Birthday Cards...

I'm on a bit of a birthday card "phase" at the moment.

After a string of early Saturday morning realizations that I needed a card for a birthday party that afternoon, I made a resolution: I'm making a bucket-load of kids birthday cards and will not be caught short again for a long time.

My last resolutions were to get a craft room up and running (check), start a blog (check), and spend more time creating (check). Now I need to actually take the pictures, upload them (and fix them in PSE...I suppose if I did this more often it would be a cakewalk) and post them. This has always been my downfall - just ask my Aunt Linda who is still waiting for me to send her copies of my wedding pictures (we will celebrate our 14-year anniversary in two weeks!).

So, without further ado, here are a couple of my latest birthday cards:

Can you tell that I love circles? Riveting and Circle of Friendship (both Stampin' Up) are two of my favourite sentiment sets. I love that I can use my circle punches to quickly add a sentiment to a card. I've used bigger circle punches to make the turquoise ring. Here, I've used one of The Greeting Farm's Miss Anya stamps, coloured in with Copic markers and "blinged" with Stickles. The image is cutout and embossed (as is the mat) using the Nestabilities Long Rectangles dies. The DP is from an old DCWV stack cut into strips and sponged around the edges for added depth. The last embellishment are my Dew Drops. Voila...very easy, but one of my faves (and it could do for an older "girl" in a pinch, LOL!

This one is for the boys... I've used the image King's Jester Charlie from Whiff of Joy stamps. He is coloured in (again) using Copic markers and cut out and matted with the circle and scalloped circle Nestabilities. The small circles have also been cut out using the same sets of nested dies. I love having such a versatile tool that takes up such little space! Again, the DSP is from an old DCWV (another resolution I made was to start using up some of my cartloads full of DSP. Once the wheels start breaking off, you *know* there's too much paper stored inside!) and the cardstock is all from Stampin' Up. The juggling balls are "shined up" using Stampin' Up's Crystal Effects.

That's all for today...don't want to overdo it ;)