Cute Card Thursday Challenge: Reuse, Renew, Recycle!

Here are four cards I made for the Cute Card Thursday Challenge: Reuse, Renew, Recycle! I always have 'stuff' hanging around in the studio that just might be a good addition to a card someday. Like most crafters, the pile just grows and grows.
The two fishing cards are great because I have fishermen on my list of card recipients. These images were cut from a left over calendar and saved in the emphemera box. The fishing scrapbook paper made it easy to assemble cards with that theme.
The pink and green card features an embossed wall paper sample on the left. I sponged green ink on the embossed sections to highlight the image. I love that wallpaper.
The pear card includes an image cut from a paper table cloth from the dollar store. How great is that. I just cut out the image like I would from a paper napkin. It's a quick way to get color into the project without a lot of time required.
Hope you enjoy the cards I created with this challenge. Thanks for following my creations.
Annette

Design Challenge Entries

Here are two entries for current design challenges.

The first is for DeNami's theme challenge which includes cards with a summer or tropical theme. Although I love ice cream all year, going to the local ice cream stand is a family summer activity. This features DeNami's Bella Press papers, stamps and ribbon; liquid pearls, and crystal lacquer on the ice cream.

Stamper's Sampler Take Ten "We Challenge You" design offers a layout with which to create a card. Again I used DeNami Stamps so that both cards could be entered into the DeNami contest. This features DeNami's Bella Press paper and stamps with Bazzill textured paper.

Happy summer. Stay cool.

Open the door and come on in

This is the better of the few niche's I created in the book. Open the door and come on in... The hanging page doesn't show well in the photo but the tag page in only about a third of a page and hangs between two other pages. However bad my house may be I seek comfort in my home.

More Altered Book Pages -"Home"

Altered Book Pages

I'm thrilled to be taking an altered book class with Marilyn Rock and Melanie Phillips. I love the teachers, the group, and the process. It's just the best fun to be creating in a room full of creative people.

I've been spending a lot of time on this book and it won't be long and I'll be on to another. I already have many ideas and I've promised Mara a book on music (Lady Gaga?).

Please leave a comment and let me know what you think. Thanks.

Laura's Art Journal

The next several posts take you through an art journal I recently made for our retired bureau director, Laura VanValkenburg. Laura loves birds and has images of them throughout her home and in our office. When she saw my first attempt at art journal construction, from a class taught by my pals Kerri and Marilyn, she loved it and we planned one as a gift to her. Lots of people wrote in the journal either on papers that would be assembled into the piece or directly into the journal. It's easy to make birds the theme but this journal allowed me to add themes of leadership, fashion (Laura's a fashionista), family, dreams, success, and teamwork.

It was the first big mixed media project that I worked on and doing it in my newly organized work space was lots of fun. I pulled things from so many different places. Looking at it now, I see that I've starting looking for pieces for mixed media art everywhere I go. Since then, I've debated about going back to my original class journal or starting fresh.

Now I'm in the middle of an altered book class and I've spent quite a bit of time on that. There will definitely be posts of that. This is the messiest the new room has become since we built it because so many things are used in an altered book.

I'm still working on traditional card making and I plan to get back posting original work here again. That was the purpose of this blog: to link my card art to others. But for now, I'm pleased to share, in its entirety, Laura's journal. Now I'm an artist. Yeah.

Laura's Art Journal (more cover shots)

Phil fills the boss' shoes

The majority of the writing on these pages is a note from Phil to Laura sharing his thoughts about her mentoring. We're all so thrilled to have him at the helm and while he can never actually fill her shoes (as April and I have), he's doing a fabulous job filling them as our new leader. Along with the words of one man are the tools and imagination of another. Here I've used Tim Holtz masks to stipple color into beautiful swirls and added my first set of Tim's stamps with the flourishes. Add a little butterfly bling, grungeboard key, and some new decorative art tape and you have a spread.

This is my favorite page

This is my favorite spread for many reasons. I think mostly because I built it once, hated it, stripped it down, and rebuilt a spread that I loved. As a developing artist, I learned a lot on this page. It has lots of my favorite things: a heart from Printworks, birds in a nest from Memory Box, Magenta and Art Impressions stamps, some Anna Griffith script, beautiful collage birds, and some photos of our BAE family. That's a bureaucratic acronym for our group to you non-government folks. The small photo book shows several of our celebrations and is an excellent reminder that there are some amazing people here and I'm really lucky to be spending time with them. It's a good start to looking through this journal. It's actually the first spread but second page didn't post well and I reposted it, making it a newer post.

Birds and butterflies and eggs, oh my

This is the most bold page in terms of color but it offers contract from the more subtle pages. I really wanted to work in some Memory Box papers and the tree in the middle page is from their line. The eggs at the bottom of the middle page are from Somerset Studios. The bird was die cut at Captured Moments (I'll be making more of those) and the butterfly clips make a cute page turning tool. A little bit of everything.

Another Tim Holtz appearance

How beautiful is that bird cage! Tim Holtz is always coming up with new products to die for. In this case, he's added steel cut dies to his line and this birdcage is one of them. They're all beautiful. Here also are some of the collage images I just got along with lots of stamped images in the background. I loved being able to see all my stamps and choose which ones would work in this project. And they all made it right back to their home on the shelves.

A Stamp (ed bird) in the hand....

The beautiful focal point of this page is a sample card of birds and nest from a company called 'A Stamp in the Hand". The collage notes on these pages are on Anna Griffith papers and I used one of her butterfly stickers in the upper left corner. This is one of the more simple spreads.

Love more, play longer, laugh louder

The piece on the left was sent in from a NY city WIC local agency clinic that Laura worked with and I really appreciate that they used a butterfly image. The left has a picture of Laura with the staff. And tucked away in the the purple envelope is the message in this title. This is a very cool constructed piece that I pulled from my stash. I'd like to take credit for it but alas it's a Printworks project. Printworks was the first stamp company I gravitated to and I still love her images. I added the Memory Box heart which is another favorite company.

The shoe page - If the shoe fits, buy one in every color

This is the girly page. I knew I had a lot of stamps about shoes but I almost couldn't even use them all on this spread. But I tried! Since I've been working with DeNami stamps so much lately, it reminded me about my stash of purse and shoe paper. Clinton and Stacy would approve, don't you think! It's just not possible to think of Laura without thinking about shoes. And she left me a pair from her collection!

Come to my window

My friends spotted right away a seriously old component in this spread. The window card was from the Penny Black line which I purchased years ago. It was in the 'make into a card someday' pile. It became the focal point of this spread and inside I added one of the new collage images I bought for this project. I now have many beautiful pictures of birds and nests that will make their way into lots of projects. Just hopefully sooner than that lattice card did! The white heart card flips up and contains a message about dreaming.