A friend of mine is hosting a shoebox swap tomorrow (if you are in the Dayton area, I highly recommend keeping an eye out for these on Splitcoast - Anna does a great job of running a very organized event), and I got a spot at the very last minute. So, what's a stamper to do when she finds out on Wednesday that she needs to pinch hit on Saturday??? I pulled out all my old designs as well as swaps I'd received for inspiration. There were a few swaps I was going to just copy stamp for stamp, color for color because they are so lovely - but the card creator in me just couldn't do it. So, I went to a swap I created for another shoebox swap at convention (can you believe that before I met Anna a year ago I didn't even know what these things are???). I quickly discovered I didn't have enough designer paper to make the original card again, so I made a few changes to the paper and came up with these 2 cards...
Both use the "Always" stamp set and the "Sweet Always" designer paper, but because each design uses close to a 4" square of designer paper, I couldn't get all of my 20 cards to be exact duplicates of each other (you can only get eighteen 4" squares of any one pattern in a pack of designer paper - which generally isn't an issue because I rarely make more than 18 cards that are duplicates of one another). What you are seeing here is a total of 4 of the 12 designs represented in a pack of the "Sweet Always" designer paper. Each sheet is double sided which is great for cards like these because I didn't have to sit around and decide which patterns work well together, I just used both sides of the same sheet of designer paper.
I also made one additional card with the same designer paper and base color, but I changed up a few of the other elements - including the ribbon just to show the versatility of the exact same stamp and sketch, but different patterns (still from the same pack of paper though - so now you will see patterns 5 & 6)... This card is not for the swap - it was actually the first card I designed on Wednesday, but then I decided to switch the ribbon and the color focus a little bit.
The final project I prepared for tomorrow is a 3-D item for a bonus swap - I'm not sure if anyone will swap with me because I'm a late add-on and so no one planned for me - but I'm hoping at least a few people will have extra of their item to swap. This particular idea is far from unique as I've seen it in the gallery at Splitcoast and on several blogs. I've seen the Owls' nose done with a variety of punches (the 3/4" square folded on the diagonal, the photo corner punch - and I tried the arrow punch before putting together this idea). I used the small oval punch folded in half. One tip for making this work, score a line on your Basic Black cardstock, THEN punch out the oval using that scoreline as your halfway mark. It will make the folding of the beak much easier. I also kind of crumpled the beak a little to give it a slight curve and make it appear a little more realistic. I don't know who came up with this idea first, it wasn't me, but I love it anyway - and thank you to everyone who has shared this idea with the cybercommunity as a whole...
Isn't that owl just the cutest thing! And personally, I love pink and browns together :) See you soon!
Posted by: Susie | October 11, 2008 at 01:37 AM
I love your swap cards. Both papers work very well!
Posted by: Jana Emmert | October 11, 2008 at 07:47 PM
Isn't it great that we have so many options of colors and papers to combine? I love the ones with the polka dots. It seems polka dots always liven things up a bit. :)
Posted by: Debbi (Motherof6) | October 12, 2008 at 05:34 PM
Okay....that owl is the cutest thing ever! My kids have now requested that I make these for their classes.
Posted by: MacKenzie Bruckler | October 18, 2008 at 12:27 AM
This is very cute! I am so glad that we have so many great papers to work with right now!
Posted by: Beth Fox | October 20, 2008 at 11:54 AM