CASE study, 4th anniversary blog hop

I am so pleased to be part of the CASE study 4th anniversary festivities!  As they celebrate their 4th birthday, the CASE study team is bringing you special blog hops each week of this month, comprised of past muses and the design team (past and current.)

Each blog hop will be open until the next midnight of the following Tuesday (so, August 12th in this CASE!) and there are sponsors and prizes set up for playing along!  You must comment on all blog posts along the way to be eligible for prizes from

Waffle Flower ♥ Serendipity Stamps ♥ Penny Black

The winners will be announced on the CASE study blog the following Wednesday.

My inspiration came from this artwork I spied on pinterest:

I love the girl, holding her cake, with stuffies at her feet, the blue doily frame around her and the bunting in the background.  I pulled out a dear lizzy stamp that my friend Wida sent me and got busy:

 

Do you see the art-print elements pulled into this card?  I combined stamp sets from a few different companies: the bunting from lawn fawn, the scribbled circle background from PTI, the fox and sentiment from avery elle.  They all work together so perfectly. 

I think the trick to combining stamps from different companies is to pay attention to the width of their stroke - the dear lizzy stamp has a heavier outline, so I chose to pair it with the avery elle stamps, which also have a bit of uneven whimsy to them, so they work especially great together. The thinner-lined circle scribbles are in the background and in a lighter color, so they don't compete with the main stamps.

There's more to see on these blogs today, and a special thanks to Chupa for having me along with this amazing list of card-makers:

Joni Nina Andaya

Teri Anderson

Laura Bassen

JJ Bolton

Nina Brackett

Clare Buswell

Keisha Campbell

Andrea Ewen

Pamela Ho

Jeanne Jachna

Anna Kossakovskaya

Elena Roussakis (that's me!)

Lisa Spangler

I hope you decide to play along this week! CASE any of the projects you see along the hop!

♥.

twinkle toes {CASE study}

Hi friends!

This is my 4th week as the CASE study muse, and I'm still enjoying every minute.  Have I mentioned that most of my favorite stampers are packed into the CASE study design team?

But enough with the chatter, and onto the card.  Here is the inspiration photo:

I created a few dozen ballerina tags for a little girl's 1st birthday party.  A lot of sponging and ballerina action.  And here is my new take on the photo:

I wanted to keep the difficulty factor to a minimum... and it is... here are my steps:

1. cut a double-layer of post-it note into a leg-ish shape. separate them and lay them down on the cardstock piece.
2. sponge with a grey ink (I've been getting a lot of questions about what inks I use for sponging.  there's no magic in it and I don't stick to only distress inks. here, I've used Stampin Up's "smoky shadow.")
3. take the negatives (from the post-it templates) and also cut off the leg a bit. it's okay, we're making shoes.  sponge pink ink into the empty space.
4. put your mat on a piece of foam and pierce holes.  use embroidery thread to lace 'em up.
5. white-heat-emboss the sentiment (from Hero Arts' "magical castle") and assemble everything else.

There you go. 5 (easy) steps.



ps, it totally pays to have little girls in the house... a princess tutu was the perfect photo prop.

♥.

a woodsy CASE (with a free download!)

Are you ready for another CASE study?

I still love everything about that invitation (click!) and the matching woodland party (click.)  Anything woodsy tickles my fancy (you've probably noticed that I shoot all of my cards on tree stumps - ha.)

For my 3rd week as the CASE study muse, I wanted to try something a little different:

Here's what I picked up from the original invitation: the gingham (more muted this time around, with red ink stamped onto a red card base) and the woodsy background (from birch to a regular woodgrain, but still...)  Instead of the original twine, I used a red embroidery thread on my girl's skirt.

I hope you like my antsy lady - doesn't she look like she's standing on tip toes, waiting for Christmas fun?  I drew her myself using a skinny copic multi-liner, colored her in with copics and added a tiny reindeer stamp to her sweater.

I'm offering her to you sans reindeer, so that you could use her for whatever occasion you'd like.  Click *here* to right-click and save the full-res version to your own computer.  (If you run into problems, or it doesn't work for you for whatever reason, please let me know!  I've never offered anything like this before, but I'd like to do it again from time to time.)

A huge thanks to my friend Philana for cleaning up the image for me so that I could gift it out today.

♥.

it's what's inside {CASE study}

It's time for another CASE study, where the muse is (me, haha, and specifically) this photo:

Just so you know, my matryoshka doll cards are probably still my fave.  I may never make anything that awesome ever again.  

It may be too hard to see from this teeny photo, but if you click over to the original post, you'll see that the sentiment on that banner reads "it's what's inside that counts." (get it? GET IT???) I sort of ran with that.

I hate to show up anywhere empty-handed, especially if I'm calling on a favor, so I whipped up a treat jar for my friend Philana, who's as lovely as the wrapping, and just as sweet as what's inside. (And by the way, what's inside is chocolate covered almonds - how's that for a something inside a something? I'm annoying like that. you're welcome.)

The original russian doll got a modern kind of makeover. I used circle dies for the head and head-wrap parts, tiny dot stamps for the eyes and free-handed the rest.



The jar was an old jam or something-or-other jar.  Do you keep yours?  I love having a bunch on-hand for gifting.  I grabbed a minty-colored-cupcake-wrapper and covered the ugly lid before adhering my lady to the top and the sentiment all around.  The little polka flag hanging off the side was for extra flair.  ha.

I hope you like my CASE of myself! And, I hope you decide to play along.  I loved seeing what you made last week and I hope to get around to commenting a lot more this week!

♥.

You want a piece of me?

My blog post title is all bravado, but I'm bashful and all tingly warm inside to be October's CASE study muse!

The inspiration photo is taken from a mini cherry party I threw some time ago (click!)

So, real cherry pie, meet sassy cherry pie:

I stamped the smiley-faced-wanna-be-tough pie, colored it cherry, and added a computer generated sentiment to fit into lawn fawn's speech bubble.  (If you haven't noticed by now, I keep using the same 2 or 3 fonts.  Font snobs:  let it go, or help a sister out.)

Although I painstakingly stamped all of the red and aqua stripes in the inspiration party, I took a lazier (read: faster) route here:



Sorry the photo is a bit fuzzy.  Nothing like holding the camera over your head so you could get markers and everything in the frame.  The colors I used are R29 and BG32, if you are interested.

I hope you like my card!  Check out the CASE study blog to see what the rest of the design team has made based on my photo (shriek! I can't believe I just typed that.  This is some kind of out of body craft experience...)

If you have some time, I'd love for you to create something as well!