Magazine Monday!

I had a really good weekend. I hope you did too. I spent the entire day on Saturday working on some of the challenges from the SplitcoastStampers VSN that was held on Friday night and all day Saturday.

When I participated in the VSN back in December, I focused on Christmas cards, using the challenges as my guide to get all of my 2012 Christmas cards done. It worked out very well. Each time I opened up a challenge, I figured out what I wanted to do, used a Christmas theme (unless the challenge called for a specific theme) then cut enough of everything to do 10-12 cards of that one challenge.

This time my focus was on Birthday cards. One of the threads I co-mod on SCS is a monthly reminder thread to get our birthday/ anniversary cards out on time. Because I’ve been busy playing catch-up on the business, I haven’t been getting my cards out like I wanted. So I decided I needed to get some of these cards done up ahead of time.

I found this birthday card inspiration in the 4th quarter 2011 issue of STAMPING-STATIONARY-AND-SCRAPBOOKING, an idea magazine from Hobby Lobby. For $1.99 you get a ton of great ideas for card and scrapbook page layouts.

This particular card was under Thanksgiving – not a birthday card. It was a Happy Thanksgiving design by Regina Farrell of TX. I tried doing a search for her without success. I kept her sketch pretty much the same. Where I have 2 sunflowers, she used 2 pumpkins, accented with a couple of green oak leaves. Where I used the Vintage Labels, Regina used an actual tag with Happy Thanksgiving stamped on it, a bit of chocolate ribbon tied in a bow on the tag and a brown oak leaf. Across the bottom of the printed band, she added a row of the brown oak leaves.

I tried just using the sun ‘flowers’ but decided they really needed the stems/ leaves. I used the Marvy Daisy punch for the flowers and the SU Build A Blossom stamp set for the leaves. The green stripe is from a 2-sided paper by Heidi Grace Designs called Baby Girl. In trying to use up stash, I’m using my ValuCS on cards I know will probably be tossed after receiving so I used ValuCS Yellow and Green from their Primary collection as well as SU Garden Green. I used my favorite SU Vintage Labels for the sentiment. The MS Daisy border punch gave a nice country look to this card in keeping with the sunflowers.