A Perfect Shopping Day......Priceless!

Hi everyone, I'm back from CHA and am back in the swing of things at the home front. I'm dragging though...these trips really take it out of me. I saw lots of new and old friends....got tons of great ideas.....saw all the latest and greatest products....ate some fabulous food and more! I'll be sure to share some of my favorites from CHA when I get those photos sorted.

For today, I created some fun cards for my girls. I just felt like putzing around in my stamp room yesterday but didn't really know what I wanted to create. Then the girls got up and we started talking about school starting soon and what new things we needed. So I decided to make them each a card that they could write their shopping list items on the inside.

I'm still loving my new October Afternoon patterned papers so I dug those out of my stash, along with Papertrey's Wise Owl. I thought that the owl would work well for school shopping, being they are are so *wise* and it would work into my school theme. The kits of October Afternoon paper contained lots of cut outs, photo corners and scalloped borders so it was easy to put together collage type cards. I paper pieced the owls onto some polka dot patterned paper, the beak and bellies onto solid pink card stock and then stamped the eyes onto PTI white card stock. I added some Ranger Glossy Accents to the eyes to make them pop even more. The front owl pieces were tied with Papertrey Dark Chocolate Ribbon.
Then for the inside of the card, I used some lined ledger paper from the OA kit....added some more of the fun owl stamps on punched circles........and then stamped *my shopping list* using the PTI Simple Alphabet stamp set. I'm going to have the girls fill our their lists and then carry the cards with them on our school shopping day. School shopping is one of my favorite things to do....I loved getting new pencils, paper, markers, book bags, etc as a child so I want to make it just as fun for my girls. We'll take the entire day to shop, try on clothes, eat lunch and make some fun memories.
Along with the cards, I'm going to give the girls a bag full of snacks, some juice boxes and spending money for the day. They'll be so surprised!! Then afterwards, we come home and lay out all the goodies for Dad to see. This is exactly what I would do too, so fun!!
Tip of the day: Above I have a photo of some Ranger Distress Ink and the foam applicator that attaches to a wooden stamper type block. While at CHA, I stopped to watch Tim Holtz for a little bit and he used the inker in a cool way to add distress shading to projects. Instead of holding the paper in one hand the inking tool in the other and *flicking* the paper edges.........he placed the paper onto a craft mat and then inked it by sliding the inked tool onto the paper edges. He inked the tool then started on the craft mat then overlapped the paper edges, rubbin in a circular motion. This gives THE softest application of ink. If you want just a little shading, you just go in with the tool a little bit. If you want more shading you move the inking tool in further. VERY cool tip I learned so I had to share it!