Baby Cards

One of the occasions that I make cards for is the gift packets I give to family and friends at Christmas. Well between Christmas 2014 and Christmas 2015 I went from one great nephew to 3 great nephews and a great niece. All of whom are absolutely the most beautiful children on the face of this Earth. ( no I'm not biased at all.) So I was informed that I needed to make more baby cards and this is the design I came up with for the cards.  My Favorite Things came out with a Baby's Bib die just in time for me to make these cards. I went through all of my stamp sets and pulled out any small images that could go on the front of the bibs. I also pulled out some patterned paper to cut out the bibs. I love how they turned out and I hope you do also. Thanks for stopping by.

Baby Cards

I personally (at this time) don't know of anyone having a baby, however among my nieces and nephews they all know someone who is looking forward to that blessed event.                                   

So when it came time to put together the Christmas sets of cards for family I had to include some baby cards.  I used a variety of stamps and DP and I made these cards last year so I'm just going to post a whole bunch of them.  Enjoy.  Hope you like them and thanks for stopping by.

Baby, Baby, Baby

Last Christmas when I passed out my sets of cards to various family and friends it was noted that there were no baby cards.  I stopped to think about it and realized that the next generation is starting families and my contemporaries are becoming grandparents.  Oh how time has flown, I distinctly remember when my oldest nephew was born (Buffalo, January, 3 feet of snow-need I say more) and how friends were having babies and I was always in need of baby cards.  So I got busy and made some.  This first set I made with a Great Impression water color set (I cheated and went the easy way and used Copics) and did a girl set and a boy set.  I really like how they turned out.  I stamped each image with Memento Espresso Truffle (Gina K is right it is the perfect brown/black) and then colored with Copics.  The DP is various pieces I had in my stash. Hope you like them and thanks for stopping by.

Detail Glitter Technique

Last Monday on Papertrey Ink's blog Design Team member Erin showed this technique in their Make It Monday segment. I am in the process of making cards for my Christmas gift packets (only 75 more to go) and needed to make some baby cards.  I've had the Papertrey Ink Bitty Baby Blessings for quite awhile and it is the perfect set for the cards I need to make.
The DP is DCWV Nana's Nursery Baby Boy paper pack.  The neat thing about this paper pack is that it can go girl or boy, so cool.
Since the set has a co ordinating die I just cut out the images stamped them with Memento Tuxedo black and colored with Copics.  I used punches to cut out the circles for matting.  When I was all finished coloring I realized that this was the perfect card to use this technique on so I got out my Quickie glue pen and Martha Stewart white glitter and embelished the Baby Buggy. The stamps in this set are so cute and I'll post some of the other cards I made with this set (I made 6  in all).
Hope you like it and thanks for stopping by.

Big Sisters

My sister is Nanny for a family that has grown this past week with a new little girl.  She has two older sisters that are so excited about a new baby.  I thought it would be fun to send them each a card to congratulate them on the new baby. 
Last August at the Novi stamp show I picked up several card sets at The Papercut.  I just love that company, they have the neatest items.
These cards are an example.  The set consists of the card base and and over layer that has a cut out under the circle.  I used a Papertrey 3/4 inch die (Limitless Circles )as a mat for the focal image and the image is from an acrylic set that I've had for years and I no longer know where it came from.  I colored with Copics and added the sentiments on the over layer.  By the way I ran the over layers through my Cuttlebug using Swiss Dots for one and Divine Swirls for the other.  I haven't heard how the girls liked them but I'm sure they are to busy playing with the new baby.

A Lullaby Card

I went to the book store yesterday to pick Mariah Stewart's latest (Almost Home if you like to read this Chesapeake Diary series is terrific) and after I had paid for my purchases and on my way out of the store I saw this CD. Well of course I thought of my great-nephew Kellen and went back and bought it. I'm shipping it to him with this card that I whipped out in 5 minutes.

Of course the only reason I could put this card together so quickly is my inability to throw anything out.

Way back when I got the brilliant idea to make up card bases to have on hand (turns out not to be such a bad idea after all) and this is one of them. Then another idea I had was to print out some digital images to color up (the coloring up part never happened on this one) and have at the ready. So these two items have been sitting around for about a year and all I had to do was color up 'Michael' from Mo Manning and cut it out and mount it to the base. I have no idea where the DP is from but it works beautifully with this image don't you think.

I used Copics to color and this is what I used-- Hair YR21,YR31; Cloud B000 under the cloud for shading BG000; Skin E00,E21;Nightshirt Boo and for the wing and halo I used a Sakura silver Jelly Roll pen.

I cut the image out with a Nestabilities Deckled rectangle and edged it with YR31.

Hope you like it and thanks for stopping by.

Introducing Kellen Paul

Today is a good news day. I'm now a great Aunt. My nephew Steve and his beautiful wife had a even more beautiful baby boy today. This photo says it all. I won't get to see the newest member of the family for 3 weeks, but I can look at these photos any time I want.

I'm not posting a photo of the mom with baby since I'm not sure how Michelle would feel about it (12 hours of labor can make a girl 'glow' more than she wants). You can see just a tiny bit of her and that's enough.

Mom, baby and Dad are doing fine and my sister and bro-in-law are over the moon with happiness. Steve's sister and brother and my other 3 sisters are all anxious to hold Kellen. Oh wait Aunt Cati has already had the pleasure. Lucky girl.

Thanks for listening to my ramble.

Little Sweet Pea

This is the card I made to go with the gift my sisters and I are giving my niece at the baby shower this weekend. When I first heard that Steve and Michelle were expecting I immediately went to PaperTrey and got this set, Baby Button Bits. It is the most adorable set. The only problem is that when you add buttons it does make the card bulky so mailing is a problem. But that isn't going to stop me from using it. There are a couple of other sets that I may have to invest in though.

Now to this card, I stamped the image with Memento Bamboo and added some PaperTrey buttons. I didn't want to use fiber or thread on the buttons since I wanted a 'pretty' look so I added pearls. The card base is the same DP Bazzil Basic Swiss Dots that I used to make the shower invitations. The plaid is from Basic Grey Kioshi. I wanted to keep in theme with the shower colors (the colors of the baby's room) so I added a green ribbon and stamped the sentiment on green paper with Memento Bamboo. Hope you like it and thanks for stopping by.

A Baby Thank You Redone

A few weeks ago I posted this card. It was the original to today's card. I asked my friend Sandy for some advice on how to improve my cards and she said LAYERS!! I tend to like the clean and simple look but sometimes it's just not enough. In this case she's absolutely right. I'm making a set of thank you notes for my niece. There's a baby shower coming up the end of July and I thought it would be fun for her to have some special thank you cards for closest friends and family. I decided this JJ image from Bugaboo would work really well. The original sentiment is Baby made me eat it! I changed it and on the inside I'll stamp Just a Not to Say Thank You. Kind of a play on when we were kids and Mom had to force us to write thank you notes. Any way I took a hard look at the original card and decided that if I'm making cards as a gift then they ought to be better (I was thinking in terms of keeping them simple so I could assembly line them easily).

After I had reached the decision to add more layers I just grabbed my stack of DP and started pulling out the ones that made me think of little boys. I had a lot more than I thought, my next problem was I had to orient my cards vertically because of the image and some of the papers were oriented horizontally and then I saw this post and my problem was solved because the third card showed me what to do, instead of using the DP over most of the card base, use a portion of it and mat it. This made for more cutting and matting but it really made me more satisfied with the cards.

What do you think. Thanks for stopping by, have a terrific Memorial Day.

Baby On Board

My Niece is expecting her first baby come September and I like to let her know that we think this is absolutely wonderful. She's a beautiful girl, smart, athletic,and puts up with my nephew with grace and humor (humor being the most needed).

I found this Alexa image at Digi Stamp Boutique and immediately thought of Michelle. I'm trying to up my cards by using more layers (Yes, I know Sandy, I do have a ways to go, but I'll get there yet thanks to your tutoring).

The DP's are (in order) Bazzil Basic Swiss Dots, Kelly Panacci Atomic Turquoise and The Paper Company Green Glimmer.

I colored Alexa with Copics and the sentiment is computer generated and the image was cut out with my new Deckle Edged Rectangle Nestabilities that I picked up at Hobby Lobby this morning.

Hope you like it and thanks for stopping by.

The Final Edition of the Shower Invites

Well the invitations are finally all done. It was a labor of love and I enjoyed every minute of it. I had a few problems along the way, first I couldn't find the paper I wanted to use, but I found these two colors in the Bazzil Basic Swiss Dots and they work even better. Then I printed them off and started cutting them out and realized I had and incorrect date. That required a trip back to the store to get more paper. I then had to figure out what was wrong with the front. It looked to plain. That's when I hauled out my Rosie Road Show stamps and picked out the cutest ones that looked like they would belong on a Onesie. There were a lot to choose from. I stamped them out and used my one inch punch and they still didn't look right. I kept looking at them and knew I wanted to do something to the edge of both the Onesie and the circles, so I took my Copic markers (Willow for the green and Buttercup for the yellow and just ran them along the edge), looking better but still not quite right. I decided to color a little bit of each image and I finally thought Okay! When I started to assemble them I really came to like them a lot, hope you do too. Thanks for stopping by.
P.S. The second picture is of all the different "appliques" I used.

Shower Invite

This is the baby shower invitation I'm making for Michelle's shower in July. I'm using the Rock-A-Bye-Baby Click Simple Template from Papertrey.

When I heard that Michelle was expecting I immediately went to the site and got this template. I had thought it was a cute idea when I first saw it but didn't think I'd have a use for it. Wrong.

I used my Photoshop Elements 2 to print out the invitation info on the back of this paper (I ran off 20 with the wrong info as I told you yesterday). Then I was able to set it up that I could get 4 image per 8 1/2 by 11 sheets of paper The invitations are slightly smaller than a normal A2 size, they're 4.2 by 5 but it still works.

I used Google images to download the store logos that she's registered at. So much easier than adding in those little cards. (Target doesn't give out those cards anymore anyway). I ran a Copic marker, Cashmere around the edge of the Onesie and around the "applique" I ran Dim Green. Some of the invitations will be done on the green paper with the yellow "applique". Got to have some variety ya know.

I did blur out some of the info, security you know. Wouldn't want any crank calls or emails.

I hope you like it and thanks for stopping by.

A Baby Thank You

This is one of the wonderful digital images from Bugaboo, it's from her JJ line, the pregnancy series.

When I saw this particular image I immediately thought of my niece who's expecting and has a big shower coming up in July. I'm making the baby shower invites for that and when I was printing them off (I'd gotten about 20 of them done) I found that the wrong date was on it. I'm using the

Bazzill Basics Swiss Dots paper you see as the background for them. Well (I said to myself) I can't waste this paper so I'll use it for thank you notes.

I had printed off the images awhile back and so I colored one up and put it together to see how it would work. The printing for the invite is on the back of the Swiss Dot paper and since it is a good quality thick paper it's no problem to use the other side. Isn't it great that paper is two sided lol.

I hope you like it and thanks for stopping by.

P.S. I'll post the invite tomorrow.

A PaperTrey Bear

This darling teddy bear is from the PaperTrey's Baby Button Bits set. This set has so many cute images that I have trouble deciding which to use next.

Well anyway, I was going through some "stuff" on my craft desk and came across this card base. As soon as I saw it I new what I wanted to make. I had stamped off this image for another project twice, so I colored him up and cut him out with a square scalloped Nestabilities. He looked a little forlorn all by his self so I cut out a couple of mats in coordinating paper and mounted them onto the card. I didn't want to cover up this sweet DP. I can't remember who the maker is and I really want to find some more, it's so stinking cute.

Well I hope you like it and thanks for stopping by

Baby Bear

I found this card in an old file of cards that I had made some time ago. This image is from an Art Impressions stamp set #2898. There are 4 baby type stamps and they are each adorable. I stamped this image on water color paper and used Marvy markers to water color it. The fun part of Art Impression is all the info and directions you get with the stamps. It is so easy. This was a simple card to make. I just water colored the edge of the paper and affixed it to the DP. Hope you like it and thanks for stopping by.

Baby Card

I haven't done too many baby cards, but it seems I have a fondness for giraffes. Anyway this card is from early on in my card making career. I'm not even sure about any of the products used. I believe the giraffe is a Rosie Roadshow and I probably colored with Tombows. I hand drew the balloons and used some peg alphabet stamps for the letters. I have no idea where the Congrat stamp is from. Probably should have kept better track of what I was doing, but who new about blogging 3 years ago. The DP is just adorable.