Jessie's Boy

Yesterday I attended a baby shower for my cousin Jessica. The best part was that she had her baby a little earlier than first anticipated...actually the day before her shower! I guess the little guy wanted to make sure he was there to see all his gifts first hand. Jessie, the trooper that she is, came to the shower right after being released from the hospital with Devin Jared. We all got to ooh & aah over him...and rightly so, as he is just adorable!!!

Of course I made her a card to go with the gift we got. I used the Little Pieces and Seeing Spots sets for the background and Baby's Firsts for the rest. I just love those cute little baby images...especially the one in the bath tub! You cannot tell from the scan, but I accented the bubbles in the tub with Crystal Effects and Dazzling Diamonds.

Waterfall cards like this one are a little more time consuming to create than a regular card, but it is worth the effort when finished. It's fun to pull on the ribbon and watch the images flip. Jessie thought it was pretty cool.

Punny Little Valentine

I was so excited when I thought of this idea the other night...I couldn't wait to try it. My idea was to use the little cow from the Very Punny set to create a Valentine for my hubby, who just so happens to love puns. I didn't want to just use the cow like it was shown, but hoped that I could turn his spots into hearts. It worked!

Here's how I did it: I masked the spots right on the stamp by cutting out a bit of post-it note and sticking it to the stamp. I inked up the stamp, picked off the post-it masks and stamped my image. So I ended up with a cow that had no spots! I did it this way rather than try to color with a marker avoiding the spots because I wanted to watercolor my image and didn't want the ink to bleed. I do have a black journaler pen I got so I could do this, but it dries so quickly that I never seem to get a good stamped image. After I stamped my cow images I drew in the heart shapes where the original spots had been. I didn't have a real fine tipped permanent marker so I used my trusty old quill pen nib with black India ink. It ended up matching really well, so I also drew in a few more hearts as a border under each cow image.

I wanted my card to read "I love you...like no udder". At first I thought I was going to have to hand write the I love you part, but then I remembered the Double Line Doodles set I had received at the Lansing Regionals I attended back in October. That set has a stamp that said "I just love you". So I inked that up with my red marker to eliminate the word "just" and used my stamp-a-ma-jig to make sure the "I" was in the proper place...after spending all that time giving the cow heart spots I didn't want to do it all over again, so I'm sure glad I have my stamp-a-ma-jig!

The two middle panels of the waterfall card have tiny little flowers with hearts, that stamp is from A Little Love. I really liked the way this card turned out, and was excited to give it to Mike. He really liked it too and was impressed with the mechanics of it, and kept pulling the ribbon to see the images flip. I has been a long time since I made a water fall card, so it took me a while to remember how to make it. I'm really glad I did, because now I have others in mind to create.

I also made a couple little bag toppers and filled the cello bags with Red Hots for the boys. I was planning to sneak them in their lunches today but lucky for them they had a snow day, so my plan was foiled (Teenage boys love to get valentine treats from their Moms hidden in their lunches to be found while surrounded by their buddies;-) Or is it just Mom who loves to think of fun little things like that? Hope you had an enjoyable Valentines Day!