New Cards, and a Picture Frame!

One of my favorite groups is the PaperCrafts group that is part of my friend (and SU! upline) Heidi's meetup group.  We all have subscriptions to PaperCrafts magazine, and we meet on a Sunday, once a month for a shoebox-type swap.  Everyone picks a project from the current issue and preps all the materials needed for everyone else to do their version of it.  Sometimes the inspiration piece is totally CASEd, and sometimes it just provides a jumping off point for something else all together.
Here is a card I did for a recent PaperCrafts group:

The original card used a die for the chairs.  I used oval punches and some old fashioned paper piecing.

At that same meetup, Heidi had us decorating paper mache frames and filling them with photos in a collage style.  We painted the frames brown, then added incredible shine and texture with SU!'s new champagne mist shimmer paint.  When that was all dry, I stamped right over it, and filled the frame with some snaps from the SU! 2009 convention:

I finished it off at home with some chipboard flourishes and pearls.  Don't know if you can really appreciate the shimmer paint in a photo, but the stuff rocks!  It made that frame look like it was made of silk.

The last new card was done for a challenge.  The inspiration piece was a room from a catalog -- chocolate brown furniture, accessories in creams and greens, and a clear vase with branches on the desk.  This is what I created:

I stamped the jar on some acetate, so in person it does resemble glass.  The stems were stamped directly onto the cardstock, and the berries (?) were done with a pencil eraser and white pigment ink.  I trimmed the jar close to the outline and positioned and glued it down over the stems.