April 24th - Easter Goodies

Welcome to our Oldies But Goodies Blog Hop! We'll be featuring many of our older but still fabulous stamp sets during the hop!

Each day we will have a tutorial and samples for your inspiration.


Follow along from April 22-24 for your chance to win the Oldie But Good  Stamp set of YOUR CHOICE. One winner will be chosen. Just leave a comment. Each day you can leave a comment on each blog to increase your chance of winning!

April 22- Flowers With Watercolors

April 23-Stand By Your Man Explosion Card

April 24-Holidays Candy Holder

Today's Tutorial was made by Vickie. You can see it here.

Sample by Vickie

I took the opportunity to make a bag to hold some lovely Cadbury's mini crème eggs.  I pulled out the Daffodil Greetings and He is Risen sets and then realised I had no paper bags to decorate other than some large brown coloured ones which were far too big.  I therefore resorted to making a version with some DP which started as 6" by 12".  The chocolate inside was the main concern for this recipient!!!

Thanks for looking. Please hop to these designer's blogs:

Sue

Jane

Vickie

Sandy
Janine (that's me!) 

Garden Show - Spring is in the air Blog Hop

Welcome to the Garden Show!

Spring is in the air, and we are ready to CELEBRATE!

Many of the Spring/Flower stamp sets in the Mark's Finest Papers a Heinrich Co.'s web store will be featured in this Blog Hop. 

Follow along from March 25-27 for your chance to win the Garden Bunny Stamp set. One winner will be chosen. Just leave a comment. Each day you can leave a comment on each blog to increase your chance of winning!

Each day the designers will create a Garden Themed card or project using the tutorial that we have linked.

Good Luck and Happy Hopping!

 

Day #2 Garden Scapes

You can find the tutorial HERE.

Hop to these designer blogs today!

Lois B

Jane

Vickie

Janine

The card I made with this set is 7" square.  I hope the postman treated it carefully as it was sent for a Birthday on Sunday to a friend in Cornwall who is bravely undergoing some heavy cancer treatment right now.  Get well soon Andree.  I featured Daffodils as the Daffodil is the emblem for Marie Curie Cancer care.  The sets used include
Daffodil Greetings
Tree Greetings
Scenic Selections
Works of Art

FOSTV115 - Spring Colours

This week's Friends of Speedy TV challenge is to use Spring Colours on your card.  I went out all Spring and used the colours and flowers of Spring.  I used 4 Marks Finest Papers sets
Daffodil Greetings, Spring Things, Winter Crocus and Mothers Magnolias.  All the sets can be found in the store.  The die is from Spellbinders and the ribbon from my stash.

Spring came to the UK this past weekend - a beautiful warm Sunday. 

The prize this week over at FOSTV is the Recipe Completer set.  Please check out the challenge and play along.   Thanks and have a great week.

FOSTV108 - Easel Cards

I tried to make a shaped Easel Card and wanted one for Easter so went with an Easter egg shape.  My card is a little bit smaller than I originally planned but I used my Spellbinders dies and this was the biggest one.  The blue layer had to be cut freehand.  I have used the sets called Daffodil Greetings and Spring Things and coloured with pencils.

Any type of Easel Card is this week's challenge and my colleagues on the team have made some great cards.  You can check out the challenge and their cards on the MFP FOSTV page here.

There is another stamp set up for grabs this week and it is called Snowball Mini and looks like this

Please come and join us.

Friends of Speedy TV Challenge 87 – Use Metal

Today's challenge over at FOSTV is to include metal on your card. It is challenge 87 which can be found on the FOSTV challenge page. My card has brads so that is a metal element but I decided to make it a bit more challenging and added some die cut Coke can flowers.  I used a Cuttlebug die to cut the flowers, embossing folder to add some texture and alcohol inks to add some colour.  The background panel is also embossed with an embossing folder. The sentiment and one butterfly are from the set called Daffodil Greetings and I also used Scenic Selections and Dragonflies.  The panel with the butterflies was made using embossing powder resist for the butterflies and then Gelatos used to add the colours.

I have included a close up picture of the flowers and you can see the embossing and colours.  One flower has a card-candi centre as the metal centre went "walking"!

Thank you for dropping by.  My nephew has a Birthday today so "Happy Birthday Ryan".
Have a great week everyone.

Speedy Fox and Friends - Purple

Purple is a colour I love to play with so when I saw this week's Speedy Fox and Friends challenge was to use purple I had to play along.  I tried to keep my card simple and used acrylic blocks to create my background and then stamped over them - the purples are all Memento inks and the grass image is from the set called Buffalo Spring, the butterfly is from Scenic Selections and the sentiment is from Daffodil Greetings. The card base is an off white pearlescent colour.

It will be ALL WHITE on the night!

Today's FOSTV challenge is to use ALL WHITE.  Because all white can seem quite flat I used embossing and layers to add dimension. 

This card was one where I learnt a few lessons
Lesson 1 - ensure your stamps are perfectly clean or stamping in white doesn't end up white!
Lesson 2 - thread your ribbon through the Romantic Rectangle before you assemble the card
Lesson 3 - white flowers are often cream - I had to search for the whitest ones!

The stamp set I used today is called Daffodil Greetings

We would love you to join our challenge this week - please check it out at Speedy TV.  It is under FOSTV challenges - number 67.

Hope you have a great week.

Easter Doily

I cut out the doily with my Cheery Lynn die and other than add another die cut I could not bear to cover it up.  I was planning to use the MFP egg with butterfly but went in the end for a simple butterfly and the Easter sentiment.  The butterfly is from Daffodil Greetings and the sentiment is from Spring Joy.  The background paper is from Bo Bunny. 
I am entering it in the Cheery Lynn challenge 70.

 

Thanks for looking.  Have a good week.

FOSTV46 - Scrapbook Page

Despite the good intentions when taking photos I have not done a scrapbook in ages, in fact I have only ever done two and they took me months to do. I have never been to any classes and I know I put too many photos on a page but take it or leave it this is me!

FOSTV challenge 46 to make a scrapbook page was a tough one as life has been crazy here.  Both Mums are unwell and I am busy trying to document my job before I leave on Friday.  They gave me redundancy but did not appreciate what my team did!  Obviously my next task is finding another job!

Anyway back to the scrapbook.  We visited friends in Minnesota in late August and early September and they made something happen for me that I have wanted to do for ages.  I wanted to see how the Amish live and meet some of the people if I could.  We went to the Lanesboro / Harmony area in MN - the Amish life is hard, very simple and they seem very happy.

This is the double page spread 

This is the close up of the left page showing snippets from all the lovely quilts in the cottage.

This is a close up of the right page






















For those of you without x-ray vision this is what it says on my page

"Cozy Quilt Cottage was the wonderful, peaceful place Chris and Jules booked for our visit to see how the Amish live.  Ann who owns the cottage made us so welcome, along with Charley of course.  Every nook and cranny of the cottage held quilts of some sort. 

The first night there was a lively one with the most amazing storm hitting the area and watching it come across the corn fields was spectacular.  The humming birds, butterflies and restful nature of the place made it a special time.  3 large deer even paid us a visit!"

In terms of stamps sets used on my pages here are the details - they are all from Marks Finest Papers
The sunflowers are from  "Bring on the Sun"
The butterflies are from "Daffodil Greetings" and "Cracked Hello"
The Amish carriage is from "A Trip to Lancaster"
The word Silence is from "Christmas in the Country"
The sentiment about nature is from "Words of Nature Mini"

The "corn" die is one of the new D-Lites from Spellbinders and all colouring is done with Copics.

We would love to see your scrapbook pages this week for FOSTV46 and there will be a MFP set (Christmas Cardinals as shown below) as a prize for one lucky participant.  If you cannot cope with a 12" page why not do an 8" one or even  6" one.



Have a great week.

Fall in a round

I love fall, or should I say autumn colours and I have to say the more I look the more colours I see.

Beate Johns recently created a tutorial over at Splitcoast for a Twisted Circular Easel Card so that is the design I chose for this one today.  My hands are multi-coloured now but it was quite fun with all those distress inks - nothing like Beate's clean design!

I used the tree from MFP Tree Selections, the maple leaf stamp from MFP Scenic Selections and the sentiment from MFP Daffodil Greetings. The circles were all cut with dies and the sentiment was cut with Spellbinders Romantic Rectangles.  The leaves were cut with one of my original Spellbinders dies.  Ribbon and fibres from my messy stash.  The border inside was punched with an EK Success wide border punch.

Front - detailed view

I am entering this card for the following challenges


Stampin Sisters in Christ 161 - use a tree
Jugs 158 - emboss resist technique used with maple leaf stamp
OCC - Fall in the Circle

Inside - detailed view

The distress inks I used were
Wild Honey
Spiced Marmalade
Peeled Paint
Dusty Concord
Aged Mahogany



Thank you for checking out my card - I really do appreciate your comments.

FOSTV 31 - Die Cuts

This week's challenge at Friends of Speedy TV is to use die cuts.  You can find the challenge over at Friends of Speedy TV challenges as challenge 31 

My original idea was to die cut an MFP image and use it on a card with some other die cuts but then I saw this week's JUGS inspiration photo and I went back to the drawing board and came up with this card.  The sketch is actually VLVJuly Week 5 but it is far from CAS!

I used the butterfly from Daffodil Greetings and stamped it all over the card base in grey ink.  I stamped another in black ink which I popped up and glittered!  I added the red touches with Pan Pastels.  The flowers, foliage, oval and strip were all die cut with dies - mostly Spellbinders.

This is a close up of the popped up butterfly - you can see the sparkle from the added Stickles.

We would love it if you played along this week. There is another great stamp set called Wild Horses for one lucky participant this week.  Good luck.

Silly Shells

Welcome to Mark's Finest Papers a Heinrich Company's 
                        June Blog Hop!

This month's New Stamp Set Releases are

Welcome Poppies Featured June 19
I'm In Stitches Featured June 20
Island Life Featured June 21
Silly Shells Featured June 22
Please hop along with us! You have a chance to win one of the above stamp sets! Just comment on the following blogs (don't forget this one), each day for more chances to win! (You do NOT have to comment on all the blogs each day! The names are drawn randomly!)


 All four winners will be announced on June 23, 2012 on the Mark's Finest Papers blog. You can go back and comment if you missed a day. (HINT: The more you comment, the more chances you have to win and comments on the MFP blog count twice!)  

This is the last day of the hop so go check back any posts you have missed and want to comment on!  

 The deadline for commenting is 11PM EST on Friday June 22, 2012.

Lois
Vicky
Anne
Pat G.
Karen H.
Patty P.
Mary
Marilynn
Pam
Debbie
Nancy
Bonnie
Kathy
Brenda
Toni
Tangii
Thrifty Stamper
Sue
Kelli
Janine
Tammylee
Janis L.
Mark's Finest 

I am going to put this in a frame and give it to a good friend.

 This card uses the 3 smaller shells and the sentiment from Daffodil Greetings.  There are some funny sentiments with this set but not ones I wanted to use here.

Try a new Technique - go on!

This week's Friends of Speedy TV challenge is to try a new technique.  Now I have to say this was the push I needed to try soot stamping.  I had read about it but thought I might set the paper on fire so never gave it a try.  

As you can see I did coloured soot stamping applying ink to the glossy card before making it sooty.  I waited until my husband had gone out to try this in case he thought I was mad!  Mind you not very sensible because if I had set the paper alight someone to put it out might have been useful!!!
Seriously as long as you are careful it is fine and I quite like the end result using the butterfly stamp from Daffodil Greetings. The tutorial can be found on Splitcoast here

Please join in the fun this week at FOSTV - it is challenge 22 and you could win the set North American Woods which as you can see is a great nature set.

How is it Monday again?

Not sure where the last week has gone, except I know far too much of it has been spent in the office and not enough time has been spent getting inky.  I knew May was going to be a mad month but I need it to calm down a little or I will be in the funny farm!  I am sharing a card today which looks far better in real life than it does in the picture - the stamping detail on the background and the shimmer don't show up too well here and it looks more washed out than it is!

The US celebrate Mother's Day on Sunday, so the chalenge this week at FOSTV is to make a card for your Mum or Mom. For your incentive this week you are playing for a chance to win this fabulous set which is one I just had to get.


I chose not to use the Magnolia flower as my main image but the daffodil which is more in keeping with when we celebrate Mothering Sunday in the UK.

Thanks for looking - please play along at Friends of Speedy TV

April Blog Hop - Daffodil Greetings

Welcome to Mark's Finest Papers a Heinrich Company's  April Blog Hop!

This month's New Stamp Set Releases are

Fabulous Dogs Featured April 17

Daffodil Greetings Featured April 18  

Hey, Cowboy! Featured April 19

Train Talk Featured April 20

Please hop along with us! You have a chance to win one of the above stamp sets! Just comment on the following blogs (don't forget this one), each day for more chances to win! (You do NOT have to comment on all the blogs each day! The names are drawn randomly!) All four winners will be announced on April 21, 2012 on the Mark's Finest Papers blog. You can go back and comment if you missed a day. (HINT: The more you comment, the more chances you have to win and comments on the MFP blog count twice!) The deadline for commenting is 11PM EST on Friday April 20, 2012.

 

Lois

Vicky 

Anne 

Pat G.

Karen H.

Patty P. 

Mary

Marilynn 

Pam 

Debbie 

Nancy

Bonnie 

Kathy

Brenda

Toni

Tangii

Anna S

Sue

Kelli

Janine (that's me)

Mark's Finest Papers

I have two cards to share with you today.   This is a very pretty set for Spring and will be great to pull out again next Easter or for Mothering Sunday which is in March.  

This card uses the main daffodil image with some of the recent Spellbinders dies and the colours roughly from CC370.

This one uses the Butterfly with Birthday greeting and the colours from the CC369. It was coloured with Copics and so were the gems.