Grab bag

I teased a new project on Twitter yesterday, but I'm not quite far enough along to blog about it yet (need my mom's serger), so I'm going to give you some fabulous odds and ends today.

First up, a "masculine" card I made for a family member's birthday.

Here's the deal - let me tell you how difficult it is to come up with suitable ideas for a card for a man. It's impossible, is how difficult it is. Which means I've given some weird ones over the years. My favorite, and also the weirdest probably, was a card I made for Father's Day a few years ago using the gel card technique. I printed out a drawing of a koi fish, watercolored it, and put it under the gel packet to make it look like the koi was underwater. Simultaneously pretty cool and kind of weird, honestly.

So anyway, on to this one. To be honest, all of the elements I used for this card have the potential to be... pretty girly. For the background, I was originally looking at another paper from the same collection that was "light red" - then realized, once I cropped it, it would just look pink. So it was either pink or blue stripes with flowers. I decided that the rest of the card would butch up the flowers a little bit, and went with the blue. The paper (top, bottom, and sculpted border) is all from one sheet of Sassafras Lass paper - I love their stuff so much. The top is the front of the paper, the bottom is the reverse side, and the blue sculpted bit is the border. I don't know now what this paper is called, because it looks like it's discontinued and isn't on their site. The frame (which is not, as my husband asked, a snake head eating the tickets...) is from the coordinating chipboard elements that go with the paper, and the tickets are from the same Papertrey ticket die and stamps that I used the other day on the Get Well card.




This little guy, it seems, is everyone's favorite. I've had a lot of comments from people who've seen it in person. I pretty much love it, too. I picked up a pack of giant paperclips at Staples, then found in my chipboard stash (I have a ton of chipboard) these circles that are just the right size - one for each side. I covered the circles in paper from Basic Grey (my other favorite designer paper company) - this is from the Bittersweet collection, and I used the small card-sized pack rather than the full-sized scrapbook pack. I love that they scale down their paper designs for cards. I stamped an image from the reading set I mentioned a few days ago in Dark Chocolate, stuck the chipboard circles together around the paperclip with dimensional Zots, and tied on a bit of Spring Moss ribbon. Easy and super-cute!