Springtime Vintage Quilt Card

For quite awhile I have wanted to make cards inspired by some of my favorite quilt blocks.  Like everyone else I get so busy with other projects that the things I REALLY want to make kind of fall by the wayside.    About a week or so ago a tutorial on the Splitcoaststamper website finally inspired and motivated me to create the card I'm posting today.

The Splitcoaststampers newsletter profiled a quilted card and tutorial made by a talented Stampin' Up! demonstrator Jenna Barber.  Jenna lives here in my own great state of Ohio.  Jenna made her card with  the new Springtime Vintage DSP by Stampin' Up! . It's a beautiful card but equally as beautiful was the story behind the quilt. On Jenna's blog she told the story of how the quilt was inspired by her mom and a great family vacation to Marthas Vineyard. You can view Jenna's tutorial Here.  From that page you can also follow links to her own blog to read her story.

I love all the colors that coordinate with Springtime Vintage DSP and normally I use pink for everything. This time I stepped outside my creative comfort zone and tried to play off he blue's.  Well it's not too far from my comfort zone since Baja Blue and Not Quite Navy are in my top 5 of colors from Stampin' Up! (preceded by pinks of course).

I made some other changes to my quilt by adding an applique look border, adding texture to the solids by embossing specific parts of the Antique Wallpaper embossing folder and by setting my "sentiment" on a Blue Ribbon.
Hope you enjoy what I've made!

Springtime Vintage Quilt Card

Blue Ribbon with Sentiment  #1

Tried to keep the quilt real by using a mitered border

Happy Hearts For Happy Valentines Day!

Happy Valentines Day to you!  I hope you all were blessed by spending the day with your loved one. I am blessed by the love of a great husband who shows me how much he loves me every day. Around here, everyday is Happy Hearts Day!

The other day I shared the card with you that I made for Ellie.  Today, I thought I'd share one of the cards I made for Eric. I couldn't post it until tonight because I didn't want him to see it online before I could give it to him. Somehow I think that would've been a spoiler. 

I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE the newest Designer Series Paper from Stampin' Up!.  It is called Springtime Vintage and is SO absolutely beautiful. The colors are all those muted shades of pink, aqua and being worked into shabby chic/Victorian type florals and prints. I've had a hard time cutting the paper because I love it so much but I broke down and cut some to make Eric's card. 


I also finally started using some of the beautiful roses I've been buying from a shop I found on Artfire called "Iam Roses."  The flowers are all made by hand of mulberry paper.  So far I've acquired only different colors of roses, curly roses and rosebuds. As spring gets closer I'll start looking for some other flowers but right now I'm loving all the roses.
I hope you enjoy the card.

Applique Look Valentine

This year I wanted to make a special Valentine for Ellie. I wanted it to be "original" and "different."  After the first few hours of working on Ellie's card I started to think I bit off more than I could chew but now that it's done, I'm happy I stuck with it.
In 2010 I took a break from working on an applique piece that I started 2 years ago.  I love to applique but I just needed a break. Since I started making cards I had thought about creating cards that had an "applique look." Somehow I thought it would be easier but I've learned that isnt the case. Without a pattern or any templates I found myself doing what I am probably most known to do, flying by the seat of my pants. 
For this card I used only two colors of paper, Real Red and Whisper White. The blocks are made from scalloped squares and the Two Step Owl Punch. After cutting the scalloped square, I cut a heart from each corner with the Two Step Owl Punch. I layered this cut square on a square of Whisper White to get the white to show through the heart.  After this, I went back to my quilt techniques and cut another white scallop square to set "on point."  This means that the block on the bottome is set on it's point so it creates more of a star appearance behind the other squares.
For the center of each block, I took four Whisper White hearts, also cut from the Two Step Owl punch and placed them all point to point to create a "flower" in the center.
The sentiment square is a scalloped square that I repunched several times to get it down to an aceeptable size for the center of the card. I then stamped it with the "Love" stamp from Tiny Tags. Finished the points of the block off with some rhinestones.
To give you an idea on how small the pieces were, the finished card front is 4"x4".  Some of those pieces were teeny but a good pair of tweezers became my friend.

Hope you enjoy the card today!

How Would You Be Affected If Your Computer Crashed?

Today I want to share a website with you. If your home computer is an essential part of your personal and/or professional life then Backblaze should be as important.

Do you run and maintain a back-up of your home computer?  If not, why not?  If not, do you ever think about how you'd navigate through your life if you woke up one day and the "vault" of info needed to support you and your family were unavailable?

Do you go to bed every night thinking about what you'll create the next day? When you wake up every day, is your mind already on overload about the paper or fabric you'll fold, cut, stitch, tape, glue and photograph?  Before you make that first cut do you scour the internet about new products on the market or new techniques that would assist in turning an ordinary piece of fabric or paper into  a work of art?

Have you ever paused to ponder what if you got up and went about your normal routine but the computer screen remained dark when you tried to start it up. How would this affect you? How would you read the mail that floods your in-box every day? How would you check the status of your latest internet shopping spree? How would you view the pictures of your kids or the pictures you've taken of your latest project? How would you pay your bills if you couldn't check your checking account balance or write an electronic check? How would you get a phone number so you could call and make a hair appointment?

I think a lot of us take all of these things for granted. We get up and do what we've always done, kind of automagically... the daily routine now includes use of the computer and without it we are somewhat crippled.

This happened to me two weeks ago. My hard drive crashed and all at once my pictures, my contacts, my card designs, my Cricut Designs, my MDS, access to Stampin' Up! to do my business was gone. You feel really blank and scared in thinking that you don't even know what all you've lost because you've stored so much stuff...
 
Luckily for me, my husband had the foresight to use a back-up service called "Backblaze."  Multple times daily Backblaze runs a back-up on my hard drive. All of that data that is so valuable to me is stored in a secure off-site vault and available to me any time I need it. Last week after my drive was rebuilt I needed it and I am SO grateful for this valuable service.

Rarely will I endorse a service, but Backblaze really saved my personal data and my professional life.  For $5 a month (per computer) ALL of my data is backed up and I never have to worry about losing one bit of it. If you dont back-up your computer, today is a good day to start. Its as easy as signing up, after that your back-up takes off and your mind is at ease....  This is one time in my life when I didnt have to learn the hard way, I didnt have to lose everything to find out I needed to save everything in more than one place.

There are a lot of services out there but we've done the research and I know from first hand perspective that Backblaze does the job and the back-up you need to recover your data WILL be available! It's been proven to be of incredible value in my world!
Start Here to Back-up Your Data with Backblaze