Today, my beautiful cousin graduated with her Bachelors Degree in Nursing! She has worked so hard and sacrificed a lot to get where she has and to reach this goal. Our family is very proud of her and I knew that I had to take the time to create something beautiful in her honor.

I used the colors from this week’s Embellish magazine challenge! My fave thing about Embellish magazine is their unique color inspiration and combos… always something fresh and new! My other inspiration was from one of my favorite cards from Sarah Martina. She always has the most beautiful work!

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HAPPY FALL!

There, I said it! It is fall and yes, I took some time out of my schedule (and early excitement for Christmas) to celebrate fall. We aren’t too  familiar with fall here in Southern California; perhaps it would be more exciting if we had more of a change. Fall usually consists of the Santa Ana winds (hot, dry winds), fire season and brown leaves. See? not so much to look forward to.

But this year has been extraordinarily different for each season so far! The summer was beyond beautiful and not much hot weather — we are talkin’ 75 to 85 degrees with lovely breezes all day long. Now for fall, we have actually had quite a bit of rainy, cool weather with some gorgeous lightning and thunder! That is pretty exciting for us! Looking forward to what else God has in store for us the remainder of 2010.

My cards for today were inspired by Embellishment Magazine’s color challenge. Green, Yellow and Rust with a Vintage twist — how could I pass this up!?

I used the 2 Sketches 4 You sketch and played around with my new stamp set from Close To My Heart — Many Thanks D1371 — which features lovely fall leaves as well as the thin swirl border stamp that I used for my center strip. I took a small 4″ doily and sponged it with Goldrush and Paper Bag (CTMH) until I got the rusty look that I wanted… I also used Paper Bag to sponge the edges of the card and the sentiment to keep with the rusty theme. Aren’t doilies fun? You can’t tell so well from the photo but I also embossed the card base (except where my strip down the center is) with the Swiss Dots embossing folder.

My second card uses Papertrey Ink’s Damask Designs, one of my favorite stamp sets! Using Paper Bag ink (CTMH) I again sponged over the doily, but very lightly for a speckled distressed look and around the edge of the card base. I wish I had a die to use for this damask but I had to cut it out by hand. It takes some patience but is so worth being able to pop it up off of the Garden Green circle for dimension. Topped this beauty off with a tan pearl from Close To My Heart’s new pearl set (mocha set).

Thanks for visiting and I hope that you are enjoying your Fall time, wherever you may be!

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Papertrey Ink is celebrating their 3rd Year Anniversary, as well as the February release and today the challenge was to create a card using origami! You can see my cute little creation using an origami pinwheel at the bottom of this post :)

How could I resist using this gorgeous and bold color combo from Embellish Magazine! In addition to the color challenge, we are to make a project using the Birthday Celebration Theme (piece of cake!). These colors are perfect for fun and happy… so needless to say this combo is permanently saved for future projects!

With this card, I used the 2 Sketches 4 You card sketch because, well… I just can’t resist a tall card! The inks used were Close To My Heart: Watermelon,  Moonstruck, Clover and Chocolate. The lovely design stamp is from the one and only Papertrey Ink — Giga Guidelines – and the cute little checklist birthday phrases are from CTMH’s It’s Your Day (and yes, I did cut the list stamp so that I can have the phrases separate!). I also used the Bitty Dots Basics from PTI. I just love the way this card came out! It will be going to my MIL for her upcoming birthday :)

Below is my Origami card for the Papertrey Ink challenge. I had never done one of these on a card before, so it was an interesting little baby adventure for this scrapper :) Yay for challenges that give you great results! Thanks, Nichole!

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