Miss Ewe

Happy Friday Everyone!

I’ve been focused on creating birthday cards and Halloween and Christmas decor for at least a week now so I decided to give myself a break and just "play" with some of my stamps.

I am dedicating today’s first card to my friend Susan DeMuth of Shapes, ETC. Susan is the one who first got me started on this papercrafting addiction. Several years ago she brought some of her favorite papercrafting books and tools with her when we were attending an NSSEA conference. That’s when she showed me how to create the 3-dimensional flowers that I now always refer to as "Flowers a la Susan". That’s when she shared a couple of her favorite books called Punch Your Art Out. When I returned home from that trip I promptly purchased the books, some paper punches and a stylus.

I flipped through those books recently and decided to use some of my punches to create some vegetables. I ran a piece of green glitter tag through a Cuttlebug Swiss Dots embossing folder, sanded the dots and then used a foot punch to punch out some cucumbers. I used a small apple punch to create green peppers. The tomatoes were made with a half inch circle punch and a small star punch.

I stamped a basket from the Hero Arts Sunny Smiles cling stamp set, colored it with some of my Copics and fussy cut it. I tore some sand paper to create the garden soil. The layering paper is from SEI.  I used foam tape to adhere the basket of vegetables to the card.

Before I share another card I’d like to pass along some advice that Susan gave to me when I first became interested in paper crafting. She suggested that each time I added anything to my paper crafting stash that I made sure it had a home so that everything would be organized and easily found. Happily I listened to her advice and now even though I have a vast collection of paper punches, wooden and clear stamps, ink pads, buttons and ribbons,etc. everything I want to use is easily found and accessible. Thank you Susan for your inspiration, guidance, and friendship. If you are a classroom teacher be sure to visit and shop at Susan’s web site at www.shapesetc.com Susan is the artist and owner of that company.

One of my recent Lawn Fawn purchases was a set of clear stamps called Critters on the Farm. I love all of the critters in this set, but decided to play with the adorable lamb. I took some scraps of Bitty Dot Basics 2008 paper from PaperTrey Ink and cut them into hills. I used a Martha Stewart picket fence border punch and punched out a long fence strip. I cut between every three or so "pickets" so that I could curve the fence and glued it behind some of my hills.

I used some watercolor pencils to color the lamb before I fussy cut it. I used some of my Copic markers to color the barn before I fussy cut it. I am pleased to see a little shading action in both of those images.  I used a sun die cut to create the sun and was thrilled to find the "Miss Ewe" text in a clear stamp set from Sweet and Sassy stamps. I cut the stamp into 2 parts so that it would fit on the sun’s circle. It will be easy to piece it back together on a clear block if I want the words to be next to each other again.

And that’s it for today.
Have a great day!
Carol

PS...Susan created my logo.  I described what I wanted to her over the phone and she created exactly what I had in mind.