clair087

I've been loving making my own patterns lately. It's such an easy thing to reach for - a pad, some watercolors, maybe a stamp...Late at night when my creativity is not particularly thriving, or if I'm having one of those days, I can still whip up something fun, with little to no effort. And it's wonderful to be able to use these bits later in my cards. Today I'm sharing three cards created with the stamped and colored paper I made recently (shown below). This little card made the journey to a faraway place recently, and I hope it brought lots of sunshine and happy vibes to our dear friends, who bring so much of that to our lives. To start this card, I watercolored a soft aqua center, followed by stamped triangles from PTI's Southwestern Style stamps in  Green Parakeet ink . I used PTI's Scene It: Celebration die to cut out the circle banner frame. Of course, I kept the negatives, which made for a couple more fun cards (below). To the top of the card, I adde...

Hey Friends! Hope you're enjoying your week so far. Today's post is dedicated to friendship.  We are so blessed and grateful for the many dear friends in our life.  It has been so wonderful to see how our friendships have evolved, grown, changed, and brought so much joy to our life. We're still so fortunate to have many dear friends from our childhood and university years. These bonds will forever remain strong in our lives. But in addition to that, it has been so amazing for us to make friends that we, as a couple, have thoroughly enjoyed. To find soulmates (times two) is a special thing and I truly believe our lives are that much richer for it.  Among the wonderful people that fill our lives with joy everyday, I've also been so blessed to meet such an incredible, supportive, and creative group of women (and men) in this fabulous papercrafting community - both in person and via social media. I remember my first venture into blogland and my first-ever comment and how el...

G'morning! How is this Saturday treating you? I hope you've had a wonderful start to your weekend! Things are fabulous around here, and the studio is looking more and more like a florist's domain :)  So many beautiful floral stamps to play with and so little time! For today's card I wanted to try mixing solid-style floral stamps (such as  Gran's Garden  ) along with outline floral stamps (such as  Peonies on Parade ). I've found that in the past when mixing these two styles together, it's often resulted in a mis-matched, hodge-podge type of a look that I wasn't very fond of. But I think I've found a way to mix and match the two, and I'm happy to say that I love how this sweet marriage turned out on my card today! It turns out that my finicky eye seems to be really drawn to a similar style when mixing florals, and although these two sets couldn't be more different from a design perspective, I think what makes them work together has actually mo...

Happy Monday friends!  Today I have a very special post lined up, and if you're just joining me, I hope you'll stay a while and enjoy the festivities! If you already know about the blog hop, you're in the right place :) Today's post is a tad longer than most, but that's because I have a lot to share with you.  So grab a cuppa and enjoy! I'd like to take a moment to share the whole reason behind this blog hop celebration. As some of you know, a very dear friend of mine and I got to meet for the first time this past Christmas. It was a dream come true and quickly turned into a week full of fun, laughter and special memories. I would like to share our story with you, but be sure to heard over to Aneta's blog , for her take, too. Before we get to that, I'd like to share how this hop idea started. OUR PROJECT One of the wonderful things we got to do while visiting, was spend a little bit of time crafting together. Aneta brought back some crafty goodies for us...

Happy almost-Friday! I hope you've all had a wonderful week. This week, I had the opportunity to catch up with a dear old friend, whom I haven't seen for some time. It's delightful that our visits always feel like no time has passed at all. I think it's one of life's greatest blessings, knowing that despite the distance or time passed, we are never far from a friend's heart.  To start this card, I used a dotted, soft pink paper, layered on some white cardstock, with a wee bit of floral paper at the bottom. Just atop that, I added this darling journalling card, cut from a beautiful older paper, which I just cannot seem to find online (if anyone knows the name, please feel free to add a link in the comments). I wanted to keep this card sweet and simple, so I used only minimal embellishments, and decided to decorate with patterned paper.  My favorite way to play with patterns is to mix and match what I call the 'focal weight' of papers, while keeping things...