A Merry Monday Card on Sunday!

Batten down the hatches people! We are in for one wild week of weather here in Ontario, and across most of the Eastern part of Canada and U.S. Hurricane Sandy is going wreck havoc, especially along the coast. Prayers that everyone will play it safe and stay safe. I shudder when I see people trying to take pictures of huge waves along the coast during a hurricane - not worth it!

Joe came down with a real bad cold Friday so it's a pretty quiet weekend around here. Luckily I'm well supplied with various craft material so I can keep busy. I stamped a lot of images Friday night so I could just sit and colour when I felt like it and ran out of the cardstock I use when I use Prismacolor pencils and gamsol. It's not my favorite paper but best I can buy locally. My favorite has to be ordered on-line and the shipping charges are ridiculous so I don't order unless I need a lot of other things. So, yesterday was not my best day, nor the worse, so I braved it out and went to the Paper Pickle's new reduced-in-size store for some paper. They are only open on Saturdays now so no more just popping in for things any time you run out. Let's just say it's "cozy". But, I'm now all stocked up again and ready to do more stamping.

Friday night I made a card for the Merry Monday challenge and then yesterday I forgot to photo it and enter it. I thought the contest closed on Saturday at noon but it turns out it is today at noon so here's the card I made.

This is based on a sketch they provided. I stamped the image with Versamark and first sprinkled on some red embossing powder on the bird, then I sprinkled on the black embossing powder and heat set it. I added the red to flower in his hat with a Tombow marker and also ran it over the scarf - you can't really see it in the photo but in real life you can see the red in the non-embossed areas. After die cutting it with a circle Spellbinder's die, I left it in the die and sponged blue chalk around it. Then it was mounted on a large die cut Sizzix snowflake - that is one pass thru the die - it is huge! I found two pieces of paper in my stash left over from other projects so I used those for the background but the stripe was first mounted on a darker blue. Well, actually I had a piece of the dark blue that was about 3/4" wide so I just cut it half and used half for each side so it looks like it was mounted - why waste paper that is hidden?  The red was also a left over piece so I just notched the ends and glued it on. Then I added the peel-and-stick greeting and the gold lines (also peel-and-stick). Paper Wishes (Hot off the Press) call these Dazzels but these were not from there, but same thing.

I decided it didn't have enough "bling" so I added large jewels to the snowflake - and called it done!

Want to know how to get a perfect notch without a die? Easy. Cut your strip and try to make it an even size - something easy to measure in half. Turn it over to the wrong side and draw a faint line down the centre about 1" or so. Then decide how big of a notch you want, and draw a line which will cross the first line. Take your scissors and cut from each side to where the lines cross. Perfect notch every time and you didn't have to buy a die to do it.