The secret to making cards for males who don't care about fancy embellishments

This afternoon, I had a card making session with my teenage son.
Now, I'm just going to pause for a minute while those of you with past or present teenage sons either dust yourself off after fainting on the floor, or wipe the tears of laughter from your eyes.  . . . but it's true.  This afternoon, Rohan and I made cards together.  But before I show you the results, I want to talk about the subject of this post:

The secret to making cards for males who don't care about fancy embellishments.
Now, it might be that every man and boy in your life absolutely loves and appreciates the miniature works of art you produce.  "Straight to the pool room", he might say, like the Dad in the movie "The Castle", giving it pride of place on the mantle piece.
And if your Dad, husband, brother, sons, and every other man you know is like this, you really don't need to read any further. 
But if, like me, you know one or two (or twenty) men who don't really seem to value the time, not to mention your favourite papers and embellishments, that go into your creations, you might want to keep reading!
It's not that they don't appreciate the sentiment that goes into your cards, because of course they do! It's just that they wouldn't appreciate it any less if it was written on a used paper towel!

My suggestion?  Keep it simple, and add a little dash of my secret ingredient . . . .

Humour!

Time and again I've noticed that the cards that my boys have most loved to give and receive, have been the ones that have had a touch of the giggles.  Whether it's a funny picture or a couple of hand-written lines in a store-bought card, or an explosion of hand-made goodness, it's the funny cards that work every time.  And I haven't noticed this changing as they've gotten older.

So here are our two versions of a funny skateboarding card (using my new stamps, of course!)

Rohan not only decorate the front of his card . . .

but also the inside . . .

and the back!

My card is based on Sherri's card, stop 11 on the Let's Scrap blog hop.  Here it is:

As I explained to Rohan, it is open to interpretation whether this baby is the next Bob Burnquist, pulling a really hard trick, or the next admission in the Emergency Ward.  I know which one I prefer!

Let's Scrap Blog Hop card 3: Debby's card

This next card, for my mother-in-law, was based on the card showcased by Debby, at her blog, ScrapSoul.  It might seem like I've been crazy-busy working on these cards, but like I said, Rob is off to see the family this weekend (he actually left about half an hour ago) so I had a day and a half to make 3 cards.  I'm not sure how many more I will do, if I make cards for anyone too far  in advance, I'll probably just end up making them another one closer to the date! So we'll see.

Anyway, here's the sketch.  This time, I was inspired by the sketch itself.  The retro picture reminded me of a sheet of Cosmo Cricket tags which I bought last year and been getting good use out of.

You might think (or at least I thought) that this would be the quickest card so far, what with just using a couple of pre-made tags, but I agonised about the placement, and which tags to use.  In the end I mirrored the sketch and added a flower, brads and some braid. 
And yes, I wet the edges of the background paper before distressing.  Told you I love that!

Let's Scrap Blog Hop card 2: Elizna's card

Next card was based on the sketch that Elizna used to make this gorgeous card you see at the left.
There's so much to love about this card - the way she used the tags, the dimensional hearts and the gorgeous border.
Having said that, my card, being for my father-in-law, is totally different!







Here it is:

The first point of inspiration for this card was the cute little Stampin' Up house stamps.  From there I thought of this map paper, which dictated my colour choice. 
I loved in the sketch how everything was in the bottom right hand corner, but I moved my sentiment up to cover a place name that was in a larger font and somewhat distracting.
I noticed that a couple of the girls were wetting the edges of their papers to distress them. I am totally loving this technique!

Let's Scrap Blog hop card one : Kristin's card

My kids went back to school this week - three different schools!!!!!! I've been dreading it all school holidays and I'm here to tell you, yes it's tough - we've got some organising to do if we are going to survive these next two years!  My mornings have been emotionally exhausting, and I have spent my school days spending way too much time on the internet!  I have:

• joined Pinterest - took a while to get my boards how I wanted them, and going back tracking down a couple of favourite projects I wanted to pin, but from now on, it's a quick press of the "pin-it" button when I see something I love!
• joined the Silhouette group on Flickr.  I went back and added some of my favourite projects from last year (and pinned some other people's while I was there!).  Again, from now on, I will just be able to add the odd project as I do it.
• started following my blog list in Google Reader - don't know why I didn't do this a long time ago, it is much more user-friendly! I spent quite a bit of time going through reading and "marking as read" old posts, so from now on I will be able to see at a glance who has added new posts since I last read them!
• And last, (but by no means least) I embarked on the epic Leap around the World Blog Hop at Let's Scrap.  If you're not a member of LS already, I totally urge you have a peek - 50 hosts around the world, each with a card sketch to show you, each with some blog candy to give away, and it goes for the whole month!

Robert's off to see his family this weekend for his nephew's 21st so I had three cards to make pretty quickly.  Here's my first card, based on the sketch at Kristin's blog, Some Scrap Sugar:

My goal for the cards I make for this blog hop is: to use only offcuts (but then that doesn't surprise you, does it?) and hopefully a few other under-used items for the stash.
My starting points for this card were

1. the bunch of beautiful key stamps I own
2. the little wooden numbers that I bought specifically for "number" birthday cards, followed by the thought that they might fit nicely in a slide frame (they did!) and
3. the colour scheme was dictated by this almost perfectly-sized patterned paper

A little something extra - at no extra cost!

Some people scrapbook very fancy, very embellished pages.  Others have a cleaner, more simple style.  My pages generally tend towards the simpler end of the spectrum.  And I'm OK with that.  I like the fact that I keep the photos and stories as the key focus of my pages.
But lately, I've been thinking (especially given the size of my stash) that it wouldn't hurt to add just a little something extra to some of my pages.
This week at Two Peas, Shimelle's alter-ego, Glitter Girl, tackled just this issue, of adding just that little bit extra, (see here)so I decided to take up the challenge!

Trying a "scrapbook starting point" has never been that appealing to me, but once as I just saw it as a variation on a sketch, I could move forward, using one of the new photos I've just had printed out.
I really wanted to add some ribbon or something to this page, but it just wasn't working for me.  I don't own any mists, but I used ink and watered-down paint to bring the colours on the page together.
I'm not the sort of person to use cutesy ice-cream embellishments on a page about a trip to an ice-cream shop.  Using my Silhouette, I cut out a few asterixes from a couple of different fonts from two of the same papers, and punched out some circles from a third.
A simple page, telling a lovely, simple story!

Hooray for new photos!

I am absolutely hanging out to buy some new patterned papers, I haven't bought any for months! I decided to wait until my new batch of photos arrived, which they did earlier this week!

Being the responsible spender that I am (trying to be), I thought I'd pick out a few photos to start, and see what I could come up with from the stash, then take the rest of the photos to the shop to match up colours.

Here's what I came up with first, using this week's ColourQ combo:

Rohan got into skateboarding in a big way last year (that's how he broke his arm 2 weeks ago, if I haven't mentioned that already).  On the way home from a camping trip on the October long weekend we stopped at a (conveniently deserted) skate park for a break.  While we were there, Rohan successfully "dropped in" for the first time.  And I was there with the camera to take these awesome photos!

I'll be back soon with more pages, I'm sure!

Craft with Grandma

Hi everybody, Maddy here! When my Grandma came to visit, she did lots of craft with me.  We made some flowers with white paper, white pen and buttons.  And then we put it on a dark background. 

I love doing craft with Grandma!

(note from Mum: Maddy got this idea from this fabulous book, 365 things to do with paper and cardboard,)