Button Flower with Handmade Paper

This week’s challenge at Just Cards is to make a card using at least one button.  This is a really simple challenge so if you’ve never done one before, come over and play.  We promise we won’t bite! 

Here is one of the examples I posted:

Except for the label and the borders, it is all made from handmade papers.  When I was cleaning my craft room the other day, I discovered a huge stack of handmade papers in a rainbow of colors, so naturally I had to make something with them.

The label is from the 15 Lovely Labels template from Hot Off The Press and the flowers are from one of my old Coluzzle templates.  The button is from a stash I’ve had for years.  I cut the shank off of it so it would lay flat on the card and stuck it on with a glue dot.

Zentangle

Huh?  What’s that?  It’s doodling on steroids, that’s what it is, and I think I'm hooked.  I saw some Zentangles on a Paper Wishes webisode a while back and the technique looked like fun, so I bought a book on it called Totally Tangled.  After reading the first couple of pages and looking at some examples, I could hardly wait to give it a try.  Typically, you’d start out with black and white, but not wanting to be typical, I went straight to coloring mine with Copic markers.

This is the first one I’ve finished and it’s based on one of the designs in the book.  I have another half done one on my desk that’s black and white and will probably stay that way.  Oh, and there are a few more that I did while sitting through one of our ever-so-interesting staff meetings last week, but they were just for practice and are on lined paper, so they don’t count.

It’s really much easier to do than it looks.  My main challenge is my lousy eyesight.  I drew most of this with my nose about six inches from the paper.  That makes for a very stiff neck!  I guess it’s time for some new glasses.

Cut and Fold With Noted Paper Pack from HOTP

I’ve been in cut and fold mode lately.  It’s partly due to the two new double sided paper packs from Hot Off The Press (Kaleidoscope and Noted), and partly due to Papers and Pixels magazine asking me to write an article for their June issue (more on that in a later post).  It also helped that one of the requirements for the May Designer Challenge over at Paper Wishes was that we use the Noted paper pack in a way that shows off both sides of the paper.  With that in mind, I set out to make some new cut and fold templates.

Here’s my first entry:

I stamped the background with the small fern stamp.  All of the papers are from the Noted pack and the label is from the 15 lovely labels template.  The cut and fold template for this card will be available in the June Papers and Pixels magazine.

After making that card, I decided to make another. One of the stamps to choose from for the challenge was the Bicycle stamp.  My original plan was to create a template that looked like the sun and just use half the template with the bicycle in the foreground and say something about riding off into the sunset.  After I got done with the prototype, I changed my mind and came up with this layout instead. 

The cut and fold template will be available from my website (www.handcraftedgreetigns.com) soon.