A Little Birdie Told Me

This card started out to be a quick card, but once I got going on it, I just kept having to add details, and the quick card ended up taking a little more than an hour to make. Oh well. It was worth the time, I think!

I started by wiping three shades of blue distress ink onto an acrylic mount. I lightly spritzed the mount with water, and then pressed the mount onto a piece of watercolor paper. I let it sit for a minute or so to let the color sink into the paper, and then lifted off the mount. I had a lovely blue backdrop for my bird. I quickly dried the paper with my heat gun.

Next I stamped the Frantic Stamper Bird on Pussywillow image over my blue backdrop with Memento Tuxedo Black ink. I colored my bird with Inktense watercolor pencils and a water-brush (did you notice my coloring error? I sure did!) I wasn't happy with the willow buds as they were just colored, so I decided to flock them with white flocking powder...and now they look just like little fuzzy pussy willows!



While the glue for the flock dried I worked on my background layer and my tag. For the background I rubbed Faded Jeans distress ink directly onto a piece of white card-stock. I then spritzed that with water mixed with a small amount of Pearl Perfect Pearls. It gave the card-stock a quiet shimmer.

I cut a small piece of watercolor paper into a tag shape and then covered it with a piece of white card-stock (I wanted the sturdiness of the watercolor, but the color and texture of the card-stock). I stamped my note saying onto the tag, and colored it with Inktense pencils and a water-brush. I punched a hole, and added a hole-protector punched from a scrap of my blue background paper.

I punched two small holes in my stamped watercolored image. I threaded a piece of blue baker's twine through the two holes so the ends were to the front of the image. I passed one of the ends through my tag, and then I tied the tag to the image with a bow.



I then glued my background piece to my standard white card, and then used strong tape to adhere my watercolored image to the background, finishing the card.

I hope you have enjoyed my little birdie card!

Phenakistoscope Blizzard

Phenakistoscope Blizzard

by Kathy Berger


Recently I saw a post on SplitCoastStampers for creating a card with a spinning mechanism controlled by pulling a string. The creator of the card called it a zoetrope card, but I thought it was more like a phenakistoscope. A zoetrope uses a cylinder with a strip of drawings to create the illusion of animation. A phenakistoscope uses a disc with slits to create that illusion, and since this card uses a disk, that will be my name for this card even though it, too, is a misnomer since there is no animation involved.

The zoetrope card used clear acetate sheets and a set of self-adhesive foam rings made by a particular home-party-based stamping company. I didn't have those items so I set out to create the card with items I did have and that are readily accessible. To replace their foam rings I opted for some craft foam and some strong adhesive. To replace the acetate sheets I opted for clear packaging tape.

First I cut a circle, about 1 1/4" in diameter, from craft foam that I had covered front and back with the strong adhesive tape. I also cut a medium circle (about 1 3/4" in diameter) and a large circle (about 2 1/4" in diameter) from card stock; the large circle was covered on one side with strong adhesive. Then I cut a large scallop circle (about 2 3/4" in diameter) from a double layer of card stock with strong adhesive between them. And lastly, I cut two small round tags for my pull tab, with strong adhesive on one.

I then put clear package tape on one side of the medium circle and on the non-adhesive side of the large circle.

It was then time to assemble the mechanism.

I adhered a piece of baker's twine (about 18" in length) to the craft foam, and then the craft foam to the scallop circle. The craft foam was then adhered to a card-stock circle a little larger than the foam circle.

I poked a hole in the center of both the stack and the large circle. The scallop circle mechanism was then attached to the remaining piece by putting a brad through the hole in center of each piece of the mechanism, and folding back the brad's legs. The mechanism was then affixed to a piece of card-stock, and then to the card. A tag was prepared to attach the pull end of the baker's twine.

In following a plan to create holiday cards throughout the year, I decided to make my card a snowy blizzard of a card. My card base is white with snowflakes stamped in Memento Nautical Blue ink and then embossed with a Cuttlebug "Snowflakes" embossing folder. My disk was decorated with a larger snowflake on a small scalloped circle (I wanted to hide the brad's head), and finished off with sparkling blue gems. With this snowy, fun card added to my collection, and a few more more every month, perhaps this year I will be ready for this holiday season when it arrives!

Here is a video that shows the steps I took to make the mechanism, and the finished card in motion.



Here is the sandwich stack details:

I hope you have enjoyed my snowy card. Until the next time!

Smiles,
Kathy

Bo Bunny Inspired Cards

Recently FranticStamper was featured on the Bo Bunny Blog. As a Design Team member (team leader, actually) I helped with the feature. Here are the four cards I made:

Floral Fantasy

The circles of the Bo Bunny Bouquet paper of the Ambrosia Collection just screamed at me to make a flower of them. I used three different sizes of Spelllbinders scalloped circle Nestabilities dies to cut the layers. I then spritzed the circles with water with gold Pearl-ex, and crumpled the circles, reopening them gently and setting them aside to dry. Once partly dry, I stacked them, poked a hole in their centers and tied them together with a brad. I then pulled them up around the brad, and gently curled them back down. Once fully dry, the resulting flower has a ton of dimension and is fairly stiff.

I attached the finished flower to the corner of my card, which was made with a corner of the Ambrosia-Ambrosia paper that I fussy-cut and layered over the flip side of the Bouquet paper. The butterflies were punched from the Ambrosia paper and wrapped with embroidery floss to create their bodies.

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Fashion Magazine

The lovely pinks of the Isabella Collection were very feminine. Its pretty patterns made me think of fabrics and fashion, so I created this page from a fashion magazine to showcase some of what I thought were the prettiest patterns in the collection.

The dress was cut from the Becoming paper using the Princess Dress die. The magazine page was cut from the Isabella paper (which was also used to create the main card layer) using the labels 7 die. The chevron decoration was hand cut from the Delicate paper.

The buttons were attached with glue dots, but not before one of them was threaded with pink baker's twine.

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I Adore You

This card uses the Love Letters Collection from Bo Bunny and really takes advantage of how well the different papers coordinate. The hearts were cut from Keys and Puzzle, while the Pinking Circle was cut from Notes. Notes was used for the bottom layer, while the next layer was from Puzzle, but the flip side from what was used for the heart. The top layer was from Journal. All of the card was tied together with solid card-stock from American Crafts and a bow to match.

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Count

This very quick and simple card used a layer of Panache from the C'est La Vie collection with a small strip of paper from the Decoupage paper of the same collection, plus a saying from the Country Garden collection which I cut with a Spellbinders Nestabilities Labels 1 Die. This card took literally just a couple of minutes to make added onto my white 5"x7" card base.

Happy Valentine's Day!

Happy Valentine's Day! Today I would like to share a really quick, clean, and simple card. Rather than describe how I made it, I thought I would show you, since it really takes just a few minutes to make.



The main card is standard 5 1/2"x4 1/4". The layers are 5 1/4"x4" and 1"x4". The decorative score-lines on the large layer are at 1/8", all around the card.

Make up a bunch for the Valentines in your life!

Smiles,
Kathy

Never-Ending Love

One of my cousins is having a baby boy! I made a baby blanket for him, and I needed a gift card to go with it, but I wanted the card to be special. I opted to make a Never-ending card, to symbolize the never-ending love and responsibility that goes with adding a child to a family.

I shared small photos of this card in my last post, but I thought I would share a little more about it today.

The card measures 4" square and utilizes images from an unknown source along with a saying from Inkadinkado's Welcome Baby clear stamp set, and two Riley the Moose stamps, "Riley in the Moon" and "You're a Star" Riley. I also used the smallest star die from Spellbinders Stars Nestabilities.

The card is intended to be a keepsake, and has places for writing in vital information. But the card is also meant to be fun. The moons and every star in the card is painted with glow-in-the-dark glitter paint. Riley's antlers are flocked with Stampendous Caramel Latte flocking powder. I think those touches, along with the fact that the card is just FUN to play with because of its 4 faces and the fun way the card opens to each of those. The four faces are shown here:




In order to present my card, and to help protect it, I opted to add a belly-band, which is what is shown in the main photograph at the top of this post.

Making a Never-ending card is not difficult. For this one, I cut two 4" square pieces of light blue heavy card-stock. I then scored each of them at 1" from the left and right edges, and then turned them 90°, and cut them in half (at 2"), across the score lines. Realigning the rectangles of one of the squares with the central cut in the vertical direction, I used strong tape in the four corners, and affixed the other square on top of it, with the central cut in the horizontal direction. The mechanism was complete at this point, and works by simply folding on the score lines. All that was left was to decorate the card as desired.

Quick and easy photo backdrop

Today I needed to take some photos of a card and I had to have a white background for them. I personally prefer to take my photos outside in morning light because I don't have the money or room for expensive lighting equipment, but I was a little stymied at first on what to do about the requirement for a white background.

I finally got inspired and I now have the perfect portable backdrop for my cards!

I took a large sheet of white poster board and, in landscape orientation, scored it vertically down the center. I then scored horizontally across the board, about 1/3 of the way from the bottom. I cut along the vertical score from the bottom up to the horizontal score. I folded it to form a corner, and then put a smaller piece of poster board over the pieces that form the bottom, hiding the edges.

This whole thing folds up flat, about 12"x13", is extremely inexpensive should something happen to it, is easy to set up, and could be made in other colors if I needed them.

I am really happy to have come up with this quick and easy, and effective, solution!

Oh... and here are the photos I was taking:


More about this card sometime soon... I want to be sure it gets to the parents-to-be first!

A Merry Christmas Card

This is the card I made for my mother for Christmas this year. Given that not only have I had another surgery on my ankle (and a far more extensive one besides) but that I fell and broke my leg 3 weeks ago, I have not been up for much stamping. It is just too hard to do lying down with my leg up on pillows, and my foot/leg is just too unhappy down for very long. I really have been trying to make sure that I use the "down" time to do things around the house that need to be done.

But I did manage to make this one card. Thanks to FranticStamper's great Precision Dies' 4-up square and Quad-Sized Square, both from the 1" sets, cutting the window and the frame was so simple!

The flower box on the card front was cut with a Poppystamps die, Grand Flower Box, also available at FranticStamper. The lovely poinsettias are dimensional stickers I had in my stash, and unfortunately I don't know who made them. The same goes for the other decoration on the front of the card, which is actually two different dimensional stickers, combined.



Inside the card on the window is a valance made with the same flower box die, cut down by 1/4" off the top. The curtains are made of vellum. The small table is an image from my own drawing, as is the Santa in the back "room". The snow globe on the table is another dimensional sticker.

The "wall paper" is Christmas paper from a Die Cuts With A View 12x12 pad. The Christmas tree is from a paint sample from Lowes, as are the banner pieces and the circles on the stairs. The letters were all punched with an alphabet punch set. The wreath is a scalloped circle with a smaller regular circle punched from its center, with a small bow sticker at the top.

The stairs were formed by cutting 4 slits in the card-stock and scoring and folding to form pop-outs. Here is a template for the stairs that you can use and scale to your needs:



The bannister and posts were made by gluing on strips of card-stock and trimming at the card's edge. Here is a photo of the card from the top, to give you a better idea of how the popup for the stairs works:



I hope you have enjoyed my card. Pop-up cards are almost magical to receive, but can be easier to make than you would think. The devil is in the details, like for this card, making sure everything looked good through the window, and making sure that everything fit as I wanted it to, plus cutting the "wallpaper" layer correctly.

I hope that you will give the template a try and share what you come up with!

FranticStamper Precision Dies Blog Hop - Day 3

Here we are on the third and final day of a design team blog hop to help celebrate the launch of Frantic Stamper Precision Dies. You should have arrived here from Jennifer Willis' blog and will next head off to Sharon Jeffs' blog.

As I told you over the last two days, FranticStamper has developed a brand new concept in die cutting! The Precision Dies have been designed to work together easily to create all sorts of windows in cards and more! Die Sets #1 & #3 are based on 1" squares, and sets #2 and #4 are based on 1-1/4" squares. The squares and rectangles in the dies have 1/4" gaps between them. The dies also have 1/8" borders, so when you bump them up against each other, they create the same 1/4" gap between cuts, making it simple to create windows in nearly endless variety.

I had the pleasure of getting prototype and pre-release die sets to play with, and I have to say that they are a total BLAST to use. They not only cut through cardstock, craft foam, felt, and other materials like a hot knife cuts through butter, but they also align with each other to cut complex windows or frames in seconds. But don't forget that they also work great individually!

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The first card I want to share with you today is the first card I made with the dies.



I used the Series 2, 4-up square die (FRA-Die-02004), the Series 2, Double square die (FRA-Die-02002) and the Series 2, Triple square die (FRA-Die-02002) in combination to cut a 3x3 grid window out of white card stock. I mounted the grid onto a light blue card-stock panel using foam dots..

I then stamped (with Memento ink on white card-stock) and colored (with Copic Markers) the Frantic Stamper Cling-Mounted Rubber Stamp - Magnolia image. I then cut the image into 1.25" squares.

I glued the image squares through my grid window, onto the light blue card-stock background. Once finished, I mounted the light blue panel onto a darker blue card. I finished the card off with a little tag and with a white hand-made medallion.

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And lastly I wanted to share the quickest card I made. It is a Halloween card that literally took fewer than 3 minutes to make.



I started with a half-sheet of card-stock, cut the long way and then scored to form a top-opening standard sized card. 30 seconds down.

I then laid the Frantic Stamper Precision Die - Series #3 (1" base) - Triple Size Rectangle + 3 square (FRA-Die-03005) onto the front of the card and ran it through my die cutting machine. We are now at one minute.

I glued an orange panel to the inside of the card, and added glue dots to the backs of my chosen buttons. We are 2 minutes into the card.

I glued the buttons into the windows, wrapped my ribbon around the card, through the window and tied the bow, and then stamped a Trick or Treat greeting on the inside. Voila... The card is done in under three minutes. It took me longer to tell you about it than to MAKE it!

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I hope you enjoyed today's cards and the hop. Next you head to Sharon Jeffs' blog. But then don't forget that Fran at Frantic Stamper is offering Blog Candy for this hop; either Set #1 or Set #2 of the square dies, winner's choice! After visiting Sharon's blog be sure to click through to the Frantic Stamper blog and leave a comment about one of the items you have seen on the hop to enter the give-away. The winner will be chosen randomly from qualified entries on tomorrow morning, and will be notified via the blog sometime that day.

Also be sure to check out the wonderful dies at www.franticstamper.com! You will love them, I am sure!

FranticStamper Precision Dies Blog Hop - Day 2

Here we are on day 2 of a design team blog hop to help celebrate the launch of Frantic Stamper Precision Dies. You should have arrived here from Jennifer Willis' blog and will next head off to Sharon Jeffs' blog.

Frantic Stamper has developed a brand new concept in die cutting! The Precision Dies have been designed to work together easily to create all sorts of windows in cards and more! Die Series #1 & #3 are based on 1" squares, and Series #2 and #4 are based on 1-1/4" squares. The squares and rectangles in the dies have 1/4" gaps between them. The dies also have 1/8" borders, so when you bump them up against each other, they create the same 1/4" gap between cuts, making it simple to create windows in nearly endless variety.

I had the pleasure of getting prototype and pre-release die sets to play with, and I have to say that they are a total BLAST to use. They not only cut through cardstock, craft foam, felt, and other materials like a hot knife cuts through butter, but they also align with each other to make cutting complex windows or frames in seconds. But they also work great individually!

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The card I want to share with you today is a kinetic diorama Christmas card that opens itself as soon as it is removed from its envelope! The card itself is a large one, using a half-sheet of card-stock for each its back and its front. It requires an A9 sized envelope and extra postage to mail.

For this card I used the Series #2, Four-up square die (FRA-Die-02004) to cut my window pane, and Series #4, Quad sized square die (Fra-Die-04004) to cut the hole in the card front. As I said, the dies work great individually, as well as in combination, and individual cuts is what this card showcases!



This card uses a rubber band mechanism to open the card. You can see details of how to do that in this post, though this one required a larger rubber band.

The Santa with hood, a Frantic Stamper cling mounted stamp image, is on a floating acetate panel in the middle of the card, attached to a stiff tab, like the princess and the dragon in this post.


I hope you enjoyed today's card. I hope you will hop again tomorrow, when I will share two more cards I made using these wonderful dies.

Don't forget that Fran at Frantic Stamper is offering Blog Candy for this hop; either Series #1 or Series #2 of the square dies, winner's choice! After your last hop stop at Sharon Jeffs' blog, be sure to click through to the Frantic Stamper blog and leave a comment about one of the items you have seen on the hop to enter the give-away. The winner will be chosen randomly from qualified entries on Thursday morning, and will be notified via the blog sometime that day.

Then be sure to check out the wonderful dies at www.franticstamper.com! You will love them, I am sure!

FranticStamper Precision Dies Blog Hop - Day 1

Frantic Stamper has just introduced a brand new product! Frantic Stamper Precision Dies are designed to work together to create all sorts of windows in cards and more! As part of the design team, I had the pleasure of getting prototype and pre-release dies to play with, and I have to say that they are a total BLAST to use!

Today is the first day of a design team hop to help celebrate the launch of Frantic Stamper Precision Dies. You should have arrived here from Jennifer Willis' blog and will next head off to Sharon Jeffs' blog.

Fran at Frantic Stamper is offering Blog Candy for this hop; either Series #1 or Series #2 of the square dies, winner's choice! Since I am the last stop on the hop, just go to the Frantic Stamper blog and leave a comment about one of the items you see on the hop to enter the give-away. The winner will be chosen randomly from qualified entries on Thursday morning, and will be notified via the blog sometime that day.

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The first card I created with the dies is a changing image card. The dies made aligning the holes for this card child's play; the whole card took just minutes to make! I used the Series #2, Triple square die (FRA-Die-02003) to cut my windows. It took only a total of two passes through my die cut machine and a couple of minutes to assemble to create the card!



Here is a quick video of it opening and the images changing...


I will be sharing how to make a similar card on the FranticStamper blog tomorrow. Be sure to check back then if you want to learn how to make this card!

Next I created a scrapbook page to commemorate the fact that my little girl is all grown up and currently a continent and an ocean away...in France! I used a combination of dies from series #2 and #4 to create the "E" (for Elizabeth) for me to frame my photos. The frame and all the craft foam mats were cut with a single pass through my die cut machine!



This is how the dies were laid out to make the


(Dies used from Series #2: FRA-die-02001, FRA-die-02002, FRA-die-02003
 Dies used from Series #4: FRA-die-04001, FRA-die-04002)

Images from FranticStamper's own line of French-inspired cling-mounted stamps, some Stickles, and a butterfly sticker finished the page.

I hope you enjoyed today's post and that you will check back tomorrow! And be sure to check out the last stop on the hop at Sharon Jeffs' blog. You should also stop by and see these wonderful new Precision Dies at www.franticstamper.com.