C copy / A and / S share / E everything

Have you ever noticed that we are raised to believe that “copying” is bad?  In the DYI world copying is the biggest form of flattery.  However there are some rules.   Everyone has their own rules such as, give credit to the person who made the card, if you remember where you got the idea, or make sure the copied image links back to the original blog post. These suggestions are just plain courteous. However, if you like one of my cards, my rule is just COPY IT! I take this as a compliment!

Sometimes to get me into the creative mood, I will search for cards to case.  I may case a card exactly because it’s gorgeous, and sometimes I use the idea, but with the products I have.  I encourage our customers to look for inspiration on blogs and in our Stampin Up! catalog because most of them are new and don’t know where to start. I tell them to first find something they like out of the catalog and case that. Our Annual Stampin Up! Catalog is full of amazing ideas that I’ve used myself to show how easy it is to copy.

Almost exact copy, I didn’t have the washi tape so I used It’s My Party DSP along the sides.

Then I turn to Pinterest. The creativity on Pinterest is AH-maze-ing! Recently I had a friend that needed to make a bunch of sympathy cards. The only sympathy stamp set I had was Rose Wonders. So I typed Rose Wonders in the search on Pinterest and up came hundreds of gorgeous cards that she could choose from.

Now, some people can’t see past the colors of a card or the certain stamp set.  For example, they don’t have that specific stamp set so they don’t think they can make that card, or they don’t have the exact colors and don’t think they can make the card. I try to get them to see they can use just the sketch or the colors with a different stamp. Case-ing helps when you don’t have a lot of time to come up with something yourself.  Here are the cards from Pinterest that we cased (Pinterest on top / our version underneath).

Here is the card she found on Pinterest. We didn’t have the exact butterfly so we improvised.

We used different colors that we had available and we used 2 small butterflies instead of the 1 big butterfly.

This was from Pinterest.

This is our CASE. Almost identical because it was so beautiful!

Beautiful sympathy card but I don’t have this stamp set.

We used the Rose Wonder stamp set and watercolored the flower.  Very Pretty!

I also love Splitcoaststampers.com because you can look up Stampin Up! stamp sets by name and get a lot of ideas.  They also have stamps by companies other than SU.

We got this card idea from Lisa Young off Splitcoaststampers.com

This is the card we came up with. It’s a little simpler, but the Splitcoaststamper card is what inspired us.

Do you have a favorite person that you CASE from?  If so, please share in the comments below.

Happy Stampin!

Your BFF Jenn