CYCI#138 Shaker Challenge - Warm Winter Wishes

The crafters on the Can You Case It Team have a wonderful challenge for us this week featuring one of my very favorite kinds of card to make: Shakers!

I was intimidated by shaker cards for a very long time, then I finally buckled down and made one and now they are one of my very favorite types of cards to make!

They look complex and time consuming, but once you have a few under your belt, you'll find they are one of the quickest to put together and give you a lot of bang for your buck. People will think you spent hours on a single card, when they really take no more than just a few minutes.

There are tons of great tutorials online, so I encourage you to hop on YouTube and check them out!

Here is my design for this week's challenge

The image is from Unity Stamps. I stamped it onto white paper and colored it using colored pencils.

It's not visible in the photo, but I colored the little snowpeople and the snow they're standing on in

white Wink of Stella for some extra shine.

I then used ordinary silver sequins for my filler. I had some left over snow flake brads from last Christmas so I popped a sentiment onto the front with some silver edged ribbon, inked the edges and adhered it with a pop dot.

I always try and be cautious with the height of my card front when making shakers because you already gain some depth with the adhesive used to create the shaker window and you want to make sure they'll still fit in an envelope for giving.

For the inside of my card, I printed a simple sentiment on my home printer, inked the edges and adhered it to a white A2 sized card.

If you're still nervous to try a shaker, check out the awesome offerings by Queen & Co and Jillibean Soup who make pre-cut adhesive foam shapes and fun shaker element that take some of the guess work out!

These cards are available in my Etsy shop.

So Suzy Stamps Guest Designer - Wedding Season

Hey Everyone! This is my last submission as Guest Designer. I appreciate all of the kind comments and encouragement from all of you and hope you found some inspiration in the cards I’ve shared.

To wrap up, I thought we could start thinking about wedding season, which will be in full swing before we know it. I’ll be featuring three cards I made using the Bride and Groom image paired with the Just Married arrow stamp.

For each of my cards, I used Versa-Fine black ink. I find it to be the boldest and crispest statement that provides excellent coverage without bleeding, no matter what paper stock I use. Even with the Versa-Fine, I still used my MISTI and stamped each image multiple times to ensure bold coverage. I then positioned the sentiment stamp above the image and stamped it in the same.

Each was adorned with Faber Castell Texture Gems but you could use Liquid Pearls or the new Nuvo Crystal Drops which would be stunning.

Here’s my first card.

I colored the brides dress in gold Wink of Stella. Look at that shine.

I then decorated the swirls with dots of Texture Gems. The image was mounted onto gold glitter card stock and onto a white card base. I added a few drops of the Texture Gems to the tails of the sentiment.

For my second card, I followed the same process, this time covering my card base in vellum featuring gold hearts. I layered an ivory and gold ribbon over the vellum and adhered a lovely gem I had in my embelly stash. I used fewer Texture Gems on the swirls, and adorned the ends of my sentiment as I did on the first card.

For my last card, I switched up my gold Texture Gems for white. 

The consistency was a bit different and a bit thicker. 

At first I was worried about seeing a bit of a dollop or point to my dots, but they dried

giving that nice rounded dot.

I covered my card base in pink glitter paper and gold mirror paper. 

I colored the bride’s bouquet in both dark and light pink Wink of Stella 

and my sentiment in gold and pink Wink of Stella.

I then wrapped a gold striped ribbon across the bottom for some added bling.

This stamp provides many opportunities to customize your card to suit the wedding colors 

of the couple you will present it to. 

Play around and have some fun!