More In the Spotlight with the scallop punch

I love experimenting with different color combinations and layouts. Which of these is your favorite?This one is for my cousin Alisa's birthday. It's all part of my goal of staying on top of my birthdays! I now have my Birthday Calendar posted on the wall of my stamping room, so there's no excuse for missing birthdays. This was a thank-you for a birthday gift. I have so many generous friends!

This was a thank-you for a super-stamper friend who loaned me her Powder Pal for Christmas in August Stamp Camp. It made the Dazzling Diamonds glitter a lot less messy!

This was a thank-you for my latest workshop hostess. I'll be sending her a $5 gift certificate, too!

I'm off to Cape Cod today for a few days of vacation, so I won't be posting until after Labor Day. I'll be bringing some stamping supplies with me so that I can make swaps for the Philadelphia Regional convention. I will post some samples when I return.

Hope you enjoy the long weekend, too!

Much Appreciated - scallop punch!

I have been making lots of thank-you cards lately for all the housewarming gifts, birthday gifts, and just generous friends. Here's a thank-you card featuring my new favorite punch, the scallop punch. It fits just perfectly with this image from the In The Spotlight hostess set. I love how Wild Wasabi and Purely Pomegranate look with Night of Navy here. It's hard to tell in this pciture, but my Wild Wasabi layer is actually a scrap leftover from another scallop punch. It gives this card some extra dimension. For more thank-you note ideas, click the "thank you" label list at the right.

much appreciated MIL

So my dear Mother-in-Law/Love was in town for my at the end of June. She's from TX, so we don't get to see one another very often. We had lots of fun together. We attended a conference in DC, hung curtains in our new (old) house, did some stamping, although the 4th of July fireworks got rained out (so we thought).

Her visit just happened to overlap with my Stampin' Up Open House, so she got to help me launch my new business. One of our projects that day included some fun with punches. I think that got her thinking about all sorts of punch possibilities. She ordered 6 punches! In addition to giving me a great sales boost, she said I could hang on to the punches for a while after they arrived, so that I could make some samples. Woohoo! So I've been having fun playing with all these new punches, and here are some things I've made.

I LOVE this card with the black-eyed susan. This flowers looks perkier than the flowers in my front yard, that's for sure! I think I probably got the idea from some of the galleries on splitcoaststampers.com. I punched all the petals and the leaf using the large oval punch, and then I made the center of the flower (forget the science term) using the 1 3/8" punch.

I made a fake bow for this Elegant Inspirations card using my MIL's 1/8" circle punch and some chocolate chip 5/8" grosgrain ribbon. It's a trick I learned from Claire. I love the way this sentiment looks with Baroque Motifs. The swirly lettering coordinates with the swirls in the design.


I punched a whole bunch of flowers with the Spring Flower Bouquet punch. This is a great way to use up scrap paper and it makes 3 flowers at once. I learned that this punch works much better with thinner paper like the designer series paper, vellum, or dare-I-say copy paper. It takes some muscles to punch SU cardstock with this punch, since the cardstock is so thick. I'll post some more samples once I make some cards with the little flowers.


For a listing of all the SU! punches, see pages 182-183 of the Fall-Winter Collection 2007.

(My dear husband figured out our scanner and gave me a little tutorial, so Shiloh Stamps should have better quality images now.)