My birthday presents from Stamper's Best

This year I bought myself a bunch of stamps from Stamper's Best. I had dressed up in a Steampunk costume a few times over the last few years so I bought some Steampunk stamps.

I also bought two types of the cards to organize the stamps (the clear plastic and the laminated cardstock) to see which I liked. I was storing them in empty CD cases but I now have so many it's hard to see what I have. I discovered I like the laminated ones better because I have a bunch of clear stamps and it's hard to see what is on each side with clear stamps and the clear sheets (as you can see in this picture). I want to put the stamps on both sides so when I ordered more, I got the cardstock ones. I noticed my clear stamps were sticking to the CD cases and were hard to get out, so I'm putting all my stamps on these cards.

I also got a few other stamps. I love the saying on the coffee one and the alarm clock one (You may have to click on the coffee one to see the saying. It says "Coffee gives me unrealistic expectations of productivity). I loved the Japanese star background stamp and the Christmas ones. I also loved this beach chair stamp. I figured it would work well for beach pictures from several of our vacations.

I also got a camera stamp as a free gift. I love it! I had thought about getting a stamp set with a camera in it but I didn't think I'd use the other ones, so this is perfect!

One of my Christmas cards for 2013

I decided that I'd try to make some of my Christmas cards this year. I had bought a Christmas ornament stamp earlier this year from Stamper's Best and decided to make a few cards using it.

I first stamped the stamp in black ink on white cardstock.

After that, I colored the stamps in in many stages using some watercolor pencils but mostly the Prismacolor metallic colored pencils I have. I varied the colors of the different areas so that every card wouldn't be exactly the same.

I then cut around the stamp, leaving a thin boarder of white, since there was no way I could trim all the white. I then mounted the trimmed stamp on cards made from half a sheet of 8 1/2 x 11 red, green, or blue cardstock. I wanted those colors because they always remind me of Christmas. The result is fairly simple but I think they're striking. I may either buy a Christmas saying stamp from Stamper's Best  or have my husband, who has much better handwriting than I do, write "Merry Christmas" along the bottom of the cards.

Christmas Cards

My husband and I were at a thrift store a few months before Christmas and they had card sets with Stampin' Up paper, envelopes, and stickers in them for 50 cents. I bought two of them. They also had Stampin' Up rub-ons that are about time for the same price, which I bought one of. There was a lady behind me that got the remaining sets (or at least most of them). I probably should have picked up a few more of the cards sets, but I think I then would have been overwhelmed. Here are the cards I made. I also used ribbon from my stash and some stamps. Some of the cards I used Stampin' Up stamping wheels on them. The sticker set came with a bird sticker, a sticker with a house on it that says "Tis the Season" and the oval one has trees on it and says "To You and Yours." I liked the way these turned out. I used the Versamark stamping pad for the wheels to make it a subtle background. The sticker set came with red and green cards, cream, red and green cardstock rectangles to put on the cards, and green and blue grosgrain ribbon. There was also blue gingham ribbon included. The border stickers around the patterned paper on the cards also came in the package. The card on the right in the first picture has a stamp that says "Wishing you sparkle, wishing you cheer, for a bright Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year" that is also Stampin' Up. I do love the ornament stamp on that card also. Our Christmas card list is longer than the cards I was able to make with these kits, so some people got homemade cards and some people got foil cards we bought at Target last year.

My Stamper's Best Haul

I ordered some stamps and stamping accessories from Stamper's Best last week and got the shipment today. I'm impressed by how quickly they got everything out, especially considering that my order qualified for free shipping. Free shipping at some places takes forever. Here's a few pictures with my haul in them. : )

The main reason I ordered was to get 10 of these cling sheets. I've been using Arlene's Tack It Over and Over glue on the stamps I've unmounted wood blocks. While the glue works fine, it's sometimes hard to get a good, consistent image with just the rubber. It works better if you stamp on a mouse pad, but I don't always have a mouse pad with me. So I'm going to convert most, if not all, of my unmounted rubber stamps to the cling sheets.

Operation Write Home asks that we stamp the back of the cards with their symbol. If you don't have a stamp, they have to stamp the back of all the cards before sending them out. Stamper's Best gives you a free unmounted stamp with their symbol on it. So glad I can now stamp the backs of the cards I'm sending in instead of making more work for the people who box them up.

I ordered this bat because I thought it was cute. I also loved the spider web background stamp. Not sure why I like the spider one so much, but I do.

I loved this birthday small stamp set. Not sure why the love stamps went with it but I really liked them. For the slightly larger stamps, I paid 50 cents for them to be on the cling mount to begin with. I figured I paid $2.75 for each sheet of the cling, so if the stamps were 4 x 6 or larger, it'd make sense to pay the 50 cents instead of using 20% or more of the cling sheet. That was my thought at the time anyway. Not sure if it really was cheaper, but it definitely is easier.

I got the "Merry Christmas & a Happy New Year" stamp to put on the inside of any Christmas cards I do. I have very few saying stamps that I would put on the inside of cards and I thought this one was good. I loved this ornament stamp. It's so beautiful. I love the ornaments and the way it was put together.

Lastly is the free stuff that Stamper's Best sent. Their site says that they send a free gift with every order, so these ones are mine. I got a binder sheet to put the stamps on to organize them in a three ring binder. I'm trying to decide if I'm going to go to this method instead of the CD cases I have my stamps in right now. I'm glad they sent me a free one so I can see if I like them enough to invest the money into changing over to this set. The other free item I got was a Super 8 Movie Camera stamp. I like the look of it but am unsure what I'll use it for. I guess I'll have to play around and see. Nothing like a challenge. : )

This is my first order from Stamper's Best and all in all I'm impressed with the shipping time and the quality of the products. Thank you so much for your good service.

My Christmas tree

Kathy M at Scrapbookaddict.com challenged us to post something Christmas related on our blogs today, preferably something we did today. I didn't do anything Christmas related today, so I figured I'd post pictures of my Christmas trees. We set up two, one for our living room that's pretty and color coordinated and another one for the ornaments we buy each year for our boys.

This is our living room tree. It has white and silver bulb ornaments, snowflakes, and icicles. I love how it looks this year with the white lights.

This is our tree with the kids' ornaments and other unique ornaments. It's set up in our master bedroom this year, only because it's the room that had a clear spot.

Hope you enjoyed my trees!

Christmas cards, take 3

I had a Stampin' Up party on the 20th of September and got the "Wishing You Cheer" set as part of my Hostess gift. I loved the saying stamp in it and I really liked the clipboard idea in the catalog (it's on page 33). The saying stamp says "Wishing you sparkle, wishing you cheer, for a bright merry Christmas and happy new year!" I also purchased the Bright bulbs Standard stamping wheel at my party. I stamped the card background with the bright bulbs stamping wheel in a dark green. I then stamped the saying stamp in blue on a white piece of paper. I colored the tree and the ornaments with different colored markers and stamped those on white paper also. I mounted the white paper on some dark blue and dark purple paper scraps I had. The tree images I mounted on the card front with regular adhesive. The saying I mounted between the tree images using 3d foam adhesive. I mounted them on a diagonal just to give it a little more visual interest. I really like how this one turned out.

My Christmas card, take two

So I played around with the same stamps I did the card in the post My Christmas card, take one. I used the snowflake cuttlebug embossing folder and the Stampin' Up snowflake wheel. This time, instead of using the metal word by Lasting Impressions for paper, I used the Stampin' Up hostess set called Rivets and stamped the happy holidays one. Since all the other images were snowflakes, I didn't think the Christmas tree in the middle part of the stamp really went with the theme. So I stamped a snowflake on the same color paper the embossing was done on and cut it out and added it to the center of the sentiment stamp. I think it turned out pretty well. I made one card so it had a horizontal orientation and another card so it was vertically oriented. I like the vertical orientation better myself. The second and fourth pictures are close-ups of the sentiment part of the card.

My Christmas card, take one

I want to apologize for not updating for such a long time. I've been busy and haven't taken the time to write about my creations and I'm sorry.

Last year (2006), I sent out Christmas cards that I had made the year before to sell at a craft fair (not very many of them sold, so I had lots left). We built a house last year and moved in 2 weeks before Christmas, so there was no way I had time to make cards especially for that Christmas. Painting all the walls, grouting the tile, and just generally helping build the house took too much time. The year before (2005), I was so focused on making cards for the fore mentioned craft fair (that was held the middle of November), that I didn't have time to make cards and just sent store bought ones. This year I am determined to send handmade cards that were specifically made for my friends and family, not just ones I have sitting around extra (not that they care, but for some reason it makes a difference to me). I really wish I would have started before now, like in July, but life hasn't worked that way this year. So, around the middle of August, I was in Joanne's craft store picking up ribbon for another project (that I will blog about soon), and decided to pick up a Cuttlebug snowflake embossing folder. Then a few days later, a friend had a Stampin' Up party. Since I had spent so much money at Joanne's, I didn't have much left to spend at the party, but I did find a snowflake wheel that I thought would go with the folder and decided to pick it up. Here's my first attempt at blending the two. Not perfect yet, but it's a work in progress to find the exact one I will be making.

I finally had found the glue ink pad I've been looking for since the end of last year when I was at Joanne's in August. It basically works like a regular ink pad, but after stamping with it, you heat it with a heat gun and it becomes tacky, making the perfect surface to adhere Perfect Pearls, glitter, small beads, Pearl Ex powder, etc. I'm still getting the hang of it, but it basically works like the Stampin' Up Heat and Stick powder, but cuts out the extra step of stamping with ink and then adding the powder. You just stamp with the glue pad. I used it to ink the wheel (which is on the light blue paper) and I then added white Perfect Pearl to the images after heating it. I also rubbed the glue pad over the embossed design on the dark blue paper and then added the white Perfect Pearl powder to that too. I then added a small metal saying from Lasting Impressions for Paper that says "Happy Holidays". That is one of my least favorite parts, I think the metal should probably be either silver or nickel, but this is what I had. The two colors of blue didn't work as well together once the designs were added as I would have liked, and I don't think the images from the wheels pop enough yet.

A close up showing the metal phrase, the wheel image, and the perfect pearls added to the embossed image.

So, take two will change several things: If I use metal, it will be silver or nickel finish. I may just stamp a saying on a tag, find a ribbon with a saying that I like or something like that. I will find colors that work better together. I will experiment and try to make the images from the wheel pop a little better.

But all in all, a good start!

Noel's Adjective Challenge

Noel did another parts of speech challenge on her blog at http://noelmignonchallenge.blogspot.com/. I haven't been scrapbooking lately, so I decided it wouldn't be a bad thing to do a layout for it. The challenge ends today, July 6th, so I needed to get going on it. I decided to use the word "Sparkling" and use pictures of our Christmas tree in 2005. (I looked it up and it is an adjective, as in "Our sparkling Christmas tree") I used perfect pearls on both the stamped snowflakes (since our Christmas tree theme is snow) and on the word sparkling. The snowflakes are part of an acrylic set by Provo Craft and the alphabet stamps are Mama mockingbird Nester stamps by Sassafrass Lass. I love how it turned out, it shimmers a little in real life.

Danielle

Winter and Christmas cards

I don't have a lot of these to post right now, since I used my stash last Christmas since we had just moved (December 9th) and I hadn't had time to make any (painting our new house took FOREVER, the last week in October and the whole month of November). But here are the few I have:

This one was fun to make. I stamped the polar bear on white card stock and cut him out. I then stamped my versamark pad on white card stock, covered it with holographic embossing powder mixed with clear embossing powder (I've found the holographic doesn't work well by itself) and heat embossed it. I then tore snowbanks out of the now sparkly white card stock. I cut along the polar bear's head so he could be resting his head on the front snow bank and layered everything on gray cardstock (I have a few in a light blue also) after stamping snowflakes on the cardstock. I love the look of it.

Look, the blue one! Figured if I was taking all of the pictures again, I'd take a picture of the blue polar bear card also.

I held a Stampin' Up workshop and got this set as a hostess prize. It's called riveting. This one says "Happy Holidays" around the outer ring and has a tree in the inner ring. Used my versamark pad for the highlight on the outer ring. I had saved this silver ribbon from a Christmas present I got last year knowing I'd love to use it on cards. I mounted the one happy holidays on 3d mounting tape and hung the present charm from it.

Another one the same as the last, but this one has an ornament charm instead of the present charm.

As I was going through my various card holders getting out the cards again this morning, I found this card we were supposed to give to one of my husband's friends for Christmas last year that he never gave them. Pretty simple, but I like the look.

Danielle