Up, up and away for men

Hi my stamping friends!

Following on from my previous post about men's cards, I thought I would share another cute card made for a man using the Up, up and away stamp set. These colours are so great for a man. Here I have used: Crumb cake, Cajun craze, Not quite navy, Very vanilla, Baja breeze and a little Early espresso.

The cloud and bird stamps come in the set with the balloons and basket and the greetings are great for guys in this set too: ""miss you!", ""happy birthday to you!", "up in the air over you!" and "the sky's the limit". I love using the last two sentiments for cards for my hubby :)

Happy Stamping!
Love, Claire

Something "manly"

Hi my stamping friends :)

I truly used to fear making mens cards but over the years I have realised that they are actually quite easy! I have a few key tips for making mens cards:

• Rough it up a bit. Distress the edges using not too sharp scissors or our Cutter kit (p.149 of the Idea book and catalogue)
• Ink up the edges using a Stamping sponge or sponge dauber and the same colour ink as cardstock. This just gives a bit of an antique/aged look. 
• Add some metal. Stampin' up!s Metallic Brads are perfect! 
• Add some texture. I have to hold myself back from using my square lattice embossing folder on every mens card I make! 

The card pictured is one that we made on Friday evening at an in home workshop. The hostess asked for some ideas for mens cards and this one I felt was fairly neutral and could work for different ages. See, you can even make a man card without a car or a boat stamp in sight!

We used the super fun Grunge rock stamp set and some of the girls who knew guitar playing men decided to add a little stamped and hand cut guitar image from the same stamp set to their cards. I love seeing the creativity expressed at workshops! It's awesome.

If you'd like to host your own workshop (and request a theme) then please let me know as I would be thrilled to help you out! Don't forget until the end of July we are still showing our hostesses how much we love them by giving them an extra $90 to spend when sales reach $650!

Happy Stamping!
Love Claire

Something for the man in your life

Hi girls!

A big happy new year to you all! May 2011 be a wonderful year for you in all you do!

I have a confession... when the 2010-11 Stampin'Up! Idea book was released I was quite disapointed by the lack of new mens stamp sets. Well can I just say that the new Summer mini catalogue has totally redeemed this situation! There are new products in this mini that make great mens cards!

Here I have made a card for a male birthday. I have used the gorgeous new Sentimental Journey stamp set from the mini and teamed it up with the Travel Journal designer series papers. That gorgeous Bashful blue cardstock has been embossed with the new Square lattice embossing folder on the Big shot and to tie in with the DSP I have used a knotted piece of pumpkin pie grosgrain ribbon (love this vibrant ribbon) and stamped a sentiment from the Upsy Daisy stamp set in Pumpkin pie ink. All of this is positioned on a Crumb cake base.

The Sentimental Journey stamp set has 8 stamps in it including a ship, airplane, car, suitcase and compass plus three word stamps - journey, travel and detour. This is a set that is also brilliant for scrapping with and I plan to use it for this as I have so many travel photos yet to be scrapped!

Please click on the link to the left to see the Summer mini catalogue and drop me an email if you wish to make a purchase.

I mentioned that there are a few new products for masculine cards in this mini, so I will be back with more soon!

Happy Stamping! Love, Claire

Just Add A Man Card!

Hi girls!
This week over at JAI the challenge is to Just add a man card but to make it doubly challening they also added in a colour challenge which is Baja breeze, Chocolate Chip and Kraft.
Here is my simple entry which uses the weathered background stamp and a sentiment from Cute and Curly. The punched star is adhered with a silver brad. The faux stitching is achieved with the white signo uniball pen.

I hope this simple card inspires you to create your own 'man card'! And head over to the Just Add Ink website to check out the gallery of wonderful creations of 'man cards' over there!

Happy Stamping, Love Claire