A few cards for Nikki Sivils

A couple of weeks ago I was reading Nikki Sivil's blog and read a very heartbreaking post about Nikki's friend and former general manager Lanie who was just diagnosed with metastatic melanoma.  Lanie is only in her early thirties and has 20 tumors throughout her body.  In order to keep Lanie's spirits up, Nikki plans to send her a card every single day and wants to make sure Lanie and her family have enough thank you cards to have on hand to send out.  To this end, Nikki was asking blog readers to send in a few cards to help out.  I found a couple of spare cards in my stash, and made a few more to send along.  I'm sure they would appreciate any others they get, so if you have a few spare cards or time to make some, please send them along to Nikki.

This card uses Echo Park patterned paper, stickers and some Scrapbook Adhesives dimensional adhesive to pop things up.  The thank you stamp is by Stampin Up, from the Itty Bitty Banners set (a very useful stamp set)!

This one used an old K and Co tag shaped card base, some Coredinations cardstock and Bo Bunny patterned paper and buttons from the Ad Lib collection.  The stamp is again from Stampin Up, another very cute and useful set called 'Just my Type'. 

Another simple card using Just my Type stamps, and I backed it with a little doily that I made using a Sizzlits die sold by Stampin Up.  Nothing fancy, but a quick little card to let somebody know that you are thinking about them. 

I happened to be in Cincinnati for a conference, so mailed my cards from there.  My Canadian friends will laugh to hear that sending five cards with envelopes in a large padded envelope cost just over two bucks using the US postal service, and would be delivered to Nikki in Missouri in three days.  If I had mailed this package from Canada, I was likely looking at $15 or so in postage, with a delivery date of two to three weeks.

October Sketchy Challenge

Although I have never been a big sketch user, I have found that I just tremendously enjoy doing the monthly Sketchy Challenge at Canadian Scrapbooker.  The sketches are lovely and easy for my brain to follow, and so much faster than dreaming up the entire page design from scratch!  If you haven't, go check it out and try it.  Post your version in the gallery so we can all see!

This month's sketch is by Sue Sykes - it was a pleasure to work with. Since I am contrary by nature, I flipped it over in my mind before I started, but basically followed Sue's design.

I had an old photo laying around that I had been meaning to scrapbook. The picture was not the best, but brought back many memories, especially since quite a few people in it are no longer alive.  I am about six years old in it, and I cannot remember this group of people being all together ever again, since it included all my dad's family and my mom's family that were in Canada.

I used primarily Karen Foster Designs to put together this layout - they have some lovely ancestry and family tree themed products such as the 'Honoring the Past' scrapbook kit.  I used a couple sheets of the paper and some stickers, added a bit of Karen Foster ribbon and scrapper's floss, a scrap of cardboard and a length of lace trim I had rescued from a thrift store.  Happy to have the photo out of the shoebox and all the people properly identified, and I will use several sheets of the Karen Foster family tree paper to outline my family history for my kids.

Karen Foster Honoring the Past Scrapbook kit

Inspired by Wine

During the fall of 2010, I was lucky enough to spend a few days in Nova Scota touring some of the local wineries.  Absolutely gorgeous and among other things, it inspired the idea for an article about wine related scrapbook layouts and papercrafts.  There are not a lot of wine themed scrapbook products around, but I found a few and they are featured in the fall 2012 edition of Canadian Scrapbooker.  The acrylic stamps from Crafty Secrets are amazingly versatile - there is so much one can do with these!  Invitations, journals, cards, wine glass charms, wine labels, coasters, and so on.....  Or, if you're handy, like my friend Kim Gowdy, you could sew a wine bag and stamp on the fabric to create a beautiful gift bag.

And then I found this stamp set by Technique Tuesday at an online store, so I had to buy it.  :-)

I saw this wooden floral frame at Michaels, so why not turn it into a wine themed wall hanging?  I hot glued wine corks around the ring, and then printed out a cute wine saying on a piece of cardstock with my printer.  I used the Crafty Secrets and Technique Tuesday stamps, Letraset markers and some purple chalk to decorate the paper up and glued it on the back of the ring.  It makes me smile.  It did not take very long to make and this, or something similar, would make a cute hostess gift for a wine and cheese party or something similar.

 Then I made a zillion coasters using a Spellbinders square die, the WeRMemoryKeepers corner chomper, Canadian Scrapbooker superstock cardstock and the Crafty Secrets stamps.  I coloured in the images quickly with the Letraset pens and then sprayed the squares with Goosebumps spray by Tsukineko.  It gave the coasters a cool pebbly surface and will protect the paper so that the coasters can be reused many times.

This card was made very quickly with Karen Foster designs patterned paper and stickers. I just sewed around the perimeter and popped up the stickers under a scrap of cheesecloth to dress it up a little bit.  Check out Canadian Scrapbooker magazine to see all of the wine related layouts we made with this Karen Foster paper!