Inspired at last

After a long dry spell, I'm beginning to get my stampin' fire back. I just love the new Big Blooms set from the SU Spring mini (see it HERE - available till the end of June. What's that? Why yes, I am a Stampin' Up! demonstrator. hee hee). Anyway, I'm loving those big honkin flowers. So many fun things to do with them. Here are some of the things I did today.

The striped flower was made by applying a marker directly to the rubber, 'huffing' and stamping. The center is a circle of C/S popped up with a dimensional. The colors I used were Ruby Red, Pumpkin Pie, and Cameo Coral.

The layouts were mine, but I got the striped flower idea from this great blog tutorial. Thanks Alli for the inspiration!

Look Katie this one is orange! Well, Pumpkin Pie actually. I really like doing monochromatic cards. I'm also trying to use more white card bases with added scrap accents and stamping for color. I really love how this one turned out. The coolest thing is that the petals are punched out! I stamped the big flower on the white square, cut out the middle, and then slid the slit punch in from the middle to punch the petals.
I can't take credit for the punch idea - I got that from a card on SCS by corysnana1.

I decided the big gaping hole in the middle needed something, so I used the big circle from Simply Circles - stamped on white and cut out. I stamped the little circle over the previous stamping for a little extra color. The ribbon is tied through some 1/8" holes and the whole center is popped up. The Linen stamp is used on the background.

Since I'm on a roll - I'll share some more. Using the same pattern from my stamp class last week, I made another one of these card tote purses. I made all 4 cards, the purse tote, and the spiral notebook cover from a single sheet of 8.5" x 11" White C/S decorated with Mixed Bouquet (one sheet wonder). I used Ballet Blue (my favorite), Real Red, Marigold Morning, and Glorious Green. To soften the background I wheeled across with the jumbo Rough Texture inked in Marigold. It's a "thank you for volunteering" gift for my daughter's Catechism teacher.

I did this a few months back. After looking at my chipboard ATC album (from Stampin' Up! of course) just sitting there so sad and um, chipboardy, I finally decided to decorate it.
Of course it had to be blue cause I just love blue and I added some yellows so it would look good displayed in my blue & yellow stamp room. I love the name frame idea and thought I'd incorporate that here. I'll have to upload my son's name frame and my "idea board" later for y'all to see. I like how it turned out, but next time I'd use the matte mod-podge instead of the glossy. Now I just have to fill it up with really cool ATCs showing lots of different techniques and specialty products. I thought it would be nice to have ATCs to show customers the difference between canvas & linen, or dry and wet embossing, or vellum and cardstock vellum, etc... All in once place and easy to find (I can never seem to locate cards when I need them).

Oooooh. And BIG NEWS on the scrapbooking front. I have completed an album. YES! That doesn't happen very often since most of mine are works in progress (school and dance) and as soon as I get caught up (haha) more pictures come rolling in. I finished MattMan's cub scout album! Woo hoo. Aaannnd, I organized all his Boy Scout photos that we have so far into a plain photo album so I can keep the campout locations and dates all straight. I added little journalling squares between the "events" and will keep adding details so that when I get time and motivation I can sit down and speed-scrap it :).

Oh oh oh. I also re-did my On-board 5x7ish Art Journal. I had covered the front of it using paper I didn't really love then the mod-podge made the ink run a little and the whole thing just didn't thrill me. So I ripped it off (gasp!). It left the chipboard kinda rough and ugly so I removed the covers and used some designer paper to cover it again (around the edges this time). DH says it looks like it was done by a professional. I told him I AM a professional :).

I used my handy dandy spiral punch to punch the holes (after making a complicated little fold on the edge to allow for the thickness of the chipboard) but it came out great. I'll show it off when I get inspired to actually decorate the front of that lovely paper with something. It is going to be a journally book all about ME! so I wanted to really love it.

In other not so fun news, MattMan was sick all weekend (please don't be strep, please don't be strep) and my aunt passed away yesterday after struggling with congestive heart issues for a long while. So it was good for me to hole up in my stamp room and actually get my mind off things.