Celebrating Cocoa Daisy's Brand New Website!

To celebrate Cocoa Daisy's website relaunch, they are having a big blog hop and giveaway!

"Cocoa Daisy has done some remodeling and updating, making our home a place you want to be. Drop in and see how our scrapbook home is your scrapbook home too."

If you'd like to start the hop at the beginning, start HERE.  Each blog is offering a $10 gift certificate to Cocoa Daisy!   So there are a ton of chances to win!  

I am a proud Cocoa Daisy kit subscriber.  It is the only kit subscription that I have.  Truth be told I rarely use the kit "as is."  But I like getting a box full of brand new paper crafting goodies each month and I pull it apart and integrate it into my stash to use.  Christine (owner of Cocoa Daisy) is one of the nicest and most genuine people on earth.  

She and her two boys and their dog live in Michigan.  Christine was a long time Cocoa Daisy design team member and recently purchased the kit club from the founding owner.  She is working hard to put her own "Christine" spin on things.  I know that I've said this before, but I think it's vitally important to support small businesses you like and artists who are generous and community minded.  That's how we continue to make the craft-o-sphere a lovely place to be!  

For the relaunch, Christine asked each of us to design a card sketch.  Ack!  Cards are my nemesis.  But I sat down to think about how I might make a card work for me and I came up with this sketch:

I put the focus more on surface design and less on the arrangement of the elements.  And lo and behold, it worked! I ended up making three cards based on the sketch. 

These took me no time at all and I think I could have made about one hundred more!  This sketch (which focuses more on an overall surface design pattern) really works for my style of creating.  And hopefully it will work for your style of creating too!

Here's a peek at all three cards up close and personal:

I used acrylic paint and then outlined each shape with a black pen.

The sentiment is stamped with my current favorite alphabet stamp set.

For this card I stenciled the feathers across the front of the card.  I used the 6x6 version of the Balzer Designs Peacock Feathers stencil.

You can see that my stenciling isn't perfect.  There are spots where I used too much paint and a few places where I stuck my finger in it, etc.  Perfection is way overrated.  I embrace the hand made qualities of this card!

This is actually the first of the three cards that I made.  Tone-on-tone was the first thing that came to mind when I sat down to work on the sketch.  I'm thinking of this as a wedding card.

I purposely put the banner on a bit askew.  And I added some foam adhesive under the pointy tips to get a bit of a shadow under the banner, which creates some separation from the background.

I hope you feel inspired by the sketch to create something!

If you'd like to win a $10 gift certificate to Cocoa Daisy, all you have to do is leave your answer to the following question in the comments section:

What small business or artist have you supported recently?

Cocoa Daisy is also offering a couple of promotions for new subscribers:

1. Sign up for a 6 month kit subscription and you will receive 20% off your first month's kit.
2. Sign up for a 6 month kit AND a 6 month stamp subscription and you will get 20% off your first month's kit and stamps PLUS an exclusive Cocoa Daisy Tote bag (designed by yours truly, btw).

The next blog on the hop is Stephanie Wheeler!

Thanks for stopping by!