterns, but hopefully it's not too busy!  I colored the owl and hat with my Copics and paper pieced the balloon.  The sentiment and its mat were cut with my Nestabilities, and I added two Prima flowers and Making Memories brads to finish off the card.  After all my hesitation about the collection of papers, I really love how this card turned out!  The inside reads "i hope it's a hoot!" (sentiment by Hampton Arts).  I hope you all enjoy my florescent creation, thanks for stopping by!

-Suzanne :O )

You're Grate!

Hi friends!  This is a fun birthday card I made for my uncle, who I hope likes to barbeque!  lol  I really went to town with this Inky Antics stamp set:

I made my own patterned paper with the smaller stamps and colored the chef and grill with my Copics.  The patterned paper has been sitting in my stash for years unused but it fit perfectly with this card! I believe it's one of those dollar store packs by Miss Elizabeth's.  I used this week's Sweet Sunday sketch for my layout:

I used my Fiskars ShapeCutters for the two circles, my Nestabilities for the lacy circle, and my Stampin' Up ticket punch on the grey stamped paper.  I added some olive green brads to pick up the green in the chef's shirt.  I really love the sentiments in this set; I stamped "happy birthday hot stuff!" on the inside of the card- my uncle always loves silly/humorous cards.  :)  I hope you get the same kick out this card that I do!  Thanks for stopping by!

-Suzanne :O )

Butterfly catching

Hi everyone!  Happy Monday!  Time for another Woodware challenge!  This week we were asked to use die-cuts and/or punches, so I whipped out my fabulous new stamp set from scrappingstamping.com:

These stamps coordinate perfectly with certain Nestabilities and have just about every occasion covered in the sentiments!  I paired the sentiment with Teddy (from Ted in the Garden) and colored him in with my Copics.  Ted and his mat were cut out with the same Nestability as my sentiment.  The patterned papers are DCWV and the pink and blue cardstocks were in my scrap stash; the pink cardstock border was created with a Fiskars punch.  For a final touch, I added some purple gems to balance out the other colors.  I hope you'll have some time to play along with us this week, we'd love to see what you can do with die-cuts and punches!  Here's the link:

Woodware USA Challenge #23

Thanks for stopping by, have a great Monday!

-Suzanne :O )

Sweet & Sassy birthday blog hop!

Hi everyone!  I came across Sweet 'n Sassy Stamps when I went to the stamp convention last week, and I bought a whole bunch of their adorable stamps.  This weekend they're having a birthday hop on their blog, so I couldn't wait to crack open some of my sets.  These are two separate stamps, but I did a little masking so I could put the donut in front of the coffee:

  


I used some Recollections kraft cardstock to paper piece the cozy on the coffee cup.  ;)  Of course I used my copics and Nestabilities; the pink patterned paper is DCWV and the green stripes are K&Co.  I used a Stampin' Up! scalloped circle punch to mat the sentiment, from another set:

  I see myself using this sentiment over and over again- perfect for all those cupcakes and fruits, etc!  This card took a little while to create with the masking and coloring, but I love how it turned out!  I hope you like it, too!  Thanks for stopping by!


-Suzanne :O )


PS- Feel free to link up if you have any Sweet 'n Sassy stamps!

little one

Good morning!  I've gotten myself sick for the second time in about two weeks, so I'm staying in today to rest (and make cards- a scratchy throat can't slow me down! lol).  A family friend should be having her baby boy in a week or two, so The Cat's Pajamas challenge this week (to make a baby card) was perfect timing.  The image is actually from a Christmas stamp set, but when I first got the set, I remember thinking it wouldn't be too hard to turn it into a baby card, especially a baby shower card.  Here's the set:

By using my pastel Copics to color in the presents, I totally changed the feel of the image.  :)  Of course I used my Nestabilities to cut the image panel, and I'm very excited about my new "small" labels 4 Nestabilities.    They coordinate with the original set so they create a smaller border around the edge; they look much better when matting an image.  I wish they would put out "small" sets for all of their shapes!  I used lots of pastel scraps and some kraft cardstock and played around until I got a layout I liked.  I embellished the card with some smoky blue ribbon and a jellishment by Doodlebug.  

My goal for today is to finish the rest of my Easter cards and get them ready for the mail.  I hope you all have a wonderful weekend, thanks for stopping by!

-Suzanne :O )