Free Coloring Page Day 6: Abstract

My mom used to draw these coloring pages for me.  It's easy to do it yourself.  Just draw a bunch of wavy lines.

Here is an example of one I colored in a while back.  This a great excuse to try out new supplies and to experiment with color combinations.

xoxoxo

Free Coloring Page Day 5: Monsters

Coloring Page Freebie Day 4 - Flowers

Freebie Coloring Page Day 3

It's day 3 of a week of free coloring pages.  Today's page is a digital drawing, a page from my Cupcake Coloring Book.  In the coloring book, there is a thematic page for each month of the year, featuring the best food ever: cupcakes. 

If you like it, you can buy the download here.  If you prefer to buy the printed book, go here.

Cupcakes All Year Round by Melissa Stewart

And if you are the crafty type, here are a couple of cupcake pages to print out for crafts.

And for you hard-core cupcake fans, here are all of the cupcake themed goodies I have in my shop.

Happy Coloring!

An Easter Gift for You!

Hello Friends! Would you like a full page sized pdf of this Easter Bunny coloring sheet?



All you need to do is "like" my page Crab Apple Designs on Facebook and send me a message with your email address that you did it. I will email you the full sized pdf of this drawing I did over the weekend.

<3 Melissa

Giveaway! Measuring Tape Love!

More delish Treasury Love. Been wanting to do one like this myself, so I am dee-lited to see this Treasury titled, "Measure Up" by michvanetta. What is it about old school style measuring tape?

In honor of this treasury, and for the sewing inspiration that always accompanies the onset of spring, I am giving away a measuring tape notebook.


To enter the giveaway, post something sweet on my blog, for instance: What's so great about Spring? For a double entry, post a cool blog or website link to a fun sewing craft idea.

Winner announced April 1st. <3

Pink Week Giveaway!

The lovely Teresa from Blooming on Bainbridge is hosting a fun week of giveaways with a "pink" theme. Her goodies include several Crab Apple items among lots of other cute things. Please visit her Pink Week Giveaway and show her some love!

Freebie: Cupcake Coloring Page & Embroidery Pattern

Super-cool Jennifer Perkins of The Naughty Secretary Club offers a Crafty Business Seminar at Stitch Lab in Austin, TX. As a present to myself, I finally decided to go for it and take her class. It was A-W-E-S-O-M-E.

She suggested that coloring book pages could also be embroidery templates. That idea totally blew my mind. So this week, my goal is to embroider something using one of my coloring pages.

Here is a free cupcake embroidery pattern for you (formerly known as a coloring page). Send me a picture of your work and I'll post it RIGHT HERE! Let's promise to do it by January 31, K?
xo-m

Will you join me in trying this? Might I suggest this extra fun kit available from Sublime Stitching to help get you started?

My One Hundred and Eleventyith Sale!

I've always wanted a reason to say "hundred and eleventyith." And now I have one! Today my etsy sales number reached 111.

In celebration, a prize must be awarded.

Up for grabs is one of the 4 hand cut owl collages seen below. Each is 8 inches x 10 inches with about 1/4" of dimensionality.





How to enter:

1) Choose your favorite of the 4 and comment on this post telling me which one is your favorite.
2) Share a link to a favorite crafty blog of yours and you will be entered to win your favorite owl!
3) If you get a friend to enter, your name will go into the "bag" for each friend you refer. Make sure your friend says that you sent them my way so's you can get credit for the referral.

4) HERE's THE HITCH/FINE PRINT/CATCH: In order for this contest to be "ON," there must be a minimum of 11 unique/different entries. In other words, a minimum of 11 different people need to enter the contest by the deadline in order for this contest to be ON. So get going, people!!

On January 1, 2010, I will select the winner. The winning entry will receive the owl collage she chose as her favorite. Yahoo!

Peppermint Candy Patterned Paper

I'm not too happy with this year's commercially produced holiday patterned paper...too vintagey, too dark. Too much RED. Plus, I need smaller repeating pattens for collage work and I'm seeing too many large patterns or "scenes."

So, I'm making my own!! Have fun!

Today's Freebie: Rainbow Polka Dotted Polka Dots

Yay for using patterns in Inkscape!

Freebie Stickers

I am still in the digital phase of designing my own patterned paper. Once I move on to more of a collage look, I will share resources like I promised in an earlier post.

For digital drawings, I use Inkscape. It's free and works on both Windows and PC. Once you complete a drawing, you choose "export bitmap" which saves the document as a .png file. Then you can open it up in Photoshop or Photoshop Elements (like I have) and fiddle with it a bit. The result is something like this - today's freebie:


When making patterns from objects, I find it easier to think in terms of a "sticker sheet" type format, then expand it into a repeating pattern. There are some good Inkscape tutorials out there. For now, I'll just say that you should "group" your images and drag one of the corners to make them smaller. When they are tiny enough to please you, use the "tiled clone" feature to create a repeating pattern.

Here is a smaller repeating pattern:

And here is an even smaller repeating pattern:

Another variation: stripes!

Spinners

Over the weekend, I played around with some digital drawings with the idea of creating a set of thematic images to use for card making, journaling, scrapbooking, etc. Right now, I have "games" on my mind. I just won a lot of 125 vintage board games on ebay and I'm still pinching myself about it. In particular, I love those old spinners!

So here are a couple of spinners for you to play with:

FREEBIES! Old US Air Mail Postage Stamps

These are so cool! I found them in a huge stamp collection I won on ebay. They were the only US air mail stamps in among hundreds. I just had to scan them to have them for keeps. Then I thought, HEY! Everyone who loves stamps should be able to play with these, too.

Enjoy!

100 Sales Giveaway

Hello Friends,
In honor of today's 100th sale in the paper goods shop, I'll be giving away 5 cupcake coloring books to those of you who post to my blog and share your favorite paper goodie blog, book, or other desirable. Be sure to include your email! On June 20, I will put the names in a bag and draw 5. I will send the winners a link to visit to download your prize. Yay 100 sales!!

Heart Me Challenge: 100 Hearts by Jan 1!

Edit: We may not make it to 100 hearts by midnight, but this promotion has been a blast! I've fiddled with the dimensions of your free gift for participating and I feel that they are ready to go. I'll be mailing them out to you tomorrow! Love, x, o, melissa

Friends, my new Etsy shop BlueCakeAndButtercup is a subdivision of my little company Crab Apple Designs.

BlueCakeAndButtercup is dedicated to paper goodies, and I'm thrilled to see that 40 Etsians have "hearted" my shop since I opened it up last month!

So here's the challenge: If we can get it up to 100 hearts by midnight, Jan. 1, I will have a gift for you!!!

Just go to my shop (look around of course, hee hee), and click on "add seller to favorites." Come back here and post a comment with your email address. Just for posting,I will send you a free digital/printable Valentine Owl card and envelope. If we make the goal of 100 hearts, I will send you a code for a 20% off coupon for my shop.

So let's get hearting.

A Free Gift for You!

I am developing a series of download-able stationery sets. Hooray! Currently, the theme is owls but I have a ton of ideas for other themes.

The download set will include 4 different designs of cards and stationery sheets, a sheet of stickers, and an envelope design. Once these designs are downloaded, you can print them out to use or to give as a gift set.

The actual downloads will be in the form of high-quality pdf files. Below they are jpeg files since Blogger won't let me upload pdfs for some reason. Still working on that kink.

Right now, here is what is available for download in the shop: stationery, doodles, and color-your-own goodies, which are blackline drawings that require no color ink and are begging to be painted or colored with crayons, glitter, pastels - endless possibilities!

Here are a few of the "Rainbow" printables for you, my precious reader. If you do download and print them, I would love to know if you find that the colors are true, margins are appropriate, etc. I'll be testing them myself once I'm reunited with my printer.

Here they are:

Digitized Cupcake Coloring Book Characters

Here we have the cast of characters for the Cupcake and Friends coloring book (in progress). Like the human race, the cupcake race has a diverse population representing the spectrum of cupcake experience. Included in this family are the Happy/Sad Conjoined Twins, Legless Cupcake on Wheels, Pirate One Eyed Pegleg Cupcake, X-Cupcake, and assorted other eatables.

Note: the call for coloring book illustration scenarios is still on! Today, I was offered: skiing accident, how cupcakes are born, and cupcake gangster initiation. Keep em' coming. If your is selected, you will be provided your own copy of the finished book! Yay CAKE!

Dessert Themed Zipper Pouches and a FREEBIE!

There are 2 new zipper pouches in the shop! One is a cake with a slice "removed" and the other is the classic cupcake.

The first person to buy a dessert zipper pouch will get an awesome freebie... this super-cute measuring tape I got in Portland:
Just mention that you read about the freebie offer on my blog when you check out. xxxooo