Coffee & Cards with Deb & Celeste 1/22

Welcome back to our first blog collaboration of 2017. Celeste and I look forward to bringing you cards to inspire you and selections of coffee to tempt you. We will have a guest blogger with us each month and to kick off our year, we have Terri Albro Burson. Terri is an amazing papercrafter and coffee lover so she fits right in with us !! Celeste chose the theme for this month and she selected a Mood Board for us with the colors Black, White, Pink and Gold :

I was inspired by a calendar I bought on clearance this week. It is all things Paris and had several pictures with our chosen colors. I cut out  the images that included our Mood Board colors and used several on my card.

Tombow

•  I adhered a piece of white patterned paper with gold accents from the MAMBI paper pad "Joyful" to a Kraft card base.
• The Metro and window images were cut from the calendar and adhered with Tombow MONO Aqua Liquid Glue, 
• The Paris and Eiffel Tower images were stamped with Memories Black India Ink on Neenah Stardust White paper and then die cut.  They are from the Sizzix/Tim Holtz Alterations Collection - French Flight.
• The word "PARIS" and the Eiffel Tower were  popped up on the card using dimensionals. I colored the word PARIS using a Faber Castell Pink Madder Pitt Artist Pen.
• Several white and black sequins were adhered to the Right side of the card as a finishing touch.

Today's card was brought to you by a fabulous cup of Caramel Coffee in my other Cat Lady mug.  I suppose the fact that 2 friends gave me "crazy" Cat Lady cups just about makes it a done deal that that is a true description of me ! But in my defense, I only have one cat.  The picture was altered using my Rhonna Farrar app on the iPhone and that cute banner is from one of  its Susan K Weckesser packs.  It is really a fabulous app for working with your pictures. That yummy muffin in the picture was made by my awesome guy, Brian. They are made with Fiber One cereal and he made them from scratch without a recipe !! He added chocolate chunks and they were absolutely delicious !! He was trying to re-create a recipe that his dad used to make for their family when Brian was growing up. He said that his came pretty close !!

Please take a look at Celeste's  card using the Mood Board colors at her blog -  Crafting Junky . And give Terri a warm welcome as our guest this month by visiting her at  Waving My Wand and leaving her a comment. Terri is an Adornit IT Girl, a member of the Coffee Loving Papercrafter's Team, and designs for So Suzy Stamps and Two Paper Divas. And that is just a short list of her creative accomplishments !! We are thrilled to have her with us this month. Be sure to sign up to follow our blogs if you haven't already done so.

Thank you for starting off your year with us. We will see you next month.

February is one of my favorite months -- full of hearts and love ...

Debra Davison / Meticulosity

Sending a Bunny To Say Hello

Today I made a cute bunny card to send to a dear friend. The last time I used my embossing paste, I embossed a few extra card bases so I could easily use them to create a quick card in the future.. I had already sprinkled some glitter over the paste before it dried so I had a cute sparkly background to start with..

To finish the card base, I bordered the Left edge of the card with pieces of glitter and text  washi. I then cut a tag from the  Live in Color Tags paper made by Susan K. Weckesser and placed a turquoise sequin in each corner. The little bunny is from the Bunny Hugs stamp set, also by Susan K. Weckesser. I stamped the image with Clearsnap Colorbox Color Pop Archival Dye Ink in Mystery and colored it  with a combination of Distress Markers and Faber-Castell PITT Artist Pens. I adhered the tag to the base with my all-time favorite glue - Tombow Mono Aqua Liquid Glue. It even adheres really well over the glittery base of the card. The bunny was popped up using Stampin' Up dimensionals.

This bright, cheery card will be heading off to say hello to a dear, faraway friend. Next time you sit down to make a card, put together several card bases. You can put patterned paper and a doily on a kraft background or emboss a few backgrounds. Then the next time you need a quick card, you will already have a starting point.

How do you streamline your card-making process ?? This past weekend, I got out my Vagabond machine and cut out  lots of coffee cup and teacup designs and also used embossing folders to create some backgrounds.. So now I have some readily available elements and backgrounds for my next card-making session !! I will be sending  some of these to one lucky commenter. Be sure to follow my blog so you can see what I do with them in the future !!

Thank you for visiting Meticulosity..

Have a great week !!

I { HEART } Books ( and bookmarks )

Yes, that is exactly what it says -- I { HEART } Books !!  Apart from my absolute love of card-making, I am also quite fond of books. From the time I was a child and would walk to the library with my dad, I have had a fascination with books. Growing up in a very small town, we knew everyone, and the town librarian was a friend of our family. After I had read all of the children's books in the library, my father wrote out a permission slip for me to be able to take out any book that I wanted. Miss Faust kept it in my file so I never had a problem. I remember going through the card catalog alphabetically and just finding topics of interest, then taking many books home on that 1 subject. That was in the days before computers when we relied on the Dewey Decimal system  ( now I am really showing my age ).. More info on that at the end of my post of you are interested.

So where am I going with this, you might ask ?? Well, with a love of books comes a love of bookmarks. I have used the occasional slip of paper to mark a page  ( have never been one to dog-ear a book !! ). In the past, I have even cross-stitched bookmarks for myself and as gifts. But lately I have been seeing these cute ones made from envelopes and just had to give it a try.

Any book-lover MUST get this amazing book that is an alphabetized reading list that I refer to often. Nancy Pearl is an American librarian and author who shares her love and knowledge of books with all of us. And isn't my cute owl just perfect in that corner !!

I used the Going Wild stamp set by Susan K Weckesser co-branded with Unity Stamp Company. After stamping the images with Susan K Weckesser's  Clearsnap Colorbox Color POP Dye ink in Mystery , I colored them with a variety of markers ( Distress, Stabilo and Stampin' Up ). I fussy-cut them and applied Ranger Glossy Accents ( if you don't own this, you need to run right out with a coupon and buy some ).. On the owl, I applied the Glossy Accents to the glasses. There are also a few strips of feather washi on the back of this bookmark.

The fox image also came from the Going Wild stamp set. I added a strip of grass washi to the bottom of this bookmark, then gave this cute little fox a cup of coffee cut from a fabulous roll of Paper Studio washi. A few cups were also placed on the back of this bookmark along with a favorite stamp of mine from Paper Angel. Glossy Accents were applied to the ears, paws and polka-dots on the bow tie. The fox and owl were adhered using my TOMBOW Mono Aqua Liquid Glue -- my bookmarks get lots of wear and tear and TOMBOW is my go-to adhesive !!

For those of you as OCD as I am, and who could not just cut a corner off of an envelope to make these bookmarks -- this is how I made mine. I used a 5 x 7 Kraft envelope because the Kraft paper is sturdier. On the bottom corners of the envelope, on each side I measured 3 inches in, made a dot with a pencil, then drew a straight line connecting the 2 dots. I then cut across the line and erased any pencil marks that remained. Use your imagination to create any kind of bookmark that you want !!

I hope that you enjoyed hearing about my other LOVE- Books !! I love all kinds of books and finally did get a nook which now has about 1000 books and samples on it. I still love the feel of a "real" book in my hands but also love the ability to have so many choices with me at one time.

My current reading list includes :
1. The Fireman - Stephen King
2. The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend - Katarina Bivald
3. Packing for Mars - Mary Roach
4. Collage Playground - Kimberly Santiago
5. The Woman in Cabin 10 - Ruth Ware

And who says you can't use a bookmark with an e-reader ?!?!?!?!

And for those of you who have never seen how I used to find my way around a library, here are a few pics. Now I wish I had a card catalog like that for my craft supplies !!

 Dewey Decimal System

Thank you for visiting Meticulosity !!