I needed two sympathy cards, unfortunately, for some special people in my life and set to work with the eucalyptus sprigs from The Greetery to make up something special. Using the sketch from Freshly Made Sketches and an inspiration pic sent from my Aunt, I set to work to create something using a black card base and this beautiful black and white buffalo plaid. I changed the direction of some elements in the sketch and made it work to use this beautiful halfsies diamond die that is also from The Greetery. I couldn’t decide which sprigs I liked best so I decided to do a little variation on each card. Can’t believe it’s FMS400 this week - wow! So happy I was able to play along :)!

Here is the final card in my latest waterfront set. I decided to leave out a sentiment and enjoying the simplicity of a blank card. These trees are one of my favourite parts of this set! Using the water scribble stamp I turned it upside down to create a background for the trees. I played around with some second generation stamping to keep the card fairly monochromatic.

Have you ever been to Crater Lake in Oregon? It known as the clearest lake in the world! I had the opportunity to visit it years ago and it was breathtaking! I wanted to recreate it a bit for a birthday card for my brother-in-law who has a cabin nearby. For the trees I used a combination of first and second generation stamping and then took a wet paintbrush with some mowed lawn ink splotched onto a block and coloured in a bit of the white space to make it more forest-like. I am hoping to create a card set - fingers crossed!

After having spent the weekend in Banff and traveling through the gorgeous Banff National Park and Kootenay National Park I felt that I just had to take this set out to recreate some of the breathtaking colours and scenery I took in. One of my good friends got engaged this summer and I have been wanting to make her a congratulations card. I decided this would work best on a horizontal card and played around with the colours a bit to get it just right.

A nature-inspired modern rustic mountain baby card for a custom set I am putting together! I have had visions of stitched elements, mountains, and this beautiful baby quote (definitely one of my favourites!) floating around in my head the last couple of weeks so I was pretty happy to find some time to put it all together. I kept going back and forth over one or two trees on this card but I think I have finally decided to just keep it at one. I made a few more of this version and decided I preferred the one tree on the other side! And after all this time, I finally realized this summer that the mountain views I look at actually have darker mountains closer up and lighter in behind. I could easily achieve this look with our two-tone paper at Close To My Heart by using each side to diecut my mountains!

These forest inspired thank you cards came together as part of a set of cards I am putting together using a rustic modern adventure theme. I love the simplicity of them on this beautiful heavyweight cardstock. I am linking up with the "adventure awaits" challenge over at Heart2Heart.

I've been hanging onto these vintage toy papers from Carta Bella for awhile and finally had the perfect opportunity to bust into them - two kid birthdays! These papers definitely bring up feelings of nostalgia for all of these classic toys...monkeys in a barrel, wind-up toys, toy soldiers, viewmasters, spinning tops, wooden blocks, and more! It does make me wonder...will our children feel the same way about their toys? Or are we so overrun with crazy amounts of toys that we do not build the same connections to them? Do toys nowadays stand up as long as toys used to last?

To put together these cards I decided to use the classic sketch over at Freshly Made Sketches. They are celebrating their 400th sketch by doing some throwbacks and this week it's back to sketch 200, which I just so happen to have played along with 4 years ago! I added my original card at the bottom of this post. For these cards, I paired a few papers together for each card, die cut the corresponding birthday number along with a happy birthday line border, and used some antique linen distress ink around the edges to add to the retro feel.




Here is my original card created with this sketch 4 years ago on August 21, 2015:

Wanting to shop local and handmade for my friend's daughter's birthday I found this sweet sloth stuffie (which happens to be her favourite animal!) by EvilKaneedle. This Mountain Misfit is handmade in Kimberley, about half an hour from where we live! I knew right away that I wanted to use the Lawn Fawn sloth to make a birthday card to go along with the gift. Freshly Made Sketches is celebrating their 400th sketch by using their original sketch #1 this week and I am so happy that I could play along too!

Plantable handstamped daisies on plantable paper embedded with wildflower seeds! While it took some time to crank out all of these daisies and stamp each one (about 4 different stamps for each flower that were second and third generation stamped for some of them!) I love how they look in this sweet mason jar. This darker plantable paper provided a great backdrop for this bouquet and made for a great wedding card! You can check out the wedding invitations I made for this wedding here.

Here is my inspiration pic!

Using this week's Inspired By picture as inspiration I set out with The Greetery's mason jar to create a card for an upcoming wedding shower. I distressed my patterned wood paper a bit and set my mason jar on top with some pretty blossoms. I just squeezed my sentiment onto a little tag and tucked it under the string that goes around the mason jar. I look forward to playing around with these sets more!

Here is a special card I put together for a very special person! I knew I somehow wanted to include this Morgan Harper Nichols quote and decided to turn it grey to work with my flower colour palette that I had already chosen. As you can probably tell if you follow my blog I just love this spring bouquet from Studio Katia and found it so relaxing to colour it up again.