Summer's Over?

This week Raise The Bar is having a fun back to school challenge using your ABC's (animal, brown, clean & simple).  So I decided to use my unbelieving chimp who's wondering where the summer went. 

The image came from My Heart Stamps For You and is perfect for both the "A" and the "B" part of the challenge.  (Since most of my cards fit under the clean and simple category, the "C" part of the challenge was super easy.)  He's stamped and embossed on brown cardstock using Walnut Stain Distress Inks and Distress Embossing Powder.  I then fussy cut him out and adhered him to a light green patterned paper.  

I used my Studio G (very) small alphabet set pegs to write out the saying and a black Spica glitter pen (which looks like this) was used to give it a little bling (although that doesn't show up very well in this photo).  This layer is then adhered to another piece of patterned cardstock that I distressed with a Heidi Swapp edge distresser.  I also threaded some brown ribbon into a large grommet for a bit of an accent.

The final step is to adhere to your base cardstock.  In this case, I decided on a dark green, dry embossed with leaves.

Fly fishing

This image is from My Heart Stamps for You.  I'm always on the look out for masculine images, since there are more males than females in my family.  I stamped the image twice.  One time for the card itself and one time in order to make a "mask"  For the mask, I cut my guy out carefully and then used repositionable double sided tape to layer him directly on top of the first stamped image.  I then used Copic markers and airbrushed the sky background.  These are the Copic markers I used for this project:
                                                                                 

After coloring, I used my Spellbinders Labels Eight dies to cut out both the image and the brown frame around the image.  Finally, I inked the sides of my card using Distress inks.  I'm thinking this will make an excellent birthday or Father's day card for someone in my family.

Documenting Firsts...

As any scrapper knows, you should always create a layout of  "firsts", whether it's a first tooth, first hair cut, or first time your project was published.  Since I'm a scrapper too, here is my  layout for my "first".  The letters are cut from the Cricut cartridge - Stamped and I sprayed the word "published" with Smooch Spritz -silver foil.  I like the Smooch Spritz much better than Glimmer Mist.  The nozzle doesn't clog up and the colors are vibrant.  This gave the letters an extremely shinny/glossy look (but hard to photograph).   The news man in the top left corner is a rubber stamp from a company called My Heart Stamps For You.  I colored him using Copic markers.  The patterned paper is Basic Grey and the solid paper is from Creative Memories.  Labels 7 from Nestabilities was used for my journaling box.