CAS-ual Fridays birthday

Today's post is my first post for CAS-ual Fridays as a part of the Girl Friday Facebook Inspiration Team. Join me in celebrating CAS-ual Fridays first blog birthday!!!!! Woot, woot!! This week's challenge is also our guest designer challenge.

Want to know another little secret? Today also happens to be my actual birthday! Crazy, I know! I have to give a shout out to my sweet twin sister, Eva!! Love ya girl!!!

Our fabulous sponsor for this week's birthday celebration is SimonSaysStamp. They are giving away some prizes worth over $100!!! Yes, that's right! There are many ways to be amongst the winners this week. You can submit an entry for this week's challenge, leave a comment on the blog or leave a comment on the CAS-ual Fridays facebook page. Don't forget that you have an extra 12 hours to play along until noon on Thursday.

Here is my card to celebrate this awesome occasion!

 

I created my own little party hat by stamping one of my Studio Calico flag images. I used a circle punch for the topper and hand cut the pom pom and fringe. I attached it using foam adhesive. The sentiment, patterned paper and ink are from Papertrey Ink. Thanks for celebrating!

Hey Baby!

Today I am thrilled to share with you that I am temping with the the Girl Fridays as the March guest designer at CAS-ual Fridays! Yes, that's right! I am so honored!

The challenge this week is sponsored by SimonSaysStamp and we are to create a card with a baby theme. They were the fabulous sponsor the week I won and I have enjoyed my goodies immensely.

    

I used Lawn Fawn's Plus One to create my card. The clouds are from Studio Calico that are heavily trimmed in Martha Steward coarse glitter. I recently found out that a friend of mine is expecting. Can't wait to shower her with blessings!

Pages with Papertrey

Yesterday was so much fun with  PTI's February blog hop. Fabulous inspiration, I tell ya. I had a blast!

The blog hop means that the month is almost over. Yikes, already? Leigh over at to the full gave us our Pages with Papertrey challenge to create our own background paper at the beginning of the month. I have had my pictures with some paper on my larger craft table since the 7th. Yes, I am admitting that I tried to start my layout that long ago. I am actually pretty thankful that the busyness of Valentine's Day made me put this project on hold. You see, when I went to work on it again and moved some things around on my page, I discovered that my new Spring Moss premium dye ink actually changed colors!!! It was now Neon Green. Really!! I couldn't believe it!! I am so glad that I waited to work on this page since Neon Green doesn't quite work with my page ;)

So I broke out my old Spring Moss pigment ink and inked up my Houndstooth to create my patterned paper for my border strip. As dry as it is, I still managed to get some decent coverage. That strip started off much larger, but after adhering a sticker border from my kit and then not liking it, I trimmed it off. I am also glad that I waited to work on this page, because I was able to use my new Studio Calico cloud image which was a perfect addition to the page.

The papers are from the Becky Higgins Sweet Baby kit except the ivory. The orange is rather bright, but I managed to tone is down by adding some Tim Holtz Antique Linen distress ink all over it. I am happy with the results and will probably do this to the remaining orange papers from the kit. To help anchor the circle title, I added a portion of Tag sale #3. I stamped Library Ledger in Antique Linen and added some Grunge Me circles. Love that tiny little tag! I used PTI's alpha block die for the second half of the title.

The photos are of my son, Joshua, surrounded by the gifts given to us by my co-workers. My daughter helped me pile them up around him. Some of the clothes are propped up on boxes of diapers that we received. I wish I had a video to share of her carrying them over to her brother. I couldn't believe she actually carried those boxes! Joshua was not quite 3 months old at the time.

smile

Happy Friday to everyone! Before I start off this post, I just wanted to give a shout out to my friend Joyce, over at Cards-by-the-Sea. She was one of the VIPs for last week's CAS-ual Fridays Challenge for this card. I am SO happy for her!!! Way to go, Joyce!

As I mentioned before, this week's Play Date Cafe Challenge includes my absolute favorite colors! So, of course, I had to create another card. And given the CAS gal that I am, I teamed it up with this week's CAS-ual Fridays Challenge. 



To be honest, I am not too big on puns. I do not own any punny sentiments. So, once again, I enlisted the help of my hubby to me brainstorm. I told him that I have stamps that are flowers, hearts, butterflies, etc. He checks out one of his latest tweets and shows me a picture of this:

Can I ever take this guy seriously? So I tell him, "Clouds. How about clouds?" So we came up with this:



The pun was his idea. Thank you honey for your contribution! The only other bit of help I could enlist this morning was that of my 7 month old. Well, the only thing he could offer was a bit of spit up. Oh well. Thanks for being such a good baby this morning.

The later part of the sentiment was computer generated. The die cut circle represents the sun peeking through the clouds. I kept it white to keep with the PDCC colors, and I actually like it best as white. Thanks for looking!

Hello and Happy Birthday

Today I have a card to share for this week's CAS-ual Fridays challenge: create a card using ribbon.

When I saw the beautiful projects by the Girl Fridays, I was overwhelmed. WOW! They did a fabulous job using ribbon in so many ways. I knew exactly what I wanted to do with ribbon for my card. Last year, for Christmas, I made my sister a mini album capturing the first few days with her daughter in China and at home. I used a ribbon flower technique that I had seen on Laurie's blog here. Excuse the poor image since the actual flower is out of focus.

So, today's card uses the same technique. I am pretty sure that saddle stitch ribbon is my favorite since there is no wrong or right side. My card also uses the colors from this weeks' Play Date Cafe challenge: Color Splash.

I inked up my new Studio Calico Stamp that I won from this week's challenge. Love the font! Thanks for looking!

*edited*

In my **aha** moment when I uploaded my image to CAS-ual Fridays, I realized my entry is supposed to be a party card. So I went back to my craftroom to create a party card. Here is my new entry: