Amy Tangerine!!

Hi y'all!
Oh I'm soooo excited! {jumping up and down on chair}. Guess who I met today? AMY TAN the awesome chick behind AMY TANGERINE!! (Yep, I'm shouting with excitement!) She was at our local Spotlight store for a Make and Take and to promote her American Crafts line at Spotty.

I have been following her blog for a few years (notice the link in the sidebar) and I LOVE {heart heart heart} her style, her bright colours and her fun sense of scrapbooking, and I was amazed and so excited when I read spotlight was bringing her out to Australia! (Ok, believe me- she is tall but really petite- she makes me look like a giant elephant in this pic! Argh!)

So anyway, this arvo I headed over to Spotlight at Lidcombe and got to be part of the intimate group doing a Make and Take with her! Yep, there was 4 of us! That was a little disappointing, since she is such a cool scrapbooking celebrity! And come on people, not many celebrities come to Australia, and especially to Lidcombe {giggles!}.

We made a gorgeous card using papers, stickers and stamps from her line, and I {heart} it! Ok, so I maybe bought the stamps and some more of her patterned papers afterwards, she was so lovely, I really wanted to support her line! Oh, she signed my card there on the front too {smiles!}

And then at the end she said she had a giveaway- one for who had come the furthest (which clearly wasn't me!) and then she asked would I like the Apron, cos I had been following her the longest! {High Five!} I was SOOOOOO thrilled!! She signed it for me & said to "Keep your creative juices flowing!" Well, I will! Thanks Amy!
So YAY!! If you're in QLD then she is coming to you tomorrow, check it out on the Spotlight FB page. She is so friendly, and lovely and chatty and smiley. Such a great person, which I think really shows out in her cool line of Scrapbooking stuff!
:) C

Friendship Cards

Hi Y'all!
I thought I'd share some more Stampin Up cards with you, seeing as I'm celebrating 5 Years as a Stampin Up Demonstrator, and am having a 10% off sale in June to celebrate! (Don't forget to email me!)
Mum and Dad are on the team for a church camp (do you call a camp for adults a camp? Or a conference? LOL!) and Mum asked me to put together some kits for "Friendship cards" for the ladies to do as a sit and chat (network?) activity that Mum will be hosting.
I decided to use the "Mixed Bunch" set ($38.95 for clear mount) from the current Autumn-Winter Stampin Up Mini Catalogue. It's a gorgeous set of 3 large flowers, with some smaller co-ordinating circular patterns, and there is a co-ordinating punch ($33.95) which makes card making so quick and easy!! I LOVE  the 3 flowers, they are so cool. The other one, the one I haven't used for these 2 cards, is a really nice filigree sorta flower, so pretty! I could imagine it as a doily-like snowflake for Christmas Cards!
Anyway, I whipped up these 2 example cards, plus 3 others which I foolishly didn't take pics of (what was with my memory that day??) using the pieces in the kits. The sentiments on these cards are from some retired SU sets also. I love the True Friend sentiment!
Each card kit contained a stamped and punched flower, a sentiment stamped on a punched out Decorative Label shape (a punch from the main catalogue) and either some small stamped and punched circles, which you see here, or book paper butterflies which I cut with my Beautiful Wings embosslit die ($21.95) from the main catalogue, plus background paper and a strip of co-ordinating paper. I was worried the ladies would have made the card in about 10 mins then sit there twiddling their thumbs, but Mum assures me it will take them a bit longer than that! In amongst the chatting and cups of tea I expect! I wanted to show how the same elements from the kits could be used to make different looking cards.
Good Luck with teaching your first class Mum!
Don't forget to email me with your order before the end of the month to take advantage of 10% off and also free shipping if your order is over $50! Email me at mrscharlottelam (at) hotmail (dot) com!
:) C

Lovely Cards.

The design brief: make some "Lovely Cards" cos my box was lacking. Cards must be viewed by Mum with the comment to follow being: "Lovely" or "Beautiful". You know, the kind of card I don't usually make. LOL! Well I love to use Cupcake stamps and owl stamps cos they're my fave things! But they are quite modern and maybe Mum and her friends would prefer something more "Classic!" So while I was sick a couple of weeks ago I set about fulfilling this design brief and I came up with quite a few cards (I was on a tonsilitis-induced, stuck at home for 5 days, roll!) I hope she likes them! I realised I don't have that many "classic" stamp sets in my repertoire either. It was a challenge and I had to dig deep, but I found my Papertrey Garden set which I haven't used in like, forever so I dug it out, and some more classical papers from my stash too and whipped up these beauties. Apparently I think this soft pink and brown are Mum kind of colours, cos I've used this colour combo a lot! I dug into my button stash too and used them for embellishments. I 'm happy with these cards! I've got more to share from when I was sick too, so stay tuned!
Happy Friday!
:)C

Do brown cards reflect my Melancholy mood?

Hi Y'all!

For some reason yesterday and today I have been quite melancholy. I'm not sure why. Monday I felt I couldn't even snap out of it! Luckily I have great friends at work who make my days fun :) so the feeling almost went away. Then today it was sneaking back in the edges again. What is this all about? If you know me, you know I am a happy person! I dunno... I've been working too hard at work lately and I have found it not a fun place to be (apart from break times with my friends) and now that I work day shift I miss the sunlight and being able to go shopping in the day time like when I worked nights. Hmm... hope I do snap out of it, it's really annoying to be sad! So anywho, the 4 cards I've made lately have incorporated brown... so I'm thinking that's a reflection of my mood! Willy did pick me up quite a bit by buying me Ribs and Pancakes for dinner Monday night. The path to my happiness is paved with food, so it would seem {sigh}.

This paper has been in the front of my stash for ages and I don't like it, but I thought it would actually look good as House warming cards! I think it turned out pretty good actually. I paired my See D's Home Sweet Home stamps with my new Trendy Trees stamps from Stampin Up which I just love. How cute are those little trees?!

Then I made some wedding cards using some of my 3D stickers. You know me by now right? Well, you know that I have a box full of the 3D stickers from my obsession with them in the past (thankfully it has petered off in the past 2 years, cos otherwise I could open my own shop with the number I have right now! In fact, I don't think I have bought any at all this year! Woo Hoo!) Well I don't have many wedding stamps so I thought it would be cool to use up some of the 3D stickers and get some more wedding cards in my box. How do you like these? I used SU designer series Berry Bliss paper from last year's catalogue paired with some little scraps from my stash to make these 2 cards. There is a bit of glitz you can't see so well in the pics but a card isn't complete without ribbon and glitz!

:) C

I haven't forgotten you!

Hi Y'all! I hope you had a great Easter! I didn't really end up doing anything creative on the long weekend, so I don't have much exciting stuff to post! Although I did visit Mum and Dad and help Mum out with packaging and pricing all the stuff for her craft sale! It's an exciting time for her (and the rest of us!) and is less than 3 weeks away, so she's coming down to the "exam period" where its Craft Cramming time! Lol.

Here are a couple of cards I did last week when I was going through my stash of paper scraps and thought I would throw together some combinations of papers I haven't used before. I'm really keen on working through all my scraps so I can move onto new papers that I'm not sick of looking at! The top paper on this card is actually pearlised so it is so pretty IRL! I wanted a sentiment that didn't pigeonhole this card into any particular event, and this one is quite sweet! I like the font too. There's my new doily lace punch that Alicia bought me in America :) {hugs!}.

And then I made this same but different card with the same colours and papers but different LO. It's a bit less Uniform, and a little more fun-kay. Lol! At some point I do need to take my cards to some markets cos i have hundreds!! Can you believe it! And I need to sell them off so that I can have room for making more!

Off to work...

:) C

And Owl Will Love You.. Owlways...

I hope you now have Bon Jovi stuck in your head too :) {sniggering to self}. Well, today has been an interesting mixture of uneventful and eventful! And I accomplished my goal of taking a non-crafting related pic- you can check it out next time I do my Project 365 mosaic in another 8 days.. There's a tempter for you to come back and check me out! Lol.

After wasting my morning waiting for a potential new housemate that decided at the last minute my place is too far from her work so didn't come, I was wandering around aimless at home cos my whole day had been messed up. I was surfing for some new Baby Stamps when I realised Art Stamps is the Australian distributer for Hero Arts and had all their new stamps in! I jumped in my car and toodled off to their shop (conveniently only 15mins from my house.. woo hoo!) and I relaxed and indulged my stamping senses in looking at all the new Rubber. Delicious! I only got one stamp from the new range (however, family, I saw many sets I wanted there!) but as soon as I saw it I put it in my shopping basket, and that's where it stayed. No, it's not an owl or a baby stamp after all.. it's woodgrain {licking lips, thinking of all the wonderful cards and scrappin I can do with this stamp!} It is actually a big circle of woodgrain and it just fits inside my Giga Scallop punch from Marvy so it's a match made in heaven. Check out the cool cards I made with it when I got home! I stamped it in Chocolate Chip on Kraft, and I think it turned out fabulously! That's the eventful part- upon making it home at 2:30pm, I made 3 cards and am currently baking a dairy free, egg free, nut free cake for Felicity (we'll see how that turns out- it currently smells pretty good though!!)

Check out the paper on this third card... I think it may have been one of the first papers I ever bought. That makes it about 9 years old! Oh my gosh!! Get rid of it!! Why on earth do I still have it! Lol. It's so amazing to think I have had some supplies for that long! Oh yeah, there is a spanner in the works for my New Year's Resolution. I just found 11 more papers I bought in the after Christmas Sales at Spotlight and RJ's in Wollongong. D'oh! This means instead of being 6 papers down with 48 to go, I am actually 5 papers up. Crap on a stick! Oh yeah, the scallop square punch is from Stampin Up's Summer Mini and the Thank You stamp that fits inside it is from a set in the Summer Mini called "Say it with Scallops." Already quite well used by me!

Hope you're doing something interesting for your Saturday night!!

:) C

Celebrate with Style- and a few 3D stickers too :)

Hello! I have been AWOL this week, I can't believe I haven't posted since last friday! The week has just flown by without me noticing. I think it's only going to get worse on the lead up to Christmas too!! Oh no!!

Mum's Sale was a Success {clapping hands and toasting with a glass of bubbly} which makes us all very happy! It's great to see all the beautiful craft stuff she makes going off to a new home in the hands of a happy customer! I did well too, selling over 20 cards, which has free-ed up my box a little and so now I can make more!

I have a mountain of 3D stickers. I love them. At last count (which was about a year ago) I had over 100 packets. Yep, thats right... 100!!! I shudder to think how many I have now. But lately I have been very controlled and I haven't bought any for ages {patting self on back}. However, I am also trying to work through the plethora that I still have. I do really like using them on cards (I imagine some people think it is cheating cos I didn't stamp and colour the image, but who cares! Lol) and there are some gorgeous 3D stickers out there!

So here are 2 cards I made recently using stickers and only a little stamping.. Hope you like them! The sentiment is from Hero Arts and is the most used one from the whole birthday set!

Did you know Christmas is less than 1 month away now! Whoa!!

:) C

Strawberry Fields

I needed to make some Thank You cards for my box and when I discovered this Strawberry Paper by "Paper Patch" in my stash (seriously, it's at least 5 years old!! OMG!! Do Paper Patch even still exist?) I knew it would be so cute with my Papertrey Ink Strawberries and cute sentiments! The green/cream stripe by Chatterbox is probably also about 5 years old too... man I need to get cracking on using up old supplies! I'm trying!!

So I stamped the Strawberries and the "Thank you Berry Much" sentiment onto a white scallop oval I cut out with my Marvy punch. I love that red and white spotty ribbon, it's so luscious and bold, it really sweetens up these cards!

And of course, when you're onto a good design.. stick with it! I made 3 cards in total with the green/red/strawberry design. This second one is probably my fave cos I love those 2 big flowers! Oh that's another thing I haven't even put a dint in, in the last 3 years. My prima flower collection. Do they multiply in the jars? Cos I have used so many and the level of flowers in the jars seem to be exactly the same!! What the?

This third card uses another one of the sentiments in the Papertrey set.. "May the Simple Joys of Life be Yours". How sweet is that! I thought it also went nicely with the Strawberries. My Real Red SU stamp pad is just so juicy that it made it hard to stamp out that little strawberry clearly. And when I stamped this one it splashed a tiny little red dot of ink on the white scallop.. so annoyed!! So I covered it with 2 little bling kaisercraft jewels! HA!! That'll teach you red stamp pad, I am infallible!

:) C

The Cat's Pajamas Stamps finally see ink!

Yes thats right... I finally inked up a couple of my Cats Pajamas stamps.. yay!! They have been patiently waiting on my desk for me to rediscover some time to have a play, and this week I managed to make 3 cards with them {hooray, waving a small Cat's PJs flag} [On a side note, I just got distracted checking out the new stamps on The Cat's PJ's website.. oops.. back to blogging!]
So the first stamp to see some ink was the nurse stamp.. oohh it is just so cute! I love that needle in her hand!! And the sentiment is just so funny :)

I made 2 cards while I had the stamps out (always a good idea!) The papers on this second card isn't shimmery like it looks in this pic.. I wish it was, it looks really pretty! Lol. Did I mention I love scallops and the pink/brown combo? True story. I blinged up around the edge of the scallop oval with my Sakura Stardust Gelly roll glitter gel pen, it is the way glitteriest (is that a word?!) pen I've ever had {I'm hugging it right now}.

And this third card is using the cute little Glamour Puss stamp, what a diva this cat looks like! I see attitude in those eyes! I whipped out the Cuttlebug and nestabilities again... hehe. I've got some more embossing templates on my wish list (family: if you are reading this I would like the Argyle and Floral Fantasy Embossing plates for Christmas!!) I only had the tiniest little scrap of that pink and yellow ribbon left so I folded loops and stuck them behind the black scallop square before I stuck it down. Sweet!! I've got heaps more Cat's PJ's stamps to play with so hopefully I'll get a chance over the weekend!

:) C

P.S. I ordered a whole bunch of new scrappin stuff from Two Peas today... now I can't wait for it to come! Keep your eyes's peeled for some new stuff soon (I hope!).