Girl Time with The Paper Players

Happy Sunday,  y'all!  Seems like stampers enjoyed Stef's sketch last week for The Paper Players just as much as I did : ) and now it's time for a new challenge brought to us by the wonderful Jaydee:

Girl time!  Your card doesn't have to be pink, but mine is.  Here's what I made:

I once went on a girls' trip to Paris with my friend Krissy (we lived in Germany at the time so it was just a short train ride away, so why not) and I had Paris on the brain because I recently bought some address labels with artwork of the Eiffel Tower and flowers on them, so I thought I'd make that in card form.  I actually started this card with the Eyelet Blooms die that was the April product of the month and built everything else on top of it.  I love the look of pale Pink Pirouette with black accents, and added in a bit of Pool Party just because I liked it.  The big flowers are from an old, old stamp set called Embrace Life, and I used a blending brush to add some ink to the flower centers and then used a marker to add darker pink too before I fussy cut them.  A few rhinestones and some crocheted trim and here we are.

Hope you'll enjoy this challenge too, after all we have Mother's Day coming up so we need some feminine cards, right?  The hubs asked me the other day if I wanted anything in particular for Mother's Day and I told him he bought me two more orchids at the store the other day...okay I bought them but he has to take care of them because both my thumbs are the blackest black and I can't keep plants alive for anything.  We already had a yellow orchid, and I got a blue-violet one with freckles and a teeny-tiny one with white flowers.  I do love to have orchids by my kitchen sink, especially since I'm not the one taking care of them.  We had five tiny ones above our kitchen sink in Germany.

Supplies, all SU!
Stamps:  Parisian Beauty, Embrace Life, Happy Happenings
Ink:  Memento Tuxedo Black, Pink Pirouette
Paper:  Pink Pirouette, Pool Party, Basic Black, Basic White, Parisian Blossoms Specialty DSP 
Accessories:  Parisian dies, Eyelet Blooms die, some kind of label punch, rhinestones, black crocheted trim, Dimensionals

Check out the other design team creations on the Paper Players blog, and you can hop through their individual blogs to leave some comments too:

The Paper Players Design Team

Jaydee

LeAnne Pugliese

Claire Broadwater

Joanne James

Anne Marie Hile

Ann Schach

Jan Clothier

Stef Perry

you are here --> Christy Stanford

And then upload your card at the Paper Players blog!  Keep in mind a few simple rules:
1.  Create a new paper project
2.  Upload your creation to your blog with a link back to us and provide a direct link to the post featuring your challenge submission
3.  Please link your card to no more than four challenges, TOTAL
4.  Have fun!

Friday Flashback: Sweet Shoppe Alphabet

Happy Friday, peeps!  Welcome to this week's Friday Flashback, featuring the Sweet Shoppe Alphabet.  It's a very cute alphabet, I'm happy for the reminder to break it out and use it again!  So let's go flash back.

This is a more recent creation, I made it just last December.

Ok, I admit, it's a little sad that the Flashback is pretty short and one of the photos is the index card I did for the Splitcoast gallery.

Also features Broadsheet Alphabet & Array of Sunshine

Ok, so there's one more project I used the alphabet for.  Clearly I needed the reminder to use it again, and I'm super excited about what I made!

These photos are from way back in 2006 when the hubs and I lived in North Carolina and we had a go at growing flowers in our backyard, no mean feat for me who has two black thumbs.  The layout is very, very simple, so to make it a little more interesting I matted half the pictures with different colors and left the other half unmatted.  So let's take a look at that title:

Your eyes do not deceive you, I used a different alphabet for the capital letters (Empire Alphabet).  I just love mixed font titles and I love how those two looked together!  I will admit, though, that it took For.Ev.Er. to stamp the title on here.  I always worry I'll do something like drop an inked stamp on the cardstock and I'll have to start over, but I managed to get through that entire very long title with no oopsies.  Even spelled it right.

And I finally used the largest of the Butterfly Thinlits.  This is a flashback for color too, that lovely shade on the butterfly is the long-retired Marvelous Magenta.  It's such an 80s color, am I right?  It retired shortly after I started stamping, so I only have a few pieces of 12x12 cardstock this color and no 8.5x11 and no ink pad.  If you want to get technical, the cardstock I have is from before Stampin' Up! went to "true" 12x12, it's about a quarter inch shy of twelve inches square.  And now I have three pieces of it plus some scraps, but it was worth it to use one piece for this layout.

There's my color palette:  Pistachio Pudding, Garden Green, Marvelous Magenta, Ballet Blue, and Elegant Eggplant even though it looks black 'cause it's not.  So that's it for me this week, peeps, hope you have a marvelous weekend, whether or not it's magenta ;)

Supplies, scrapbook layout only:
Stamps:  Sweet Shoppe Alphabet, Empire Alphabet, Embrace Life
Ink:  Garden Green, Ballet Blue, Elegant Eggplant
Paper:  Pistachio Pudding, Marvelous Magenta, Ballet Blue, Elegant Eggplant
Accessories:  Butterfly Thinlits

Friday Flashback: Symbols of Solicitude

Ok, so I'm just running late all week :)  But it's still Friday and we're still doing the Friday Flashback!  Today's featured stamp set is Symbols of Solicitude, which lives in the same stamp case as the similar set Kanji.  Having lived in Japan for almost three years, of course I have to have pretty much all the Oriental stamp sets that SU! makes.  So let's go!

The picture doesn't show it very well, but I stamped the "peace" kanji and embossed it with silver on the left page.

Also features Embrace Life

What is it about Japanese/Chinese stuff and the color red?  Yep, I use them together a lot.

Also uses Kanji

This was a wedding present for a friend of mine; she wanted something Japanese (and nope, they're not Asian at all).  I made both the card and the cross-stitched piece.  And now for today's new card:

Still red, I couldn't help it :)  I'll just need to remember this card next February when my friend Chris' birthday rolls around, I think he'd like this.  I based it on a past Retro Sketch:

The card actually came together really fast once I finally got in my craft room to work on it.  I'm gonna get back in the groove so I can have posts ready ahead of time, it's my new goal.  For now though, thanks for joining me for this week's Friday Flashback and have a great weekend!

Supplies, last card only:
Stamps:  Symbols of Solicitude, Four You
Ink:  Chocolate Chip
Paper:  Riding Hood Red, Very Vanilla, Haiku DSP
Accessories:  Hexagon punch (to flag the ends of the sentiment strip), Dimensionals, Square Lattice EF