Mom Julie's Birthday Card for 26 July 2010

I really like doing the flowers a-la-Paola ;-) and now regularly visit the various sites where she is on the Design team. This is where I get a lot of my inspiration from...whiff of joy and of course Paola's blog :-) Thanks friend for being such a good influence!
The picture is, believe it or not, an old card which I tore and distressed using the Tea Dye Distress ink, a medicine sponge and a couple of squirts of water! I did the same treatment to the rose in the middle of the flowers. The bottom roses were dabbed with ink from the Yellow Ochre Chalk Inkpad.
The lacy border was punched using a Fab Scraps punch which was one of a set of 4. I covered it with some organza ribbon. The bottom left embellishment is a tag from the Fancy pants Alphabet set from Cuttlebug and the flowery design under that are Nestabilities. I also sneaked in a couple of, often neglected, skeleton leaves. The swirl is an off range Creative Memories Punch and the papers are random scrapbook papers.
I'm also starting to use my flat pearls more and more & have used 2 different colour ones on the card in various places.

Blog Candy

Here is some fabulous blog candy for you. Visit http://artfuldelight.blogspot.com/2010/07/here-we-go-again.html to see how you can win it. The draw takes place on 30 July 2010. Good luck!

Soccer Fever

Just before the soccer ended, my mom Julie asked us to take photos of her next to her car which is proudly flying the South African Flag. Everyone was encouraged to wear their Bafana Bafana shirts on a Friday to work & mom was quite happy to oblige! That's my darling Gav with her in the last pic.

One of my friends from the RSA group, Paola has inspired me with her colouring in and the stunning cards she makes using paper flowers and flat pearls (amongst other things).
This Z-card is one of my first creations, using this gorgeous girl from Whiff of Joy - this site will show you how one of the ladies on their design team colours in hair.



I coloured in the skin on all the cards using Copics - Blush R20 and either E00 Skin White or E21 Baby Skin Pink. For the rest I used regular ol' Pencil Crayons!
Oh...on the yellow card above I wanted the dress to be white, so I just shaded the lines with an HB pencil! The swirl's are part of the fancy paper.



Lots of colour in this card, hence the multicoloured flowers.



Plain and simple, enhanced by peel-offs. All the above shapes were cut on my Cuttlebug, using Nestabilities, some of which were Susan's - thanks for letting me use them:-))



I made this card for my friend, Marelize for her birthday last month.

Thanks so much Paola for getting me to climb out of my box ;-)

Soccer Challenge

Our Cardi-ologist July meeting was held at Susan's place, with Gladys being the hostess and issuing the challenge for the month - a card for a 5 year old boy depicting soccer. This was my entry. The soccer ball and Planet Goal are erasers I found at our local Checkers. The boy is from ladybugandfriends.com and he's usually holding a bouquet of flowers, now his hand is behind his back ;-) I coloured in his face with Copics and his clothes with Tombows. The white cardstock is done on the Cuttlebug and the red was textured manually with a Fiskars Texture Plate.

Pecan Nut Tree

This Pecan Nut tree of ours yields delicious nuts and is so full in the beginning of the year that Gav has to prop various branches up with a long ladder & poles. This pic was taken mid June 2010.


Here Shadow & Sheena are looking for nuts - they both love them!!


Gav climbed up the ladder today (Sunday 18 July 2010) to shake the tree & gather some of the nuts that wouldn't loosen. This is practically the last for the season.


We picked up half a bucketful just today - and I sat in the warm wintery sun after Church, shelling some for baking and of course eating!