Wedding Cards

Hope everyone had a great 4th of July! We had a very laid-back day. Ate way too much food, watched fireworks from the back porch of my parents' house, and tried to comfort the dogs through all the loud noises.

And of course I did a little scrapbooking! My favorite thing to do on days off :-)

For today, I've got wedding/congratulations cards. This first one was super simple. Beautiful paper will pretty much do all the work for you, and with this card I used a DCWV paper pack. The colors and patterns are so fun and happy, and everything coordinates so that makes it even easier.

For both cards I used the same "Congratulations" rubber stamp, but here I embossed it with white embossing powder and a heat gun.

This second card was a little more time intensive. I used a border punch to create the detail for the wedding cake, and then layered that paper onto a piece of the same size and color paper. You could also do two different colors and I think that would look cool too. Three tiers of that makes a wedding cake, and I added some flower embellishments to the top, a ribbon along the bottom, and stamped it on the side. The background paper is also from a DCWV paper pack.

Here's a close-up of how the border punch looks on the cake.

Using a Layout Sketch

Hello again! Sorry it's been so long.

Got a little bit of scrapbooking done this weekend, including this single page layout for Allison and Stephen's wedding album. I wanted to try going from a pre-designed sketch (never done that before; usually I just make it up myself as I go along). So I did some Google searching, and found the My Little Sketch Blook website, where Liz has created dozens of layout ideas to give some inspiration.

I had two horizontal 4x6's to work with, so that narrowed down my choices of sketches. In the end I chose this one for my inspirational starting point.

And here is what I came up with (sorry about the weird glare above Allison's head)

I left out some of the frills (including the butterflies. Wasn't a fan of those), but I did want to do some kind of flower in the bottom left corner. I used a Martha Stewart flower punch for that, and whatever yellow and beige paper scraps I had lying around. I added ribbon to the top, because it matched the paper perfectly so I couldn't resist. For the journaling circle, I punched out holes using a nail (I know, super scrapbook-y equipment, right?) and then used embroidery floss for the stitching (I have pretty much every color of the rainbow, from my old cross stitching days). For the title, once again I used my Cricut and Sure Cuts a Lot software. I'm just now figuring out all the cool things I can do with that program. 

I really enjoyed having a sketch to start from, so I'll be looking for some more sketch inspiration for other pages. Usually I try to fit so much more than 2 pictures to a page, and most sketches don't do that. But for Allison and Stephen's album I have plenty of room for pages so I'm not worried about squeezing all of them in. 

Later this week I'll show some of the cards I've made using Target brand washi tape! 

Mother's Day Cards

I can now reveal the cards I made for Mother's Day! I had some leftover hydrangeas from doing this project, so I used some of the remaining flowers for these cards. I'm still searching for the best adhesive for pressed flowers. Right now my laminating machine does a great job, especially for large groupings of flowers like this. Not sure if I like it so much for individual flowers, though.

Anyway, these were pretty simple to put together (except for the yellow one, which I did as a window card. That one was a little more complicated). A fun trick for printing on scraps of paper like I did in these cards, is to first print your title/sentiment/whatever on a regular piece of paper, then cut your separate piece of cardstock to whatever size you need, and then lightly tape that cardstock directly onto the words you just printed on the regular paper. (Make sure everything fits and is lined up the way you want it.) Then put that same paper through the printer again (printing the same document as before). This is a nice trick to avoid having to hand write anything! (Good to know for people with sloppy handwriting like me.)

It was also my in-laws wedding anniversary last week, so I made them this card as well:

This one was super easy and fun to put together: starting with a fun blank card, I added a border with flower punches and brads, and a small sentiment that I adhered using 3 dimensional sticky squares to give it some depth.