I wanted to make another special birthday card for a friend and knew I wanted to use the pinecones again! My friend, Tammy, lives on a beautiful acreage filled with lots of trees and has a barn filled with chopped wood for the winter. She inspires me often with cardmaking and scrapbooking! I decided to use the layout from Freshly Made Sketches this week.

 I have a couple of crafty friends who I wanted to send some love to this week and I knew just the set to start with from Lawn Fawn. 

I am SO excited to share my first slider card! It took some trial and error and more learning but it finally came together smoothly! We happen to have a couple of little guys in our lives with birthdays coming up in August who have firefighter daddies. When I saw this Village Heroes set from Lawn Fawn I knew it would be perfect and was so happy I could get it in Canada through Papercrafters Workshop. 

Here's a little sneak peek at some Close To My Heart goodies coming your way this holiday season! The sketch this past week over at Freshly Made Sketches was perfect to make up some simple holiday cards to add to my Christmas stash. I started out wanting to use the oval shape but then it just made more sense to use these stitched rectangle frames. I'm hoping I will find some time to make up some more with this awesome layout and use up some of my Christmas paper stash :).

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!

Here are two baby cards I created using Freshly Made Sketches. A friend asked me to make up some gender neutral baby cards for her to have on hand after seeing this card I made awhile ago. I really wanted to use this paper that I got in a Simon Says Stamp kit quite awhile ago, and although it does contain some rose gold and pink shades, I still find it to be gender neutral (plus I hope we're moving more away from the whole pink=girl, blue=boy stereotype!) ! At first I thought about overlapping my stars but I really wanted to showcase this sweet sentiment so I used a stitched circle to (hopefully) convey the moon with the stars. I am playing along with #MarchMeetTheMaker by Joanne Hawker on Instagram this month. Be sure to check it out - lots of great inspiration!

I needed a baby card for a friend this week and I knew just the paper collection I wanted to use. Our new Close To My Heart paper collection, Feels Like Home, is beautiful and perfect for many different occasions. Using Freshly Made Sketches again I set to work with this beautiful saying from Papertrey Ink.

It's my birthday month and Lawn Fawn sent me a free birthday gift with my order! This sweet little koala was fun to colour up with my Tombow markers and I loved using some of the other Lawn Fawn products I own to create this sweet card for my son's friend's birthday :). I used Freshly Made Sketches and am also linking up with the "Happy Little Critters" challenge over at Lawn Fawnatics.