Tin of Cards Classes

In January, our monthly card making class began working on the Tin of Cards kit from page 152 of the 2015-2016 Stampin' Up! catalogue. Each month we will be doing two cards from the kit, as well as two others. Everyone will leave the class with six cards each night, through April. (Bonus!) The kit comes with the cute green and white striped tin to store your cards, as well as dividers to separate the different kinds of cards you make. Everything you need to make 16 cards is in the kit: pre-cut and folded cards, die cut butterflies, wooden word bubbles, gold thread, baker's twine, epoxy stickers, and more.

The adorable tin

The only thing I had to provide was adhesive and the matching stamp set from page 110 of the catalogue. It's a great set that I know I will use a lot.
The kit has four cards of the same design, totalling sixteen cards, but I decided to mix things up a bit. We did two of each kind of card, and then I altered the last two cards to give everyone more variety in their card collections. These are the first two cards from the kit, that we made in January.

Card Number One

Card Number Two

 It turns out that I stamped on the wrong side of the wooden word bubbles. AND I should have used black star on so that the ink wouldn't bleed. Oops! Oh well, it still looks good.
Because the tin cards do not address every occasion, and there are holidays in the months of January through April that are not represented in the kits, I have also been designing two other cards each month.
Since this would be the only card class before Valentine's Day, we clearly needed to do a Valentine. My wonderful husband has always had a love of by-planes, so when I saw the plane from "Sky Is the Limit" (a wonderful freebie from this year's Sale-a-bration flyer),  I knew I had to have it. Not all the girls in the class have a "Valentine" in their lives right now, so it's great that the sentiment on this card can be used for many occasions. (And yes, my hubby loved his Valentine!)

Great for a Valentine or any occasion.

And anyone who knows me, knows that I LOVE balloons! So when I saw this year's Occasions catalogue, I knew that I had to have the Balloon Celebration stamp set and the matching balloon punch. I've been having so much fun with this versatile set! I totally copied Lady 'n the Stamp's CAS card. I just thought it was so cute, so simple, and so perfectly quick and easy for a large group of ladies to do! Thanks Emma!

CAS Birthday Balloon

It's hard to tell in the picture, but the balloon is popped up with some Stampin' Dimensionals. Inside the card we stamped the sentiment "and eat cake!" from the same stamp set. 

Thanks so much for checking out my cards! If you have any questions, are interested in ordering some Stampin' Up! products of your own, or in joining our monthly card making class, please do not hesitate to contact me!

Chris

Catching Up

Well, it seems as life got in the way of blogging again...
Since I write last in August, we went on our annual family vacation, the kids went back to school- both are in high school now!- and the entire fall has passed! We did do our card classes through the fall, and I'm sorry I haven't been keeping you up to date on what I'm doing. Looking back on the card classes in the spring, it seems so long ago that I made those cards. In march we made four cards, including a Mother's day card. I'm sorry to say, it seems as though I have no pictures of those to share. In April, we had so much fun making the Perpetual Birthday Calendars from page 153 of Stampin' Up!'s 2015-2016 Annual catalogue. With some ladies doing two or three calendars, and sharing one stamp set amongst the group, it ended up taking some ladies two classes to finish their calendars, but I happily squeezed in another night for them to come by and finish up. I searched online for examples of how other people had decorated their calendars, and used them as guides when I set out to do my own. Some ladies copied my designs exactly, and others did their own thing. I love how my friend Beth did her July page. She was one month away from marrying her American finance, so she did her page up with red and blue stars- I wish I had gotten a picture of it while she was here. Here are a couple of pictures of my calendar pages.

Alphabet stickers, pre-punched shapes and banners, and coloured sequins are included right in your kit! I added lots of sparkle to these three months to keep things cheery during our cold winter months here in Canada.

The yellow and pink combo for April is just so pretty. I pulled out my retired Pink Passion marker for a little more pizzazz. I really love how the butterflies turned out for May. I got the idea from a card that I saw someone had done with the Perpetual Calendar stamp set that we're using here.

I think I have too many favourites. I love how my July turned out with all the little maple leaves and rhinestones, and I love the bright bold colours of all those circles in August!

All pages are decorated along the bottoms also. Here are a few examples. I even added an extra "A" at the bottom of August's page for something a little different.

The combination of orange and brown leaves floating across the page makes October another of my favourite pages. I added the brown coloured sequins for some fun sparkle. I really had no idea what to do for November, so I chose a stamp from the set that hadn't been used much, and went crazy. The blue star wasn't quite dark enough for me, so I sponged some Island Indigo on to make it darker. 

I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.

I did something a bit different for December as well. Instead of using the pre-punched banners that came with the kit, I decided to cut my own from a piece of Night of Navy CS. I then used my two way glue pen and some Dazzling Diamonds to bring the plain white "D" to life. I'm not sure if you can see it, but the snowflakes also have a little bling thanks to some Stickles.

I hope you've enjoyed looking at these pictures of my Perpetual Birthday Calendar from Stampin' Up! I will post more of the cards from the spring classes soon!