HUMMINGBIRD AND ALPACA CARDS.

I am finally getting around to posting some more of my photo cards! I got busy with making some for Thanksgiving, took pictures of them, and then my camera broke and there was no way to load the pictures to my computer! To say the least, I was NOT a happy camper. After a few days of stewing about it, a light bulb went on in my head, and I realized I could scan the cards... duh.... 

NOTE: you don't like to read all of my explanations, please go on to the cards below.. if you just like looking at the pictures!  I tend to get too wordy.

Being a Close to My Heart consultant, I try to use mostly CTMH products, but I did not purchase any Thanksgiving or Fall stamps this year with sentiments.  Another problem... how do I add sentiments to my cards other than printing them out from my computer and cutting them up? 

So, I decided to use a nifty program called Smilebox which I absolutely love!  You can use some parts of it for free, or sign up on a monthly plan which is very inexpensive.  You can make all kinds of things, like greeting cards, invitations, calendars, collages, scrapbook pages, and little journals. What I love is that you can also send your creations by email, with music and photo slideshows! 

I could go on and on about Smilebox, but for the here and now, what I did was find some neat little Thanksgiving cards with sentiments I liked, made them by uploading the photos I wanted to use, printed them out in a small size, and then adhered them to my pre-purchased 5-7 cards.

Here are a few of the cards:

I finally got to use my neat hummingbird photo that I took last summer!  I love this sentiment and adhered the collage to some "other" pretty papers I had. I also used some sparkles to add a little bling.

For most of the cards, I used creamy cardstock on the inside with one of the stamps from the retired CTMH Acrylix Live Inspired stamp set. I used the Cocoa CTMH ink.

 Here's my Hem Your Blessings card using my own photos.

 

 Plant Your Blessings card:

These are all photos from my yard or my neighbor's yard. Smilebox has these neat layouts where you can add your own text, which I did in the middle.  I used some "other' papers for this card as it matched so well.

I stamped with the Smokey Plum inks from CTMH.

Here's a card using photos of our alpacas. We raised them for several years from 2004 to 2009. What cute critters!  This was a little Smilebox collage/card and I added my own sentiment, then mounted it on a black pre-purchased 5x7 card.

Though I was trying to keep these cards simple, I did add a couple of banner strips on the inside, to match the banner on the outside of the card.

Here's another cute alpaca card. No, the flowers aren't my added embellishments! They are in the Smilebox program. This was a little scrapbook layout and I just used one of the pages that I printed out to mount on this card. I used the "Life is Good" sentiment from the recent It's Your Day CTMH My Acrylix stamp set and added a couple of sparkles.

One more DARLING alpaca card!  I mounted this collage picture from Smilebox on some brown cardstock that I stamped with Cocoa ink from the CTMH August Stamp of the Month, Baroque Borders. Love that stamp set!

These cards were all fairly simple and fast to make.  Sometimes I just want something quick and easy and photo cards are the way to go!   

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HAPPY THANKSGIVING ALL... and now on to Christmas............