Three, two, one

The Less Is More challenge for this week has been a three, two, one recipe. I love this idea - it conjures up all kinds of ideas to me. Here is my interpretation of the recipe:

I'm not sure that my picture does this card justice. It is very soft in real life. My recipe is three flowers, 2 leaves, and one word. To add a little texture, I used a strip of cream cardstock that I embossed with a Cuttlebug folder that I picked up recently. I also used my score board to add a simple line border around the face of the card. The sentiment, flowers, and leaves were all cut with wafer thin dies. As a final touch, I added a tiny Swarovski crystal to the centre of each flower. Simple, but elegant I think.

Until next time,

A Special Thank You

It is pretty obvious by my blog photo that I love my dog, Mozzie. My husband and I have had a long standing passion for Siberian Huskies and in my much younger years, I used to participate in dog shows. Unfortunately, about a month and a half ago, our dog tore his cruciate ligament and meniscus in his right hind leg. We had a difficult decision to make - being a fairly large dog, there was little to no chance that his leg would heal without surgery and surgery was going to cost big bucks. We really couldn't even entertain the thought of putting him to sleep. Needless to say, we chose to go ahead with the surgery. We have a wonderful veterinarian, Dr. Sheila Driver, who has her veterinary clinic, Huronia Animal Hospital, in Penetanguishene. She went out of her way to arrange to have an veterinary orthopedic surgeon come up to do Mozzie's surgery as soon as possible. It was really important to have this surgery done quickly because a dog's musculature begins to atrophy from lack of use quite fast. The added stress on his other hind leg from hopping on three legs left that leg open to injury, and without repair, his injured leg would develop arthritis. Mozzie's surgery was a huge success and it is so exciting to see him starting to move more normally. We are anticipating a full recovery and look forward to watching his joy at running through the snow this winter. This is a favourite pastime, as you can see:

To thank Dr. Sheila and her wonderful staff at the Huronia Animal Hospital, I made a special card for her. Here's a picture:

Many of the pieces for the card were cut using Memory Box dies. Other bits and pieces I just hand cut as I needed them. I was pleased with the finished result and Dr. Sheila seemed pleased too.

Until next time,

Inspiration Kittie

This week's Simon Says Stamp Challenge is entitled Kristina's Inspiration. As you can see, Kristina has posted an adorable picture of her cat, Mannie, and pulled colours from that photo as our inspiration. Those of us who regularly follow Kristina's blog feel as though we know Mannie personally. We sometimes hear him "talking" in the background of videos and get to enjoy looking at the occasional picture that Kristina shares with us. Mannie is indeed very photogenic! Here is the inspirational picture she posted:

Here is my interpretation of Kristina's Inspiration:

Since I have used one of Mo Manning's wonderful digital stamps as the focal point of my card, I have decided to enter my card in Mo's Digital Challenge too. The stamp I used is called "Fall" - so cute don't you think? I coloured the stamp with Copic markers and mounted it on a background of Hero Arts Layering Papers. I chose to hand draw and cut out a leaf similar to the one in Mo's drawing and stamped my sentiment on it. I popped both the focal image and the leaf using dimensional squares from Scrapbook Adhesives. Hope you like it!

Until next time,

Lucky Enough To Win

In July, I was fortunate to have my comment chosen at random to win some wonderful crafting materials from Ellen Hutson. This was a fabulous mix of blog candy goodies that were presented to welcome a new designer to "The Classroom", Krystie Hersch. You can check out the lovely card she made using the same materials here.

I am so delighted with the new goodies and as luck would have it, I didn't have any of items included in the package. In fact, I had been considering purchasing the Memory Box Dies that were included. Anyway, I had great fun playing and this is the card I came up with using Krystie's card as my inspiration:

If you haven't shopped at Ellen Hutson's store, I highly recommend that you check it out. They have a wonderful selection of materials, have reasonable shipping fees and are very prompt at shipping out orders.

Until next time,

Less Is More Challenge

The "Less is More Challenge" this week is to create a card using the following sketch:

Here is my interpretation of the sketch:

I used Hero Arts Layering Paper for the card base. This particular colour came from the Floral package. I love this paper because it is only coloured on one side and it is nice to have a plain white background inside the card for stamping a greeting or for writing in a personal message.
I used a Martha Stewart border punch and Whisper White Stampin' Up paper for the scalloped edge, which I also scored above and below the coloured layer for some extra dimension. The coloured band was stamped with a Studio Calico Lattice background stamp and embossed with white Tsukineko embossing powder on watercolour paper. I used sponge daubers and Distress Inks (Broken China and Seedless Preserves) to blend the colours. When I was pleased with the effect, I misted it with Perfect Pearls and allowed the colours to blend further. When it was dry, I trimmed it to fit and mounted it on the white band of paper. The little butterfly was stamped and embossed with black embossing powder and coloured with Tombow watercolour markers and blended with a water brush. The final step was to stamp the sentiment with black Archival ink.

Until next time,