The May Wacky Watercooler Blog Hop

It's my birthday and we're having a Blog Hop.  What an exciting day!

May is a funny sort of month when you are part of Stampin' Up!  A whole lot of products have retired and we're waiting to welcome the brand new Annual Catalogue on June 2nd.  The Occasions Catalogue is also still active until June 1st.  This Blog Hop is going to reflect all these changes.  This month we're concentrating on saying goodbye to the old--the products that are retiring from both the Occasions Catalogue and last year's Annual Catalogue.  We're also welcoming in the new since we've been able to order a very select amount from the brand new Annual Catalogue.  I had a lot of fun mixing the old with the new for my projects.

If you've come through the blog hop from the beginning, you will have arrived here from the very creative Deborah Smart's blog.  Deborah is one very busy crafter and always amazes me with her wonderful projects.

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For my first project I created a masculine birthday card using one of my favourite retiring stamp sets:  Clockworks.  This card could easily be for Father's Day with the appropriate sentiment alteration.  What I love about the Clockworks stamp set is all the gears and designs as well as the clock faces.  I also used the Gorgeous Grunge stamp set and Label Love stamp set, neither of which are retiring.  I used a lot of layers for this card, beginning with a base of Early Espresso, some Gold Foil, another layer of Early Espresso, a layer of Baked Brown Sugar onto which I heat embossed a variety of designs and, finally, a partial layer of Early Espresso cut out using my Hexagon Hive Thinlit.

The card really looks masculine, doesn't it?  I am so happy with the results.

For the inside of the card I continued with the colour scheme.  I love this sentiment from the Yippee Skippee stamp set and decided to stamp a gear from the Clockworks in the top left and bottom right.  Then I used the Chevron Border punch to get some Early Espresso Core'dinations pieces and adhered them around the gears after sanding them slightly.  

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I only prepared one more item for this Blog Hop but since it's a multi-page accordion-style album, it's really quite a large project.  For this one I decided to spotlight two of the new In-Colors:  Hello Honey and Lost Lagoon.  The design is along the line of the album I made for my daughter over a year ago, but it has more pages and I also decided to use my Circle Card Thinlit for one of the pages.  

The pages alternate between the Naturals White cardstock, Hello Honey cardstock and Lost Lagoon cardstock.  I also used some of the pages from the Moonlight Designer Series Paper Stack as well as some Whisper White cardstock and Pool Party Core'dinations.  The Pool Party looks great with the new Lost Lagoon.  There are also several stars and hearts cut out of Silver Glimmer paper spritzed with Pool Party ink, using framelits from the Circle Card package.

The stamp sets I used were Baby Prints (retired), Baby We've Grown (Occasions catalogue and also in the new Annual Catalogue), and Something for Baby (new Annual Catalogue).  They really worked well together.  What I love best about the new Something for Baby stamp set is that it comes with coordination framelits which eliminates the usual fussy cutting I wind up having to do.  You can see on the cover how beautifully the pram is cut out with the framelit.

The sentiment is from the Baby We've Grown stamp set.  I love the way the Hexagon Hive thinlit and On Film framelit enhance each other.

The baby for whom I've created this album hasn't been born yet so I've left the photo areas blank as well as the areas for his name and other information.  I love the way one can combine My Digital Studio and actual stamping.

For the little boy's shoes, I used the Baby We've Grown stamp set while the safety pin and little socks are from the Something for Baby stamp set and framelits.

The next spread of pages is, again, a mixture of stamping with the My Digital Studio because I wanted a list of firsts to go with the stamp from Baby Prints.  Since this spread also includes the Circle Card, I used the footprints from Baby Prints on one side of the circle and a sentiment from the Cuddles and Kisses stamp set on the other side.  

For the next spread, I did some very fussy cutting because I wanted to include the little bunny from the Baby We've Grown stamp set.  Of course I included four bunnies.  Cutting those little whiskers was a challenge!

The next spread includes the inside of the back cover so I repeated the same embossed pattern that I used on the inside of the front cover.

  

This shows the entire inside of the accordion-style album.

And, finally, this shows the front and back cover together.

I can hardly wait for the baby to arrive so that I can complete the album by adding photos.  

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That completes my Blog Post.  I hope you've enjoyed my projects.  That's the whole line-up for the Wacky Watercooler Blog Hop.  Of course, if you've begun with me, you'll click on "Next" and that will bring you to the beginning of the hop.  Our Blog Hop is circular, therefore it continues just like a ring and is never-ending unless you "jump off".  I hope you won't decide to jump off until you've enjoyed all seven posts.

The next stop for you will be Kathe Deck.  Kathe is a wonderful crafter and never fails to surprise me with her creative projects.