Play Date Cafe Challenge # 20 and Blog Hop!

I am so excited to share with you that I have been invited to join The Play Date Cafe Challenge design team.

This week the Play Date Challenge includes a blog hop to celebrate the new design team and also to say goodbye to Julie Campbell, who has been on the design team for the past 4 months. To celebrate Julie achievements and the new design team, we are having a BLOG HOP!


To see what you can win and to get started from the beginning, you need to start from The Cafe.

If you came here from Mona Pendleton's fabulous blog, you are in the right place.


Here are THREE ways to give you the best chance to win:

1. Make sure you stop at each designer's blog and leave a comment.There are ONLY 9 total and all you have to do is click on the name! (You must leave a comment at each blog.)

2. Become a follower of The Play Date Cafe...easy-peasy!

3. Play along with this week's color challenge.

All the details on how to play are on the sidebar in The Cafe.

The winner will be chosen by random.org and announced on the 18th at the CAFE.

The next stop in the blog hop is the wonderful blog of Julie Ranae Julie's Open Window. Hop on over and check out her lovely creation for this week's challenge.

Onto the challenge....

This week's challenge is a creativity challenge:

Look at those lovely greens with just a hint of lavender. I was inspired to use the colors along with a the neutrals included in the picture.

My card based on the challenge:

The background is from Hero Arts Antique Flower Background stamped with the Hero Arts shadow ink Soft Sand. The flowers are colored using watercolor markers and misted to give a slight watercolor effect. I used the same technique on both layers of my butterfly. The butterfly is from a Hero Arts set called Artistic Butterflies. The flower stamp is from Magenta A09150M. The sentiment is from Paper Bag Studios stamped using the Memento Bamboo leaves.

I am very excited we have had several days with 50 degree weather which has me thinking maybe spring has finally started for us. Hope your day is sunny and bright!

Suzz

Just for Fun...

I was playing around with some stamps on Friday night and ended up creating this:
It is hard to see on this picture but the center of the clock has been cut out and you peek into the inside of the card. I had stamped this bird for the IO challenge but ended up not using it so it came over and nested on this card.

The stamps are all Hero Arts with the exception of the bird which is Impression Obsession. The ferns are stamped using the new Ranger Distress Ink Crushed Olive.

Products:

• Hero Arts - CG138 Ledger
• Hero Arts - CG166 Big Clock
• Hero Arts - K5314 Silhouette Fern
• Hero Arts - CL388 Live in the Moment
• Hero Arts - CG125 Friends Definition
• Versafine - Vintage Sepia, Toffee
• Impression Obsession - Bird with a Candy Cane
• Ranger Distress Inks - Crushed Olive
• Watercolor Pencils
• Pearls, Raffia
  

Going to have a few busy days with work and family. So no stamping for me for a few days. Maybe I will have to stamp up a few images to color at lunch. :)

Have a lovely Sunday!

Suzz

Impression Obsession Challenge

The Impression Obsession challenge this week is to make a card for Easter. You can find the challenge HERE.

I have a couple of fantastic Cover a Card stamps from IO and wanted to use them on this card. I don't have any Easter stamps from IO so I was a little bit more spring like in my approach.

I went on line and looked for some Easter quotes and found this lovely one from Alice Palmer. I like the idea of life, love and peace being re-born as I think of Easter and spring as being like that.

The background on the green is stamped using the new Ranger Distress Ink Crushed Olive and uses the IO stamp Tapestry 2. It is a very pretty flowery background.

The second IO stamp I used was the Greenery stamp on the background of the words. I stamped that using the Pear Tart color from Memento.

The last stamp I used from IO was the birds and they are stamped using the versafine vintage sepia and kissed onto the tapestry stamp.

The punches are all EK success.

Well off to clean the house... ARGH! I hope you have a lovely Saturday and lovely weekend. I have a post lined up for tomorrow which I think is really cute.

Suzz

Butterfly Tag #2 and Tag #3

Here are the other butterflies... inspired by Louise's challenge this week to create a tag with brown and one other color.

I tend to create multiple versions of any project I do. So the butterfly I created before came from this butterfly. I wasn't sure I liked the mix of stamps I used on the butterfly. After I finished the first one I came back to this butterfly.
I put it on the tag after the butterfly was completed. The second butterfly was inspired by the idea of using the medallion flower stamp on a glimmer mist background. I really love the effect of the petals as butterfly wings but got stuck on the body of the butterfly because of it's size. Sometimes when I take pictures of something it loses something in the translation. This is one of those. Other times the card looks better in the photo. But definitely the softness of this didn't translate into the picture.

The stamp used on the bigger butterfly is the Hero Arts Medallion and the background is glimmer mist taffy.

The smaller butterfly used a variety of stamps from Stampabilities, Penny Black, and Hero Arts.

The inks were Memento Rose Bud, StaZon Fuschia, Memento Rich Cocoa, and Versafine Vintage Sepia.

The tag shape was traced from a Hero Arts Clear tag.

Hope you have a lovely day!

Suzz

Play Date Cafe Challenge #19

Look at this lovely lemony goodness that is the color challenge for Play Date Cafe this week:

Yellows are such a fantastic spring time color... So bright and cheery when the skies tend to be grey and gloomy.

I have been wanting to ink up the Flower Trio stamp from Hero Arts and this gave me a chance to play with it using my yellow copics.

The image is stamped using Memento Rich Cocoa and colored using the Copic markers. The background is stamped using Memento Dandelion and the sentiment (Hero Arts) stamped with Memento Rich Cocoa.

The circle and scalloped circles are die cut from the spellbinders nestabilities.

A simple card but very bright and cheery.

Thanks for stopping by... Hope the sun is shining by you.

Suzz

Tag Tuesday Challenge #42

Louise's challenge this week is to create a tag with brown and another color. What a great choice pairing brown with another color...


I actually created 3 butterfly tags for this challenge and I am sure the other two will show up in the near future... I decided to use brown and pink together as they are such a beautiful color combination.

The template is from Fiskars. I hand cut the shape.

The music background is a stamp from Stampabilities which I stamped in the center of the butterfly using brown pigment ink. The flowers are are Penny Black stamp and I stamped it twice with a lighter pink and a darker pink.

The edges are distressed using Memento Rich Cocoa. The flower is a flower from Prima Marketing Camelot Roses. I punched the leaves using an EK success punch. The antenna were a pearl accent found in the wedding section of the craft store.

Thanks for stopping by..

Suzz

Red Ink on Kraft

I saw some lovely paper at the store which had red damask against a kraft paper. I wanted to see if I could re-create the effect. This is what I came up with..

I couldn't get the same color of red on the kraft. I tried several distress inks and ended up using the fired brick.

The background image is the elegant brocade stamp from Hero Arts. The sentiment is from Verses (Grow Old) and the flowers are Prima. I used the friends cling stamp from hero arts on kraft cardstock. I heat embossed with white embossing powder and punched leaves to accent the flowers.

I hope you are having a fabulous Monday.

Suzz