Step Outside Your Color Comfort Zone!

Yellow can be a difficult color to craft with and I don't keep a lot of yellow in my stash.  But one of my favorite perennials is my yellow tree peony (photo below) and I thought I would like to try an Anna Griffin card for Mother's Day with this yellow flower as inspiration.  I used Anna's Lovely Layered Cards Cartridge again and will put my sentiment inside.  Once again the darkest yellow needed some umph with distressed inks to pop and I didn't want to use a cream neutral with the yellow, so I added this small scale dot by Stampin' Up.  I am going to enter this one into the Fantabulous Cricut blog Mother's Day challenge as I see that you can enter 3 times.

Mother's Day Challenge Entry

Have you ever visited the Fantabulous Cricut Challenge blog?  It is a wonderful source of inspiration and ideas for the Cricut machine.  They have reached a milestone of 300 challenges and have a great prize this time.  So, I am in on the challenge 300:  Mother's Day!
My card is made with Anna's Lovely Layered Cards.  Even the sentiment is from that cartridge.  So easy to cut and put together with fabulous results!  And I'll give you a great tip when you don't have enough contrast in your three colors of pink card stock try to sand the lightest color pink (hopefully it has a white core like mine) and add some darker distress ink to your darkest pink paper to make your flower pop.  I have two boys and therefore don't keep much pink paper for scrap books.

Supplementing Anna Griffin's Card Kit with Cricut

I am making Mother's Day Cards from HSN with Anna Griffin's Card kit today and ran out of Happy Mother's Day sentiments.  I love her card kits and they are so generous with plenty of left overs, but Anna needs to add more Mother's Day sentiments because some of us have step parents on both sides of the family!  I needed sets for Mothers, Grandmothers, Step Mothers and Step Grandmothers.  So, I got on my Design Space and made my own! 

I used Cricut Elegant Edges for the oval frames, added the cream ovals in the center and the sentiment is from Cricut Mother's Day 2010 Cartridge.  I sent the cream oval to the back and then flattened the images.  After I printed and cut them, I embellished with a gold pen by hand.  Now I can make all my cards with professional looking sentiments.  Thanks Anna Griffin and Cricut!

And here is a photo of the outside of the cards by Anna.

Finish Your UFO Challenge 16: Go Green

This week I am continuing with my Finish Your Unfinished Objects Challenge.  And working with the Anniversary theme, the 16th anniversary, this week's extra entry theme was hard to find.  Turns out there is NO traditional 16th anniversary gift, only modern traditions for this anniversary.  The modern tradition is the gemstone Peridot.  So work on a UFO that involves the color Peridot green or an actual Peridot for an extra entry this week.  Above you'll see a paper purse I made with cereal boxes covered with some Basic Grey paper.  You can find more information about the purse project here.  What a great idea for Mother's Day!

And since this was such a struggle and the color is green, I'm also accepting any UFO that is environmentally green.  So, finish a UFO with a recycled or up cycled supply and get an extra entry too!