Enjoy the Things that Really Matter

Hello everyone!

I want to extend a big welcome and thank you to my latest followers!  I'm so very grateful for each and every one of you!  I hope everyone is having a great week so far...almost the weekend :o).  Hope you get to spend it doing something you love.

Every once in a while, I get asked to make a custom card for someone, and today I have one of these cards to share.  This is a retirement card for a lady that my MIL worked with and all the gals in her office wanted a special card for the occasion.  Here is what I came up with:

Now, I know this isn't a typical retirement card, but this lady has a little grandson and a little dog who are the centre of her universe, so I think it works really well for her.  I used my absolute favourite Edwin - Edwin with airplane from the Magnolia Princes and Princesses collection and masked it together with the log.  Since she has a small dog, I opted to mask the dog from 'Fishing Fun' by Gillian Roberts for Stampavie into the little scene.  If you are not familiar with this image, it is of a little boy fishing and the dog is snuggled up beside him.  Not the easiest of tasks, but thank goodness for my stamp-a-ma-jig!  I am very happy with how it turned out and I think the two styles work nicely together.  The images were stamped with black Stazon on 300g hot pressed watercolour paper and coloured with distress inks (frayed burlap, weathered wood, stormy sky, black soot, antique linen, pumice stone, fired brick, walnut stain, scattered straw, and peeled paint) and watercolour pencil for skin.

I decorated the inside to match the cover, but used a lighter paper for writing on.

The tag is made from Magnolia's vintage tag Doohickey and pulls out to reveal the sentiment, which I made in Word since I didn't have one that was appropriate for the occasion.  It is made using a bunch of text boxes crammed in together :).  If you click on the image, you can see the puppy's tag is very sparkly, courtesy of my clear atyou Spica pen.  I absolutely love this pen!

Other supplies:
The card and papers are all Stampin' Up, except for the striped one which was in my stash and I'm not sure from which manufacturer.   All the edges were distressed and inked with frayed burlap.
White lace and blue ribbon from my stash.  The lace on the tag is from Kaiser - it started out white, but I died it blue.  The Doily is from Little Yellow Bicycle and the flowers were all white flowers from Pretty Petals.  The rose was coloured blue with Tattered Angels glimmer mist in bubbles and then the edges were inked with DI weathered wood.  The other two were inked with weathered wood and frayed burlap.  The leaves are a Magnolia Doohickey.

I would like to enter this card in the following fun challenges:

Crafting Life's Pieces for the beautiful sketch, which I rotated and flipped
TOMIC - anything goes (and it's their first anniversary celebration!  Congratulations!!)
Magnolia Down Under - seeing double (I've doubled up on the lace, the ribbon, the leaf Doohickeys and the little blossoms)
Midweek Magnolias - anything goes

Thanks for stopping by today and thank you for taking the time to leave a comment!  I love reading them and love the chance to visit you too!

Have a wonderful weekend!

Hugs,

Dawn

Simply Magnolia GDT

Hello bloggers,

I would like to extend a huge thank you and welcome to my blog's new followers!  I am delighted to have you along on my crafting journey!  I hope everyone is having a great weekend.  I wish I could say mine has been, but my little one has caught a virus and is covered in a rash, so we are quarantined at the moment.  He is handling it all very well, and had I not told him he is sick, he might not have known.  He also very generously passed his little bug on to me, so I spent last night with a fever (but, luckily no rash).

Enough moaning and on to something far more exciting.  A few weeks ago, I won a guest design spot at Simply Magnolia!  The challenge this fortnight is fancy folds with a friendship theme.  Here is my inspiration piece:

When I first dreamed up this idea, I thought it would have a lot more folds than it ended up having.  But then I decided to make everything smooth and rounded instead of square an folded.  However, there are still folds at each junction - top, bottom and where the spout meets the can, so it does still work.

I used Seeding Tilda, which was a wonderful Christmas gift from my in laws.  I wished I looked as cute as her while gardening!  I masked her with Root Cellar Door, minus the root cellar door.  I really liked the stones and flowers on this image, but it just didn't seem to make sense to scatter seeds in front of a door, so I masked it out.  It also doesn't make any sense to wear white boots to work in the dirt; silly Tilda.  The images were stamped on 300g hot pressed watercolour paper and coloured with distress inks (tumbled glass, tattered rose, peacock feathers, walnut stain, antique linen, frayed burlap, pumice stone, scattered straw, victorian velvet, and bundled sage) and a watercolour pencil for skin tone.

I made the friendship sentiment in Word (since I didn't have one) and printed it onto the vintage tag (a Magnolia Doohickey) which tucks in nicely behind the image.  The papers are from MME lime twist and Making Memories je t'adore.  Flowers are Pretty Petals, butterflies are Cheery Lynn's small exotic butterflies dies and the bottom edge punch is from MS.  Lace and rhinestones from my stash.

The flower on the spout was cut with the Forever Young cricut cartridge and the blingy button is a TH Accoutrement.

A huge thank you to the gals at Simply Magnolia for inviting me to guest design!  If you haven't been already, make sure to pop over to the Simply Magnolia challenge blog to see what the very talented DT has come up with.  I hope you will be able to join in the fun!

This project is also for the following challenges:

Just Magnolia - anything goes with optional doily
Midweek Magnolias - bling it on
Tilda's Town - use a magnolia accessory stamp with Tilda or Edwin

Thanks for stopping in and for taking the time to leave me a comment - good, bad or indifferent.  I always love the chance to visit you back!  Have a great week!

Hugs,

Dawn