winnie & walter WCMD blog hop

Happy World Card Making Day, friends!  I was thrilled when Winnie & Walter invited me to be a part of their WCMD blog hop, especially because, have you seen the caliber of talent they rounded up???  If you're hopping along, you've probably arrived here from Lydia Evans' beautiful blog, and you're pretty far along by now, so you know what I'm talking about.  If you've come from another place on the internets and are wondering what I'm talking about, head to Winnie & Walter and read all about it!  (They also have a whole lot going on aside from the Blog Hop, all in celebration of WCMD, so there is much to see and do over there!)

A few notes:  Want to win a $25 gift certificate to the Winnie & Walter shop? Leave some comments on the different stops along the blog hop route and you might be one of 3 random winners who receive one!

*Comments close at 23:59 CST on October 7th*

A full list of the blog hop contributors can be found here on the Winnie & Walter blog.

Your next stop after me is the lovely Kate Capper

Let me just begin by singing the praises of the Lulu Fringe cutaway:  I die.  I'm in love.  It's totally my new favorite thing.  I got it because I've gotten a bit obsessed with making tassels and wanted to try my hand at paper ones using that die (and I did; I made a few; scroll down to the third card).  But it's possibilities aren't limited to paper tassels and grass.

I made this cute little banner, too, from some tassel scraps and I think it's pretty sweet.  A few swatches of lace, tulle, and peach seam binding, mixed with imperfect hand stitching and warm-toned papers from Crate Paper and Pinkfresh Studio make for a darling mismatched garland.

Since the fringed garland is the piece de resistance of this card, I wanted to keep the lower half simple yet still pretty.  Two banners in coral and gold cut from The Big, The Bold, and The Extras cutaways, and a polka dotted "happy" are just enough to keep the lower half of the card from looking over the top, but with the mix of color, texture, and pattern, it's not unbalanced, either.

Can you tell that I stamped a background on my next card?!  I always buy the floral stamp sets, reeled in by the gorgeous images, and sold by the extraordinary examples the talented designers have created with them.  Then I get them home and realize I can't do that.  I mean, if I practiced and practiced and devoted an incredulous amount of my time to stamping, I think I could probably do it.  But I'm not at that point yet so I was super-proud of myself for making this leaf background.

It was a giant leap for me, number one, because I'm always too nervous to stamp directly onto my main surface (like the white card here), number two, because I eye-balled the whole pattern and didn't end up with any huge gaps or too-close clusters, and number three, I actually really like the way it turned out!  Really, that bird tag is not covering up any errors; it's kind of a miracle.

The leaf stamp is from The Big, The Bold, and The Extras stamp set and before you go thinking I stamped all over that bird tag, rest assured I didn't--it's paper from Maggie Holmes' new Gather collection.  But isn't it such a compliment to my lovely leaf background?

I used a few of my favorite go-to Cutaways on the card, like the tag, hole reinforcement, and small banner from the Katharine Essentials.  "Hello" is cut from Pink Paislee dotted paper and it was nearly by accident that I used a different TBTB&TH word on each card--and cut from the same paper.  When you find a good thing, you don't mess with it--#sorrynotsorry :)

This card is a bit of a hot mess, but I kind of love it anyhow!  There are quite possibly at least 2 elements too many here, but oh, well.  I love to layer, I love texture, and I love depth.  I could probably turn this into a gift topper, but it's World Card Making Day, not World Gift Wrap Day so...

This is actually the first card I started and the last one I finished.  It evolved a lot over the course of working on these projects.  The very first things I made in preparation for WCMD were the paper tassels and I really wanted to use at least one on at least one card (all three cards at one time were adorned with a tassel, but, alas, they were not meant to be on the other 2). 

*Want to make your own paper tassels?  I happened to have a small package of suede tassels with these gold caps on them.  I pulled out the suede and replaced it with the paper fringe.  There are similar caps here, sold on Amazon.  I don't own them so do not know what kind of quality they are, therefore I'm not recommending them, but it's a good place for you to start searching!

And I CAN endorse the Lulu Fringe cutaway because I have it, I love it, and it works!

Anyhow, I'm not going to say which embellishments make this card slightly outrageous because I love each one of them dearly and while I was laying everything out, before anything was glued into place, it all looked just fine.  So I'll just go ahead and blame the glue.

There are more fringe-y layers and Katharine tags, plus some "Happy" love, and even a gold, glittery Faceted Heart.  And, of course, the paper tassel (made with the Lulu Fringe cutaway and a marbled patterned paper, again from Maggie Holmes' Gather).

That does it for me on this World Card Making Day blog hop with Winnie & Walter.  You're moving onto Kate now and don't forget to comment to receive $25 in the W&W shop!  Thanks for stopping by!

xoxo