Giving Thanks Card with Pendant Focal

This will be a very different Thanksgiving for us because it will be the first one we’ve spent without our son. College Boy will stay at school for the holiday because it’s just too crazy for him to fly back and forth for such a short time, especially when just over two weeks later he'll be home for a month long Winter break.

We’re thankful though that he was invited to his Academic Adviser’s home for Thanksgiving. I’m sending along a token of our thanks and made this card for him to give to his hosts.

I had this fun brown and black floral paper in my stash , along with these die cut leaves.
Included in the design team supplies I received from Blue Moon Beads was this beautiful wood pendant.

I was debating what to do with it and it just went perfectly with my card so it became the focal.

The colors, the feather and flower charms all just tied together with the paper.

The card is 6x6 so I cut the papers to fit and layered them together as shown. Then I glued the pendant to the center panel and embellished my card with paper flowers.

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Blue Moon Beads Design Team Project : Rum Raisin and Gold

You might remember last month I announced that I’d been selected to be part of Blue Moon Beads 2012-2013 Design Team. I’m so excited to share the first project I made with the wonderful supplies they sent me to play with!

Included in the supplies were several tins of color coordinated beads. The first one I played with is called “Rum Raisin”

Pinks, purples, lavenders and orange.  The colors immediately said “gold” to me so I used some gold BM chain that I already had in my stash. I made several clusters of beads to intermix with the chain using beading wire and wrapped loops. A great video to show you how to make a wrapped loop is here: Wrapped Loop Tutorial

I didn’t have any particular order so I just kind of eyeballed my spacing of the beaded sections.

II folded my large completed chain in half and attached jump rings to each end and then added some more chain to each end.

Using stringing wire, I strung a small section of beads that I attached with jump rings to the middle of the double layer:

I like the randomness of this and these are definitely colors I would not likely have put together on my own. These little tins can be found at JoAnn’s and Blue Moon chain and beading supplies can be found at several craft stores.

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Disclosure: As part of the Blue Moon Design Team, supplies were provided for my use. Opinions are my own.

BFF Open House Link Party # 75 and Exciting News!

75 parties! WOW.  If it's your first time linking up, Welcome. If you're a regular, thanks for making this party so much fun.

I'm so excited to be able to share some fun news with you. Die Cuts With A View had a call for design team members for Blue Moon Beads ( one of their other great brands in addition to their glorious paper). Yours truly applied and was notified this week that I am on the Design Team! I screamed out loud. Did you hear me? I am so excited and will be posting 3 projects each month . This was truly a dream come true and I can't wait to get started so check back.

I never would have had the confidence to do this without the brilliant and supportive bloggers behind  Crafterminds. If you are a creative blogger, I cannot urge you strongly enough to visit the Crafterminds blog and if you can, participate in the weekly Twitter chats each week on Monday at 4 Eastern. Doesn't matter if you have 1 Follower or 1000, you'll learn something and make some new bloggy friends.


 Now, let’s see what everyone’s been up to this week. Only two more weeks until Halloween. What tricks and treats are up your sleeves?

Grape, Gold, and Chocolate Necklace

This is the gift that I made to go along with the birthday card I shared a couple of days ago.

I went shopping in my stash which Mr. Chocolate would tell you means I don’t need to go to Michaels or JoAnn’s for the rest of the year. HA
Main components: Bead Landing gold chain ( Michaels), an antiqued gold toggle clasp that I picked up @ JoAnn’s, and the pendant is from Blue Moon’s Global Nomad collection.

The beads are faceted crystal I picked up on a couple of different trips. Hubs is used to me scoping out bead, paper, art stores wherever we go on vacation!
I wasn’t sure what I was going to do when I started so I made some different combos using head pins or bead caps and strung some spacer beads ( all of the findings are from Blue Moon) on larger jump rings.

I ended up spacing some of the beads throughout the chain and using others with the pendant. I liked the combo of the chocolately brown pendant with the deep grape of the beads. The other beads are an iridescent light brown that pick up the gold from the chain , the brown from the pendant and the purple from the other beads.
It’s for a cousin who’s really more like an Auntie to me. I hope she likes it!

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Graduation Card and Gift

Other than food, I won’t get to make many grad presents for my son’s guy friends but I will for some of the girls. 
I used the Graduation Subway Art printable I did on this card, along with some embellishments from KandCo’s “Life’s Little Occasions” collection.

This is the Graduation Medley Collection

For the present, I decided to make a necklace and I used Blue Moon’s “Lost and Found” collection of metal pendants as the focal. They come already stamped with different sentiments. I thought “Inspire” was a good choice for a grad.

I used two of Blue Moon’s metal chains and head pins and strung onyx, opalite and quartz beads on the headpins along with bead caps. I secured those to different lengths of chain with jump rings.

I wire wrapped some of the opalite beads and placed them randomly throughout the chain:

I hope the wonderful young lady this is for likes it!

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