Sketch #277

We at TMS would like to express how thankful we are for each and everyone of you - our followers, our participants and our sponsors.  We appreciate the support you give us.  To our followers here in the United States, we wish a very Happy Thanksgiving holiday to you. May the day bring gratitude, a bountiful table and a memorable time with those you love. 

This week we're sponsored by Dies r Us.

This week's sketch is brought to you by Nina.  She's off on vacation but she didn't leave us to enjoy the Mexican sunshine without inspiration.

I have layered a white card with a piece of green. To the left, I have adhered a panel from a K&Company Christmas pad. I made my own slide using a Sizzix die and dark green card, and my "ribbon" is a piece of lovely metallic gold paper. I placed my paper "ribbon" under the side panel rather than over it because I did not want to cover any of the sentiment or design on the panel. 

I do wish that I had placed my slide a little more to the right, but once glued down, I could not move it. I added a green pearl to the center of the slide and also to the upper right corner of the card. 

This is a lovely design -- simple, and yet very versatile. It can be quick and elegant or whimsical and fun. It can be layered (such as mine) or straight to the card front. This is a good sketch for Christmas cards (and keeping the postage reasonable) but it can also just as easily be used for any other occasion from Birthdays to Easter.

"SEA"sons Greetings

Sami of Sami's Stamps has put together a fun set of images this week. They are quite unique for Christmas in that they are all lovely mermaids -- hey, just right for the tropical Christmas, eh? They are really quite pretty, and the DT discovered that many of them can be multi-functional in that they are not specific to Christmas. Here is a thumb nail look at all the images:

To have a better look (and also to see the beautiful samples the design team have made), you'll want to go over to Sami Stamps' blog HERE.

I used the beautiful Candy Cane Mermaid. Keeping with the sea theme, I've used predominately aqua and blue-green for my colors. After coloring the mermaid, I did brush some Stickles Star Dust along the side and onto the very bottom of her tail.

 My card is a white base. I had not planned to use the white base and had cut the dark aqua shape to be the card base. Alas, the die slid down a bit on one side so that when I ran it through the cutter, one side of the top was not attached to the back. I just ended up cutting the two pieces completely apart and adhering one to the white square base. I then cut the next smaller die using the aqua patterned paper (believe it or not, that came from a Christmas pad called "Old World Winter" by the Paper Studio).

I inked around my image piece using ColorBox "aqua."  My dies are DooHickey by Magnolia and were a special order set available early last spring. I cut three of the sea grasses, lightly brushing the aqua ink here and there on the die cuts to give them a little more depth. I did not, however, ink the little jelly fish. 

The flowers are a combination from my stash. They are by Prima, WOC and Recollections. The sea shells are some I've had for a very long time and they were purchased in a package, not personally collected (sigh). 

I did computer generate my sentiment, and I refrained from making the sea portion of the greeting large (as in my blog title) because I thought that was just a bit over the top for my lovely card (grin). 

Please stop by the blog and have a look at all the lovely cards. There is no new challenge as our challenges run for the entire month, so if you haven't joined in yet, you still have time. We'd love to see what you do with a Sami Stamps image. Also remember that there is a special offer (sale) on all images that runs through 31 December 2014. A perfect time to pick up some of Sami's beautiful images!!

TMS and Daydream Designs

Welcome to another sketch challenge.  This week's sketch is inspired by Jessi and it's another great canvas for creativity!

We have a wonderful sponsor this week that I am thrilled to have join us.  We're sponsored by Diane's Daydream Designs.

We are delighted to be able to sponsor this fun challenge and to offer a prize to a happy winner! Visit Daydream Designs store for our full line of whimsical, hand-drawn digi images, sentiments, papers, embellishments, and more for all your crafting needs. Images are usually in both JPEG and PNG with 300 dpi resolution, are resizable and our crisp, black-line sentiments can be recolored in most photo editing programs. We promote family-friendly, wholesome products with many Christian-themed images and scripture verses. There is sure to be something for every crafter and every project whether digitally created or traditionally designed. 

Visit our Daydream Designs blog for tons of inspiration from our Dream Team Designers. Diane Noble, Owner/Illustrator

Here's the awesome sketch we get to play with:

I have used the image Snowbaby Love Outline Set  for my card. It is a lined drawing which I printed off and colored with Copic markers. Unfortunately, you cannot see the snow as it does not photograph well, but I added Stickles to it so the glitter gives a shimmery effect.

The card base is cream (again, doesn't seem to show well in the photo -- must work on the lighting before next week). I've placed a layer of goldish colored snowflake designed paper on top as my background. I then used a strip of red and white scrap from a pad I purchased last year (or maybe the year before) from Michael's Crafts across the card. (I missed that extra little strip at the bottom of the main strip until I'd completely finished my card -- one of those didn't see for looking things.) I stamped the sentiment onto scrap of the white X-Press It card on which I'd printed my image and then cut it into a fish tail banner. I have added a green button and a tiny red dotty bow. I finished the card off by punching a corner piece from the background paper and adhering it to the right corner of the image.

We very much enjoyed see the beautiful entries in last week's challenge. Please join us again this week (no twist, just the sketch). Stop by the TMS blog to see the other inspirational cards (we have three guest designers this week as well as the TMS design team).

Father Christmas

I have pretty much gotten all of my Christmas cards made for this year. Just have a few more that need inside sentiments/verses and some envelopes that need to be made and they will all be ready for addressing. Truth be known, I had a stack left over from last year that didn't get mailed out, so I had a good head start on the project. Sad state of affairs, eh?

This is one that I made last Wednesday when I went up to my play date with my girlfriend whom I visit every other week. This was a fairly simple card but turned out quite lovely. The papers are from a K&Company 12" x 12" pad that she purchased last year. The card weight, red and ecru, are from our stash. The Father Christmas topper is from a new kit that we each bought from Crafter's Companion. Isn't it lovely? We printed it off with the computer and mounted it to the red card. Then we added sparkle. I used Stickles (I think Star Dust) which I haphazardly "painted" along the top and the right side only. We did try glitter embossing powder, but the glitter did not stay on the paper as well as the Stickles glitter did. (NOTE: If you do use glitter embossing powder, put it on and heat set it before you add the topper to the red matting else the adhesive will melt and your image will come off the matting.)

I made the red bow which is adhered to the left corner of the image with a glue dot, and the Merry Christmas sentiment is from the K&Company pad which we cut into a "ticket" shape using a die. The ticket may have been a bit "over kill" since the image has printing of merry Christmas in different languages, but we felt the card needed a little something at the bottom there, and we were trying to keep the card relatively flat for easier mailing. 

Hope you like the card. I am quite fond of vintage Father Christmas images, and the cd which comes in the Crafter's Companion kit has several of them for me to use.

Christmas Cheer

This week, we have a wonderfully simple but beautiful sketch for all of you. This sketch can be adapted to any kind of card (as you will see from the samples the DT have made). Our sponsor this week is returning sponsor Yours or Mine Paper Crafts.  Mei has a sweet little shop with all kinds of paper crafting treats.

Now here is our sketch for this week:

My girlfriend and I have gotten started on our Christmas cards for this year. (I have a confession to make in that I got behind and didn't get a lot of my cards in the mail last year, so I really have quite a head-start for this year's cards. I'm not proud of that confession and have a goal to do much better this coming holiday season.) This is a nice, CAS design that can look festive without adding lots of extra layers (translate extra postage).

My base card is red Bazzill card cut to 5" x 7" size. I then cut a layer of green DP from a Brenda Walton K&Company 12" x 12" Christmas pad (which I've had for a couple of years), and the fish-tail banner from a companion piece from the same pad. The K&Company pad contained two sheets with various sentiments and tags printed on it. My sentiment is one of the pre-printed elements from the pad page. I realized that maybe I should have scanned the page before cutting it so that I'd have additional sentiments/elements to use on other cards, and was much relieved there were two pices of this page. The two glittery holly leaves and berries are from a set of Jolee stickers that I purchased last year from Michael's Crafts.

Please stop by the blog. We have a new DT member, and I know you are going to love her work. Nina has been a faithful follower of TMS for quite a while, and we are so pleased she has agreed to join the team.