Party Animal

Happy New Year everyone! Hopefully there aren't any of you regretting being so much of a party animal this morning... which leads me to todays card, another look at the Balloon Builders set from the Occasions catalogue - which launches tomorrow!

You may have noticed in the Occasions catalogue there is already a lot of inspiration for this set:

When I returned home from OnStage - where everyone received this set - I decided to see what other animals and things I could come up with:

Yeah, I think this set is going to be a lot of fun!

Normally I have a vision in my head of the card I want to make before I start - though things often get changed along the way. For this card I made it up as I went along. Working from my sheet of test stamping, I replicated the horse for my card, stamping the ballons on Whisper White cardstock with Crumb Cake ink. I then used So Saffron and Calypso Coral on the long and short skinny balloons respectively, stamping the images in a rough circle to create the sun rays. The sentiment was stamped on So Saffron cardstock with Calypso Coral ink then punched with a 1 1/4" circle punch. I laid it in position without adhesive so I knew where I wanted to trim the top edge, and once trimmed I attached it to the cardfront with a couple of dimensionals.

Todays colours are:

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TBT - Petite Pennants

My desk is generally tidy - I've got no space to create otherwise - but I was doing some more tidying last week and camea cross a background piece I had made quite some time back and decided it was time to actually make it into a card.

I used the straight edge pennant from the Petite Pennants punch to make a bunch of triangles and then arranged them into this background. With the background already made, this card was pretty quick to put together. Though I remember the longest part of making the background was just deciding where I wanted each colour... the actual sticking them down went together much faster! I do remember at the time I deliberately avoided using the triangle punch for this effect as they would be smaller and take longer to put together, but in true Carol style that idea is grawing at me from the back of my head so I might end up giving it a go one day. Both the pennant and triangle punches are now retired, but you can pick up the triangle punch from the Clearance Rack while stocks last.

Some what amazingly, all the colours I used are still current!

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A Day Stacked With Ice Cream

It's been pretty chilly here lately, and the only way I usually do ice cream in this weather is on the side of some hot dessert (mmm, pie). However, with the new set Sprinkles Of Life I can have the ice cream without the extra chill! Well, I do also miss out on the delicious flavour... I might have to do something about that later...

So for this card, I wanted three scoops, but just to be difficult I wanted the card in the landscape orientation. To help accomodate that I teamed the basket stamp with part of the cone stamp, which I inked up using the Crumb Cake marker. This stamp set is a transparent photo-polymer one, but using such a light colour it was still hard to line things up perfectly, so the handy-dandy Stamp-a-ma-jig ably assisted with that :) To get a light impression on the Vanilla cardstock, since we don't have Vanilla ink I inked the stamp with Crumb Cake and stamped it off on scrap paper a couple of times before stamping on the cardstock.

The ice cream theme dictated the colours they used - they had to be yummy!

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Mixed Bunch Farewell

For me Mixed Bunch was a surprise inclusion on the retiring product list this year. The clear-mount version is sold out so if you are still thinking about purchasing woodmount is your only option and you need to get in quick! There's only 2 weeks left to order retiting items, but remember they are only available while stocks last.

For this card I once again decided to use an image in the set that I hadn't used that often. I thought the little dots on the petals would team well with the Perfect Polka Dots embossing folder that is also retiring. And then I had to give Itty Bitty Banners a last hoorah to finish the card off!

Do you like the colours I have used on this card? I thought I would start using a simple graphic to give an easy reference for colours I use on projects so you don't have to piece together the info from the product list :)

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