Clean & Simple Valentine

This card was inspired by 2 challenges...

 Less is More #51 "Cut it Out" Challenge- Make a card with a hole in it.

Scrap, Stamp & Doodle "Have a Heart" Challenge- Make a card with a heart on it.

 The heart is a wooden heart from the craft store that I painted white and stamped with black ink.  It is added to the card with dimensional tape.  

SUPPLIES:

Stamps/Images: SU Natural Beauty on Heart, Sentiment is computer generated.

Paper:  White Card with Cut out by Studio G (pack of 8 with envies at Walmart is only 99 cents), Black and White patterned paper from my scrap drawer.

Ink/Coloring: Permanent Black Ink on Heart

Accessories: Spellbinders Fancy Tags for Sentiment, Circle Punch, Swarovski Crystals, Wooden Heart, White Acrylic Paint.  

CAS-ual Fridays Challenge CFC13- The Long and the Short of it...

This week's challenge at CAS-ual Fridays is to make a 4 by 9 inch clean and simple card.  Clean and simple designs are a big challenge for me but I like this one.  It's a good start to my weekend.  If I'm feeling well tomorrow, I have a whole day to myself in my art studio.  I'm hoping for a "feel good" day!

Clean & Simple Stamping #147

Here are two cards inspired by this week's Fall to Layout over at Clean and Simple stamping.  I can't help but use paint chip cards on these layout cards that need color coordinating blocks of color.  They come in so handy!

CAS-ual Fridays Challenge CFC7

This week's challenge at CAS-ual Fridays is Color Blocking.  They want to see blocks of color next to each other to form a cohesive design on a clean and simple creation.  I think this card fits the bill.

I used a square punch and paint chip cards from the paint section of Home Depot for the color blocks and a computer generated sentiment.

I don't find myself making many clean and simple cards but I like this one.  Happy Father's Day weekend!

Clean and Simple Birthday

Here's a quickie clean and simple birthday card. I'm on a roll with clean and simple, aren't I? This is new! I think what made the difference for me was starting with nice thick watercolor paper instead of plain old cardstock. It makes a real difference.

For this card I stamped the image from the SU set called Mostly Flowers in Blue Breezes Kaleidacolor rainbow ink then I punched them out with a square punch. They are mounted with foam tape to add some dimension.
The sentiment is from the It's Your Birthday SU set and a couple of Swarovski crystals really balances things out.

Someone from the Gingerwood birthday list is getting this card but I can't remember who because I mailed a whole STACK of cards out yesterday. Whoever it is, I hope they enjoy it!

Thanks for stopping by... see you tomorrow!

Quick and Easy or Clean and Simple?

Is there a difference between "quick and easy" and "clean and simple"? And if there is a difference, which one does this card fall into? I'm confused. Well, either way, I love the look of this simple card and it it's quick.

I met my goal of making and sending 25 cards to Cards for Heroes this week. The box is packed up and ready for it's trip to the post office. I also included 2 Dear Hero letters so I guess you could say that I participated in their 25+2 challenge even though I didn't see that until my box was packed up.

This is one of the cards I sent:
I found a small piece of unknown designer paper in my stash and I punched it with a square punch. The squares lined up on the card nicely so I added a rub-on sentiment punched out with an oval punch.
Some white grosgrain ribbon and some faux stitching with my white Singo pen and it's perfect.
Here's the inside. I punched a small heart in the white layer for some added detail.

I hope you enjoyed this simple one. And would you consider joining me in the 25+2 challenge and send some cards to Heroes?

Another Clean and Simple

This is basically the same card as the last post except after stamping the Fresh Greens Kaliadacolor ink pad, I spritzed it with some water and let the colors run a little bit.
I'm not sure which look I like best. What do you think? Do you like the watercolor look of this one or the clean look of the last post? I'm curious of your opinions if you would be kind enough to share them in the comments.
Have a great Monday and try to keep cool... it's going to be over 90 degrees here today which means it's going to be a lot hotter in most places!

Clean and Simple

I've been trying do some clean and simple style cards. It's very hard for me. I LOVE the look of clean and simple and I love to see what others are doing with them but for some reason I have a very difficult time accomplishing it myself.

But I do like this one. The base is Marco's watercolor cardstock. That makes all the difference in my book. I am just not happy with the weight of regular cardstock for these kinds of minimal cards. Watercolor paper is substantial enough to use for this and it has a beautiful texture.

The colored ink blocks on this card are done simply by "stamping" a Kalidacolor rainbow ink pad onto the watercolor paper. Just leave the colors separated- don't slide them together. For this card I used the color Autumn Leaves. The little tab that slides the ink colors together is too tall to "stamp" the ink pad but you can easily remedy that by doing it on the edge of your stamping table.

After trimming the cardstock around the ink blocks, I stamped the leaf stamp from the SU set called All Natural in black.

I finished the card by tying grosgrain ribbon around the front of it. A tip for easily tying ribbon that will stay in place is to punch a hole in the card where you want your knot or bow. Now wrap the ribbon around the front of the card so both ends go around the back and then thread the ends up through the hole so they are coming through the front of the card. Make each end come up on opposite sides of the ribbon that laying across the front of the card and then tie a knot or a bow. I hope that make sense... I've been looking for a tutorial online to show you how it's done but I can't find one at the moment.

Hope you had a great weekend!

KISS Cards with Paint Chips

What is a KISS card, you ask?  It's simple.  KISS stands for Keep It Super Simple.  I love to look at blogs that feature the "clean and simple" style.  I am very drawn to the artwork there but I have a hard time doing it myself.  I tend to look at my own KISS cards as if they just aren't finished but I was determined to make some.  Here they are:

They are super simple, that I'm sure of.  The cool part of these designs is that I used paint chips from Home Depot for the monochromatic color schemes.  Here's the chips I used:

I was shopping for paint last week and these chips caught my eye.  I love the colors and I love how they give you 4 tones of the same color to play with.  I grabbed a few extras to play with.

I used a circle punch and some rub-ons to make this simple card.  And here's the inside:

And this card is pretty much the same thing, just bigger circle punches.

Quick, easy and super simple!