I guess I was warming up early for Fall… even towards the end of the summer, I was pulled towards creating cards with warm colour palettes of oranges, reds, browns, and yellows…
Front & Inside of a “Friends” card
Front & Inside of a Birthday Card for a toddler
Well I haven’t shared a scrapbook layout in a while but it’s mostly because I haven’t been scrapbooking as much these days! I’ve mostly been sticking with the smaller crafts like card-making because they are shorter to complete and therefore less painful. But I wanted to keep catching up with my kids’ albums, so I finally got to the layout with the photos from Harmony’s first day of grade 6 (so just about 1 year ago!).
First Day of Grade 6
Materials: Riding Hood Red card stock & ink, Chocolate Chip card stock & ink, Only Orange card stock, chocolate brown ribbon, white jumbo brads, Chocolate Chip felt flower, orange flower brad, yellow mini brads, red mini brad, fall multi-colour brad, red metal frame, white Creative Memories letter stickers, various-sizes circle punches, scallop circle punch, stamps from various Stampin’ Up sets, and several different patterned paper sheets in oranges and reds.
This is actually a good time of year to do these Back-to-School and School Album layouts because we are very much getting into the Back-to-School mood these days! With about 3 weeks left of summer, we’ve done some shopping for school supplies and I have done a lot of online shopping for the kids’ clothes. I’m glad my son doesn’t mind – too bad little miss preteen is a little fussier about that! She is far more used to getting to go shopping at the mall. It was a yearly tradition that I have really had to give up the past couple years. She says she doesn’t *mind* pushing me in a wheelchair at the mall but it’s just not the same and I just can’t go as far and as long as I used to, so we can’t get it all done in one shot like every other year. Thank goodness I have some fond memories still tucked away in my foggy brain of previous trips and also some pics in her album to show her!
Side Note:I’ve re-organized the albums in my Scrapbook Layouts Gallery to show the more current albums on Page 1 of the gallery. It also made me realize I have not yet uploaded the pictures of layouts from Avery’s First Year scrapbook (one of my fave albums!) so I’ll be sure to do that soon.
Back to this layout… I tried out a new technique for paper-piercing the “6″ on the layout and my trick worked pretty well so I wanted to share it…
This card design can finally be posted because the recipient has received this card… 
I thought this card would be more difficult to create, but it actually ended up being easy to put together. It was based on this great tutorial.
The paper used for the base was Bazzil and the rest was mostly Stampin’ Up colours including Riding Hood Red and Chocolate Chip. The flowers punched out had those colours with some vellum mixed in as well as a Chocolate Chip felt flower. The design on the white paper is actually just a stamped design, not patterned paper. The white paper was punched with a scallop punch at the bottom and then the top part was created using the scallop circle punch and circle punch. The brad was created with the make-your-own-brad kit with Chocolate Chip and Riding Hood Red ink.
The best part was that this card actually fits well into a regular card-size envelope (that fit the standard 5.5″ x 4.25″ sized card). You just need to be careful that you don’t have the top part sticking up too much. Be sure to stick it down at least halfway into the bottom part.
The card ended up looking so cool that I made another one for my brother-in-law (well, BIL to be)…
The style was definitely switched up to be more masculine – I love grays and blacks with red but don’t get a chance to work with those colours much. The darkest gray is this very shiny glittery paper from Bazzil. I also used a patterned paper from Bazzil with really neat designs on them. For the top ribbon I just used a regular-size hole punch and placed the brad on the bottom instead with Riding Hood Red paper and Chocolate Chip ink (with a bit of silver ink for the circle) to create the brad.
These are definitely a fun card to create! Just keep in mind you’ll need a very stiff type of card stock to support the structure of the card. This also means that you’ll really need that Sticky Strip (from Stampin’ Up) to hold it together securely. If anyone creates one I’d love to see it so please post a link!
Happy Stampin’!
