Frugal Friday --- Saturday Edition

I missed Frugal Friday yesterday so here is a Saturday edition! I am pretty burned out trying to come up with quick and easy cards for sets that my daughter is selling like hot cakes to raise money for her fundraiser for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. So far she has raised $150 selling cards and keeps coming with requests for more cards for Mom to make! I am happy to help out though.
She is working hard to reach her goal of $5000. On Tuesday she was in a wing eating contest at Wing Stop. She had people who sponsored her for $2 a wing. She had 5 minutes to eat as many of the 25 wings as she could. She ate 20 which shocked her co-workers who sponsored her as they thought she would only eat 10 at the most!

I used Nesties in the Cuttlebug to emboss the cards and then used a smaller one for the image panel. The 'Just A Note' stamp is a $1 stamp from Michaels. To emboss the card without cutting it the sandwich is from the bottom up A plate, B plate, tan mat, cardstock, Nestie with the cutting side down, B plate.

All machines aren't created equal and for my machine I have to use a shim between the B plate and the tan mat to get enough pressure for a good embossed image. Your machine may be different so try it without the shim first and if you are not getting a sharp enough image keep adding a shim of cardstock until you are happy with it.

I think these cards would be pretty done with notecards that are colored on the outside and white on the inside but I don't have any and I wanted the inside white.

I am going to look through my stash and see of I have any suitable patterned cardstock that is white on the back

Frugal Friday

I am back with a Frugal Friday card! The sentiment is from the My Sentiments Exactly special limited time offer of over 100 unmounted stamps for $24.99 or on Ebay for a Buy It Now price of $21.21 until the 26th. A very frugal deal! The flower stamp is from a clear $1 set from Michaels. I chose the scrap first and then colored the flower to match with Prismacolor pencils and OMS.

Frugal Friday

You Bought It Now Use It!

This is what I have been telling myself. It isn't very frugal to buy something and then not use it! These are a set of dies from Cuttlebug that I bought a while back but have not used. They called Vintage and are 2" x 2" dies that come 4 to a package. The price varies around the web from $14.99 to $7.99 on Ebay.

These are 2 cards I made using a couple of the dies. If you take a close look at the lovely white card Sheila made she has used another of these dies on the corners of her card.

For the first card I used the die to cut 2 corners, top left and bottom right, from the colored panel and I cut 2 dies from white CS which I adhered to the other 2 corners.It doesn't show well in the picture but the two I glued on look like they are embossed while the two I cut look like they are debossed.

I cut the aperture with a Nestie and then cut a smaller one from the green and glued it behind the panel which I then glued to the card base. The stamp is from Inkadinkado. I stamped it twice, once on the card base and once on a scrap. I colored both and then cut out the flowers and a leaf and used pop dots to adhere them.

For the second card I used the Cuttlebug Textile Textures for the bottom panel and Swiss Dots for the narrow panel and edged them with a chalk inkpad. I cut 3 dies and used the chalk ink on them too. They are raised with dimensional tape. Now to use the other two.

Frugal Friday and a challenge

For today's card I used a $1 stamp from Michaels. I have a few of these type of stamps in both horizontal and vertical orientations and have always found them more difficult than the square ones so I thought I would challenge myself to use this one today.

To me, being a frugal cardmaker is creating a beautiful card without a lot of expense. I would rather spend my crafting dollars on things I can use over and over rather than on rub-ons, stickers, primas and other embelishments that can only be used once. I also like my cards to go in the mail for the price of one stamp!

Which brings me to the challenge. I love cards with lots of white space too so here is my challenge to you.

CHALLENGE.
1) Create a card using only white cardstock. (today's card is a good example) Use as many layers
as you like but no colored cardstock or paper.
2) The color should come from the image. The card should be at least 75% white.
3) No embelishments like ribbon, buttons, primas etc
4) The challenge will run for 6 days, Saturday through Thursday. All entries must get to me by
midnight EST on Thursday, that is 11pm Central and 9pm PST.

When you have made your card email a picture to me with WHITE CHALLENGE in the subject line and don't forget to tell me who you are. My email address is in the left column near the top. I will put the picture on my blog using your first name only.

I will be making a challenge card every day, that is 6 cards. Your name will be entered in a drawing on Friday and I will do a random drawing and announce the winner on my blog and by email. The winner will receive the 6 cards that I make gift boxed plus a nice surprise!

Break out the white cardstock and get creating. I look forward to getting your entries!

Frugal Friday

COLORING ON VELLUM

What does this have to do with Frugal Friday? What could be more frugal than a free image! There are free images all over the internet. All you have to do is save them, resize them, print them on copy paper and trace them onto vellum. Look for stained glass patterns and clip art and of course sign up for the free samples from Dover. Here is a clipart site to get you started. On this post you can find a download for a free program to resize your images as well as a tutorial on how to do it.

I made this card with a free parchment craft pattern I got from the internet. You can get the pattern and directions HERE. Instead of using the floral image that came with the pattern I used part of a free image from Dover. As it is from a long time ago I have a download HERE I colored the image on the back with Prismacolor pencils.

The vellum paper I am using is from Pergamano but any cardstock weight vellum would be fine. You can get it at Papertrey Ink. The vellum you generally find at Michaels, Hobby Lobby etc is not heavy enough to take the embossing.

If you just want the soft look of coloring on vellum the lighter weight from the craft store will work. Print or stamp the image on regular printer paper and then trace it onto the vellum. To get the very fine line on the card above I use a mapping pen and white acrylic ink. You can get these in any art department.You can use a white gel pen but you will not get the fine line you get with a mapping pen. Of course you can use any color pen you want to do the tracing or you can trace with a white pencil, color on the back and then erase the pencil mark from the front.

For this card I traced the image onto vellum with a black Micron pen 005 which is a very fine line. Instead of coloring the petals I used a stylus to emboss the petals slightly from the back. The leaves and centers are colored with pencils on the front.

Sorry for the angle of this card but I wanted to show the gold outline. I traced the image with a gold gel pen, you can see the difference in the thickness of the line with a gel pen versus a mapping pen or fine Micron pen. I colored on the back side with colored pencils. You can color on the back or the front but coloring on the back gives a softer look. Both colored pencils and markers work well for coloring.

Have fun with coloring on vellum!

Frugal Friday

It's Frugal Friday again and another card with a $1 stamp from Michaels. I don't know what happened to the picture but the colors are more vivid than they look in the picture.


This gift stamp is from one of the clear $1 stamp sets by Studio G. I stamped the package randomly on the background and the panel with Versamark Ink. I stamped and colored 5 package with Prismacolor pencils and odorless mineral spirits. I punched the squares with a
1 1/4" punch angling the packages slightly. The 5th package I cut out. The squares and sentiment are mounted on black and purple CS. The sentiment is from Stampin Up.

Frugal Friday

The purpose of Frugal Friday is to use some of the inexpensive things I have found and make something great with them. Wouldn't this be a great end-of-the-year card for a teacher?

This cute little stamp is one of the $1 stamps from Michael's. The flip-flops and sentiment are on the same stamp but I seperated them. There are 2 ways you can do this. You can either mask off the part you don't want with scotch tape, ink up the stamp, remove the tape and stamp. How many times will you forget to remove the tape before you stamp? Not more times than me I'll bet. LOL

The second way, and the way I find the easiest when you do multiple stampings is to ink the part of the stamp you want to use with a water based marker. Don't forget to clean the stamp before you ink up the second part though!

I doodled the dots around the squares and on the flip-flops and I added clear Stickles on the flowers although you can't see it in the picture. I raised up the green flip-flops with pop dots. For the background I ran the CS through the Cuttlebug using the Swiss Dots folder.