If you were reading my recap of Leadership, I mentioned a fun activity they ran over the course of the conference. They called it “Craft Wars: Paper Pumpkin”! Now, I’ll admit, I haven’t ever watched Craft Wars but I get the general idea (or at least have a guess).
You have a pile of miscellaneous crafting supplies.
You have a project goal to create.
Make something cool.
GO!
And that is pretty much how this worked. They had all of the stamps from the My Paper Pumpkin kits since March in bags in the center of the tables. You had access to:
– Whisper White or Crumb Cake card bases
– about 6 colors of ink and markers
– designer paper from the Occasions Catalog (wanna see what we had to work with?)
– gold or silver bakers twine (maybe white too)
– Essentials Wooden Elements
– and um… a couple punches and dimensionals.
So there was a lot to work from, but you were limited to what was on hand… oh, and did I mention NO cardstock except the cardbases… so we started hacking up extra Whisper White cardbases to get extra cardstock for stamping and cutting.
I started by looking at the stamps to see what inspired me. In this case, the “Wahoo” and “You Did It” stamps from September 2013 Kit (the sad part, I never actually put together my kit and wasn’t sure what I thought of the stamps at first. Um, super fun it turns out!) along with the word bubble stamp from the December 2013 Kit. Then I grabbed a few more stamps that seem like they could be interesting accents to the card and walked through the rows of paper and see if anything fits the style of the stamps and the completely fuzzy idea of what I should be making. Turns out I was grabbed by the Bermuda Bay polka dot patterned paper from the Kaleidoscope designer paper.
Then I started stamping, cutting and layering the elements. And really I still had no idea how exactly it was going to ultimately come together!
When I’m in a crunch, I’m a “glue-as-I-go” girl and so I started gluing things down which mostly works, until you decide you want to wrap baker’s twine around some paper that you already glued down. ; )
But “thankfully” I had gotten an ink smudge on the front of my card after I had only glued a few pieces of paper down, so I could pull them up, wrap my twine, and then glue everything back down on a new card base.
In the end, this is what I came up with:
This is a bit of a departure from my typical card style, but I LOVE IT! I’ll be honest, this is completely inspired by a style of scrapbooking I love… so, see – scrapbooking can be a great crossover into card making.
Well, I took this picture kind of quick and didn’t try to hard to make it super nice because I figured I’d be picking up my card the next day and taking it home where I could photograph it all nice and pretty.
But to my happy surprise – IT WASN’T IN THE BOX! Which turned out to mean, I was one of the 20 cards picked as winners of the Craft Wars competition. Yay! There were a ton of super great cards that I saw people creating so I’m glad someone on the judging panel liked my non-traditional layout.
You know, I’m thinking I may have to host my own Craft Wars: Paper Pumpkin edition!
Who is in!?
Yeah, I like that idea.
Ok, so start checking out your Paper Pumpkin kits and start brainstorming cute card ideas!
If you aren’t subscribed to My Paper Pumpkin yet, hop to it and you’ll get a set of the 2012-2014 In Color markers for FREE! You just have to sign up by Feb 10th to get the extra perk! Get going here.
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Alright, I’m off to upload more pictures over on the Facebook page – display board pictures this time! Talk about inspiration overload! But in a good way, of course. 
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