The Most Annoying Graduation Card EVER!!

So the challenge this week at Crazy 4 Challenges was to make a graduation card. Seems simple right? Oh, you would think so…

Oh but I had to complicate things by using Chibitronics lights. These are usually pretty easy to use, I’ve done it before, no big deal! Well, this time I spent HOURS agonizing over why they wouldn’t light. So I get all but one working… try to adjust the last light in the sequence… don’t change a. single. thing. with the other three lights. Now the first three don’t work and the last one does!!!!! AHHHHH!!! {insert bag language here}. So hubby comes to help. After much ‘rewiring’ all of the lights work. By now I’ve tried soldering the lights (apparently I’m very bad at it), taking lights out and replacing them and adding the special fabric conductive tape to try and make them work. Hubby gets them all working. Great. Off he goes, I add the card front, one light goes out!! {insert tearing hear and rending of garments here}. After another hour, I finally get it to work. Ta Da!! (total of 5 hours now working on this card!)

Why oh why did I go to all this fuss and frustration? Well my baby is graduating from Kindergarten this year. I know, it’s a silly thing to have a kindergarten graduation but it is so terribly cute and he loves Chibi lights cards so much. I just HAD to get it to work. He’s actually been in kindergarten for three years now. Being born mid-December, he really wasn’t ready for JK the first year so he only went for afternoons until March, you know, like in the olden days!! June of last year (16/17 school year) he just wasn’t ready for grade 1. He would have been so far behind. He was diagnosed last year with ADHD, learning issues and academic delay. He should get special help but brilliantly, they don’t really help kids until they are already way behind in grade 3. Because many kids catch up by then. ugh…

As we don’t celebrate his birthday, he is only older than the other kids in his class for a week or so before the holidays. When he comes back from break, he will be the same age as any kind with a very early Jan birthday. So not really a social stigma which some parents worry about. So for him, leaving kindergarten is a real accomplishment. More so than for other kids.

Back to the card! I forgot to get a photo of the pull tab which is also the switch for the lights but it says ‘happy graduation’. He saw me making it but he hasn’t seen it finished so he will still be surprised.

I hope you can join us this week with your own graduation card. Don’t forget to link it up and leave a nice comment for the team and their inspiration!

Enjoy, Rebecca

Smile Tropical Card

It’s time for another sketch over at Crazy 4 Challenges! I’d just gotten my May Simon Says Stamp card kit when I made this card so I just had to use it for this card!

As I often do, I treated the sketch as more of a suggestion rather than making my card match it exactly. I also flipped the sketch turning it upside down.  The clusters of leaves and flowers represent the circles on the sketch and the adorable little scalloped circles sub in for the small banners. I also added some yellow vellum, (that matched perfectly! Wahoo!) so the stickers would stand out from the busy background paper. I actually needed to use two layers to get enough opacity to cover the paper. I used a Hero Arts tag die to cut the tags but ran it through my die cutter again after repositioning the paper so I got a narrower tag.

I’ve been having trouble with the program I use to write my blog posts so I’m afraid you only have tonight and tomorrow to play along but I hope you love this sketch enough to make some time!

Enjoy, Rebecca

Camel Train

I had to think really hard about this week’s Crazy 4 Challenge Theme. Trains. That’s very specific and believe it or not, I have NO train stamps! What? I have over 7000 stamps collected across more than 14 years but not a single train? How is this possible? So I had to get very creative this week!

So I give you a CAMEL train! Also known as a caravan, a camel train delivers goods across many miles. Almost the entire card was done with one stamp set by Hero Arts from a recent card kit. Other than that, all I used was a single ink pad, one die and my watercolour paints. Oh, and some embossing powder for the moon but that is optional. I just think it would be pretty hard to leave the moon intact while painting around it with such deep colours. I used a lot of water to do the sky because extra water means blooms which I love in sunset or sunrise skies.

Here is a close up of the sky. I do wish I’d brought the darker colours down lower but oh well. I just love sunrises and sunsets!

I really wish you could see the lovely shimmer in the Daniel Smith bronzite paint I used for the sand. I tinted it darker with a dark brown paint for the shaded sand areas but you can still see the shimmer. Oh, and the intense metallic bronze tintedFinetec watercolour I used for the details on the camel’s tack (or at least that’s what they call the hardware you put on a horse); it’s very metallic! I didn’t mind that the sandy areas didn’t come out smooth as sand really isn’t in real life. I hand-cut the camel because the white edges really wouldn’t have worked well.

I hope you have better luck with your stash than I had with mine and you have some train stamps! Come on over to the C4C blog and join us this week!

Enjoy, Rebecca

Dad Hero Card

Our challenge at Crazy 4 Challenges this week was to make a super hero card! I was a bit stumped by this one! I have one super hero stamp but it’s really old so I pretty much gave it to my son who loves it. Sure, I could have used it anyway but I don’t have any papers that would go with it either! Not really my style as you know!!

So I looked through my stash and found a hero sentiment. Perfect! The Fun Fasts paper is a journaling tag from Basic Grey; the papers are from the same collection all of which I received in a Simon Says Stamp kit from ages ago. I love the floral paper; it’s pretty but not so much that it can’t be used on a masculine card.

I used the shadow stamping technique for the sentiment. With dark ink like I used, you can just shift your paper and stamp again with the lighter ink. However, if you want to use a lighter ink for the main image or sentiment, you will need to emboss it to keep the shadow ink from overlapping. I didn’t want a shiny sentiment so I used some WOW matte clear embossing powder. I didn’t really need to emboss because my main ink was dark but better to do it when I don’t need to then forget when I do need it!

Have you got some cool super hero supplies? Come on over and play our latest challenge with us!

Enjoy, Rebecca

Time for Fiesta!

Last month Hero Arts sent a really fun Mexican-themed card kit. When I first saw it, I was hesitant as it really isn’t my style. But I get card kits for a reason, to challenge myself, and the images looked fun to colour. Also, the large ornate die was amazing!

My kids had been begging me to make a Chibitronics card so I combined the kit with some fun lights. The concept was that in the day, the sun in the desert is so hot, it’s practically white hot. But later in the day, it glows orange as it sets. The mouse is coloured with Rather than colour the cacti, I used Distress inks, some Oxide, some regular, to sponge on some colour. After, because the Oxide somewhat covered the stamped lines, I re-stamped using my MISTI.

In this photo, you can see that pulling out the tab both completes the sentiment and actives the lights with a switch. I’m not thrilled with the obvious three lights rather than an overall diffused light so I may try to add some vellum over the two layers of tissue I used to see if I can get it to diffuse more. Once you get the switch set up properly, it works really well.

I’m not into scrapbooking much anymore though I always intend to go back to it some time. I kind of stalled out after my second son turned about 18 months. I never got a decent photo of him because he was obsessed with my camera; so every photo has his face next to the lens, massively blurred out, his arm in front of his face as he reached for the camera or was crying from being told he couldn't have the camera! But it is International Scrapbook Day so I thought I’d wish you a good one!

Enjoy, Rebecca