Sister Stamps BFF Birthday Celebration

Coming up with a card worthy enough to send to my dear and super talented friend Patti of Creations By Patti for her birthday is always a huge challenge for me. After weeks of scouring the internet for something fresh and new, I finally decided to try the 3-D Scenery Card I saw over at Card Making Downloads. I think I must have watched the video tutorial for this 10 times or more before I finally figured out the mechanics on how this card is put together. LOL, and even then it took me over a week to come up with a working template!

The neat thing about this card is that it's kinda sorta like a box card, but it has a window with shutters that slide open to reveal a scene inside. For the base of my card, I used MTC and tried to create a Japanese style house with shoji doors that slide open. On the outside of the house I used an image of a tree with branches found on the internet and rendered it into a cutfile with MTC. Filled the branches with sakura cut using the Petite Sakuras die from Frantic Stamper. The coolest thing about this 3 x 3" thin metal die is that you can die cut 29 blossoms (4 different sizes) at one pass! I only needed to run it through my Big Shot 5 or 6 times to get enough of the smallest size blossom to fill my trees...great time saver!

On the inside, I used my favorite BFF stamp from Sister Stamps, colored them with Copics and paper pieced their kimonos with washi paper.

The "chochin" or hanging lanterns were created in MTC by welding circle and rectangle shapes together.  I used Copics to color them and ran them thru a crimper to add some fun texture before hanging them onto some black embroidery floss.

Here you can see how the stamped image was adhered to a slider inside the box.

Here's a top view of the card from the front...

...and a view from the back where I added a birthday sentiment. A little hard to see, but that tab towards the bottom of the box is the end of the slider that holds the stamped image on the inside.

Here's the card with the shoji doors closed...

Sliding the shoji panels into it's closed position also collapses the card so it can be put into an envelope. Had fun learning how to re-create this new style of card. Still need to play around and tweak the template for this card a bit more before I try another. Maybe then it can be my new favorite type of card to make!

Clothesline Baby Card

Had to come up with a quick card for a baby shower couple weeks ago for a friend at work who's expecting twin baby girls...and all I can say is, "Thank goodness for Pinterest!" Saw a lot of darling clothesline baby cards and hoped I might be able to put one together pretty quickly.

Found several pins for Onesies on Pinterest, and chose to use a freebie file offered over at the Quilling Patch. No time to spend on choosing colors so I just cut them in white and colored them in with Copics later when I had time to think. Trees are a cutting file from Miss Kate's Cuttables, and I created the picket fence in Make the Cut (MTC) by simply welding triangle and rectangle shapes together. Thin steel dies were used to cut the grassy border (DieNamics), birds (Memory Box), flowers (CheeryLyn), and fancy corners (Cuttlebug). Frame is another a freebie cutting file from Heather M. I cut a length of white of white embroidery floss and tied to the tree branches for the clothesline.

I decided to put my clothesline scene on a Surprise Pop Up Slider Card, instructions by Beate Johns can be found here. Pulling on the tulle bow at the top of the card slides the clothesline scene back and up, revealing a place underneath it for a message or sentiment.

This top view shows the slider attached to the tulle which pulls out with more room to add a message.

And here's a side view that shows how the front cover folds back and up in a way similar to an easel type card. Not at all fancy, but I think the sliding movement of this type of card always makes this a fun card to receive.