Congratulations Card

A dear friend and fellow author just reached a huge milestone in her career. To help her celebrate, I made her a card combining products from three different companies.

That gorgeous flower is a multi-layer die cut from Altenew, the sentiment is from MFT, and the scallop edge border and all paper is from CTMH. I think I'm going to recreate this exact same card but reverse the patterned paper, making the flower the plaid and the border the dotted pattern.

Since meeting my deadline back in November, I've been catching up on life and spending hours in my craft room to recover. I've been reading a couple of really interesting books to spark ideas for a novella collection. Hopefully I'll have news to share on that front soon...which means in the next six months because publishers have a different definition of the word than the rest of us do.

I'll be heading up to New York early next week to celebrate Christmas with our son. I hope to do a "Best of 2018" post either while I'm there or soon after I get back. I love this crafty, blogging, creative world I get to share with you. I've said it before (and I will probably keep saying it multiple times in the future), paper crafting is as much a part of my writing process as plotting and developing a character arc. I really, really missed being in my craft room while on deadline. It's been good to do nothing but make cards and scrapbook pages (which I don't show because I can't get good pictures) for a long time. My fingers are getting itchy to type a new story now.

Thank you for being part of my "tribe" by supporting both my papercrafting and my writing with your visits and comments.

Wishing you a very Merry Christmas and a wonderful New Year,
Becca

Final Ugly Sweater Card

All 72 Christmas cards went in the mail yesterday. Whew! I wanted to show you the final card I made to finish.

This combines two stamp sets from CTMH (see below for shopping links), retired and current paper from CTMH, two die cuts from MFT, and a Cricut cut.

So here's the deal...the Ugly Sweater stamp set comes with "Fa la la!" but I'm a singer and the full thing is "Fa la la la la la la." I know. I'm a little obsessive compulsive. However, I got an unexpected royalty check for the large print edition of The Promise Bride which needed to be spent and MFT had just released this adorable die.

To get the texture on the sweater, I used a background stamp included in the Flower Market Cricut Cartridge (CTMH exclusive). I'm not sure where the actual sweater cut comes from only that I fussed with altering the image because that obsessive compulsive part of me didn't like that the image came with the red part on top of the ribbing bands. I changed it so the sweater was the full image and the ribbing parts were separate cuts. I used retired Cranberry paper and current Linen paper (light side) and stamped with retired Cranberry ink and Black ink to decorate it.

Here are the shopping links for the current supplies available through CTMH:

• Ugly Sweater (retires at the end of the month)
• Flower Market Cricut Cartridge
• Linen cardstock
• Black cardstock
• Black ink
• Heather ink

That royalty check was large enough to purchase some other supplies, so here's my second card for the day...

I've coveted the Peony flower from Altenew for quite a while and then they went and released a plaid cover die. Oh yeah...put that in my cart right away! The sentiment is a mix of MFT (praying) and retired CTMH (for you).

In writing news, I took a long break after sending off the final book of the Montana Brides series but now it's time to get back to work on proposals for new stories. The rest of my royalty check went toward a couple of research books so I'm off to read.

Until next time,
Becca