StampTV asked me (!) to host today’s Mix It Up Monday challenge. How about that! My “Get It Inky (Finally)!” challenge is for you to find a stamp in your collection that you have never gotten inky, and then ink it up with your favorite color. As some of you may know, that would be orange for me. I ended up making a monochromatic orange card in the process, but you don’t have to. The various designs from the free Sunlit Summer digital paper pack (get it here on StampTV’s freebies page) were perfect for creating the sunray background. Thanks to Shannan Teubner for a great tutorial!

It is hard to admit, but there were several never-before-used Lovely Labels for me to choose from. I really liked the shape of the Labels Twenty die for this card. Both ends of the stamped die-cut looked like they were missing something, so I colored self-adhesive half pearls with a Copic marker and created a little pattern with them.

If you’re a StampTV member, I hope you give this challenge a try!

My sister’s birthday is coming up and I’ve challenged myself to mail overseas cards at least seven days in advance from now on (since none of my Easter cards arrived there on time). To keep the card nice and flat (in other words: extremely mailable), I only embellished with glitter pens. The sketch I used is Mojo Monday 235‘s layout.

In order to make the ivory tag less stark, I first stamped the Linen background with a light pink ink and stamped the Dutch sentiment “It is your birthday” on top. The flower from One Person was stamped with brown Memento ink and colored in with Copic markers. I thought this particular flower matched the ones in the Sweet Threads patterned paper quite nicely.

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Zalig Pasen, as they say Happy Easter in Dutch! I sent my parents this Easter card, even did some (not-so-straight) stitching on it to please my mom. The layout I used was a Viva la Verve sketch last month.

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My younger sister is celebrating 12.5 years of marriage today — a copper wedding anniversary in Belgium. I created this “copper” card for her, using the March Viva la Verve CAS (Clean and Simple) sketch. The brushed copper card stock was embossed with Stampin’ Up!’s Vintage Wallpaper embossing folder. I stamped the frame and Dutch sentiment with VersaMark ink and heat embossed the copper EP.

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I pretty much bought this stamp set with the Mona Lisa image so that I could make a card for my niece, Lize. She has a special connection to this painting, and it’s kind of a family inside joke.

The sketch I used was Viva la Verve‘s first one of March. The card ended up a bigger size than I usually make, about 5-1/2″ x 7″, due to the large image. I used the little dots that were created by the alignment holes in the A Cut Above die to make the sentiment tag look like a thought bubble.

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I used a mirror image of Jennie Harper’s January Release Sketch (because that worked better with the ABC blocks image) as the starting point for my card. The card base was embossed with the Stripes embossing folder.

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It’s been such a mild winter so far here in Maryland that some days it already feels like spring. The warm temperatures have inspired me to create with spring-like colors. For Lori McAree’s January Release Party Challenge, I made a patchwork background by glueing 3/4″ squares of patterned paper on a 3″ x 4-1/2″ piece of white card stock, which was then cut with the largest Labels Fourteen Nestabilities die. I embossed the smaller label image in white on pink card stock and added the oval sentiment on top with dimensionals.

The card base was embossed with a Tim Holtz embossing folder, but it looked too dramatic so I softened it up a bit by adding the vellum paper layer. The organdy ribbon was adhered to the card with Scor-Tape behind the smaller pink label.

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I am looking forward to another year of Jen del Muro’s “Sketches For You To Try” and hope to create cards for all 12 sketches this time around. January’s sketch was a great starting point for my father-in-law’s birthday card. He loves sailing!

There are still a few days left to participate in this challenge. Click on the sketch below for details…

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Here’s a card I made for my aunt Maria in Belgium (hence the Dutch greeting). I used an old Viva la Verve sketch from last September that included this diagonal design for the background, which took a little bit of puzzling with the vertically-striped DSP. It had been a while since I last set an eyelet, but this little tag just didn’t look right without one. To decorate the tag even more, I cut a couple of tiny flowers out of the patterned paper and glued them above the sentiment.

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