It’s Thursday – which means gymnastics for my little one and a new project for Lindsay’s Stamp Stuff! Lindsay has some awesome new Houndstooth papers in her My Grafico store (and they’re on-sale right now!!), as well as some cute Princess stamps.  However, I have once again, used her Love Grows Here set along with Jodiann’s Gelly Hearts and Mini Stripes Light styles to create 4 cute little cards.

Using Lindsay’s Multi-Bracket Paper SVG freebie as a starting point, I experimented in Inkscape until I created Multi-Bracket card base and mat SVG files – definitely a bit of a learning curve, but completely doable! Then I turned to my trusty Photoshop and with the help of Jodiann’s styles, created 5 different papers that I printed out and then using SCAL cut the card bases and mats – I used 5.5 inches as the height for me card base and 5.15 inches for the height of the mat.. Then, using Photoshop again, I selected and printed the stamps from Love Grows Here.

I must admit, I’m rather pleased with the way they turned out – though my fingers were getting a little tired – thankfully I have really good, sharp scissors!  The birds are colored with Copics and Bic Mark-Its; the hearts have a generous coating of red stickles on them, and the the stitching was drawn in with a Blue Spica pen. The sheer organdy ribbon is from my stash. The heart paper is one I created and the card base is from my stash. This was one of my DH’s favorites. This little guy was colored with Bic Mark-Its with a touch of Spica Yellow glitter pen added to his wing and Cool Grey 1 Copic for shadow. Since Lindsay is sponsoring this week’s challenge over at Tuesday Morning Sketches, I used Melissa’s fabulous sketch to guide my layout. I used Bazzill CS and an EK Success Punch to create the image mat.  The card mat is one of my creations; the base is Bazzill textured CS.  The flowers are from Prima (checkout my friend Suzanne’s store – Crafting Connection, for awesome deals on Prima) and the pearls are from Michaels. This was DH’s other favorite!

Yes, once again, I HAD to use the fabulous cupcakes in the Love Grows Here set.  I colored the cupcakes with Copics, Mark-Its, and Spica pens – I used a white gel pen for accent.  The small cupcake sprinkles are coated with Red Stickles while the large sprinkles are Dew Drops from Crafting Connection.  I added ribbon from my stash to the card mat (another of my papers).  The card base is SU.Last but not least, I used the doily heart from Love Grows Here.  I colored the heart with Copics and punched the holes in the lace with my Fiskars hand punch.  The flowers are Prima and the pearls are MS.  Both the card mat and base were created by me.

That’s about it from me, but before you head over to Lindsay’s blog to check our her fab project and goodies – as well as the links to the other DT creations, I have a surprise for you!  I’m giving away the card base and mat SVG cutting files and 4 layered, printable cards – you can get them here.  If you like them, please leave a comment and send your friends to my blog – don’t share the links directly – thanks!

Have a fabulous Thursday!

DSO is preparing for an online make-over – aka Bunny and Kim, our creative Goddesses, are going to play! In order for them to create effectively (aka update all of  the techie and creative stuff), our fearless leader, Bunny, is going to have to make some changes and take a few things offline. Last weekend the Private Messaging area was hit with a lot of SPAM (and I don’t mean the horrid stuff in a can), so Bunny will be starting with our Forum work earlier than scheduled. What does this mean to you?  It means the DSO Forums, Private Messages, and  Gallery will be starting their computer spa-day on February 1st.

While we don’t anticipate any issues, we cannot guarantee that our Gallery will be able to be saved and re-uploaded successfully as it must be separated from the Forum postings (as those will not be saved).  The goal is for the entire Gallery to be re-loaded all refreshed and ready to go but, just in case it doesn’t behave nicely,  we HIGHLY recommend that if do not have your Layouts saved on your computer that you back them up before February 1.

Courtesy of our own Jodiann – panic is not necessary – help is below:

How to back up Gallery Pictures:

Navigate to your Gallery at DSO, Right Click> Save As on each LO one at a time. If you want to re-up your Gallery photos easily  make a file on your hard drive and save each one there.  You can add a number 01, 02, 03 in front of each file name so you can keep the order straight. If you don’t care about that, don’t add the numbers.

Saving Signatures:

Go to  DSO>Gallery>User CP> Edit Signature. The preview screen has a HTML option. Click it. Highlight>Copy> Save in a email and send it to yourself or paste the info into a blank Notepad file. When its time to add it back. Get the email and do the steps in reverse. Highlight>Copy>Signature HTML code> Go to DSO> Gallery> User CP and paste the code in to the preview screen.

See – that wasn’t so bad now was it.

At least it is at DSO – here’s a small sampling of the stellar Personal or Commercial use products our Designers have to offer:

Charlie is having a special CU sale on some of her products.

Stunning Personal Use kits by our fabulous Designers:

Create the perfect Page Title or Card Sentiment with Jazzy’s WordArt:

Want to create your own kits or freebies with Quality products? Checkout these awesome CU-friendly goodies:

So what are you waiting for?!? Head to the store! (Special thanks to LouCee for doing the “legwork” for this post – you RAWK sweetie)!