I made this card on a bitterly cold but sunny day in NJ when I needed some colour. I used the Stampin’ Up! Painted Petals set, stamping the stems of the flowers in garden green on very vanilla. I found (after messing up the first attempt!) that it was best to stamp one set of stems and then stamp the flowers for those stems. Otherwise, I ended up with overlapping flowers, which was not the look that I was planning. I varied the heights and angles to make it more realistic.
I stamped most of the flowers in melon mambo and masked off a few which I later stamped in so saffron. I then mounted the very vanilla piece on a base of melon mambo.
Sale-a-bration DSP is only available for a short time and it’s exclusive to the promotion – it won’t be turning up on the clearance rack later on. Some of us seem to collect DSP. I like to take it out of my 12 by 12 file folders and look at it, consider making a card and then put it back. So I haven’t bought any of this year’s SAB or Occasions new DSP because I am getting quite a stash! I wasn’t a demo during Sale-a-bration last year (I wasn’t even making cards) but my sister joined towards the end and had an extra Sweet Sorbet pack which she gave to me.
I tried to make a card with DSP for a friend’s birthday at the end of January but there was something missing. Caro, after viewing it on Skype, gave me an evil grin and suggested ribbon. I don’t use ribbon either – but I do like to look at it and put it back! – so the thought of DSP and ribbon was causing her quite a lot of mirth. I played with the design some more and did in fact incorporate ribbon and DSP – I’ll show it after his birthday. As Susan Itell says, once you have a keeper of a layout, why reinvent the wheel. Good point. So I decided to make another card with the same sort of design but in different colours, different DSP and different shapes and that was Caro’s birthday card from Tuesday which I really loved. Actually the only similarities, as you’ll see at the end of the month, is that there is DSP for the background, there’s a matted shape on the right and there’s ribbon on the left. I was so pleased with Caro’s card that I decided to make another variant.
The base is crisp cantaloupe with a piece of the sweet sorbet DSP on top. Before adhering the DSP, I wrapped a piece of the crisp cantaloupe baker’s twine around the DSP, just long enough to tuck behind the DSP and be glued down with glue dots. I then used stampin’ dimensionals to ensure that the DSP wasn’t lumpy where it was over the twine. After that it was a simple matter of cutting another small piece of twine and tying a bow around the first piece of twine. I stamped the image also in crisp cantaloupe from the Stampin’ Up! Embellished Events stamp set and cut it out using the second windows frames die and matted it on a piece of crisp cantaloupe cut with the third one. I then glued the matted image to the DSP. Although it would’ve been easier to glue the image before popping up the DSP, it made it easier for the placement of the image once the twine was in place.
Now that I’ve used some DSP, I think I can let myself buy some of the new packs. And they are beautiful!
I wasn’t fond of the suggested April sheet – it had too much stuff on it for my taste. So I decided to focus on April showers. I stamped the April image in lost lagoon, stamped off once first. Then I took a piece of moonlight DSP stack in lost lagoon and whisper white and cut out a star using the second smallest framelit die. I stamped April in lost lagoon before adhering the star in order to get the placement right. I contemplated putting on a letter A, but it just didn’t work. Stampin’ Up! suggests sequins. I tried. I really did, but they weren’t working for me. So I cut out some stars out of silver glimmer paper using the confetti star punch. That worked much better! I also repeated the stamped off lost lagoon April image at the bottom right hand corner of the month’s sheet and added a few stars there too.
My sister’s birthday is today and the card arrived in time so that she could take it on her business trip. So Happy Birthday Caro, I hope you like the card. After the Painted Petals refused to become her birthday card, I decided to use DSP. Caro loves DSP and she especially loves the retired Eastern Elegance pack. I picked up a pack from the clearance rack recently. After my success with DSP and twine for David’s card (which will be revealed at the end of the month), I decided to try the same kind of thing for Caro’s.
I started by colouring in the stack of presents from the Stampin’ Up! Cool Cat set (retired) using my stampin’ write markers in lost lagoon, soft sky and smoky slate. I then embossed the top part of the image in smoky slate and cut out the top present and popped it up carefully on little pieces of dimensionals. After matting the image in smoky slate, I decided that a larger mat of lost lagoon worked well with the ribbon – the size of the mat mimics the size of the ribbon. I’m not comfortable with big splashy bows especially as this is one of my very first cards with ribbon, so I decided to hide the tails of the ribbon behind the DSP for a more restrained look. I used glue dots to hold the tails in place and then constructed all the layers onto a base of lost lagoon.
Hopefully Caro really likes the card. She will definitely appreciate the fact that I put grey on it; she knows I can’t stand the colour. I should be over it by now, but after wearing grey for school uniforms for about 7 years, I’ve never been able to deal with it. So it was quite a challenge to use it. I think I’ll take Jen’s advice and view it as “matte silver” and actually, I’m really very pleased with this card. Pushing boundaries is definitely a good thing.
If your crafting table is anything like mine, it’s covered with stuff. I try to tidy up every now and then, but when I’m under a time crunch or am struggling with a card, the stamp sets on the table grow and the ink pads jump out of the caddy onto the table. The stamp sets allegedly live in a bookcase in a different room and I craft on the kitchen table where I have great light. I try to allow other people to use part of the table sometimes! Whilst my parents were over for the Christmas holidays, it was hard for my father not to notice that I need a bit of help with my organisation. So he suggested a few little boxes with shelves and wandered off to the basement with my brother. After a design decision (one box with a back and one without for now) a couple of boxes appeared after a few days. This sounds as if we kept them in the basement until they was done, we didn’t! We were busy with other things too – walking, cooking, eating and improving my pool playing – my father’s rather good at it.
So here’s the first box. As you can see it’s perfect for holding the blendabilities – I just cut off the plastic at the ends leaving the small tab for ease of removal. I haven’t decided completely on what else to put in here.
Here’s the next box. We decided it was easier to remove things horizontally and these are items (dies, embossing folders, 2 colours of envelopes and pre-cut envelope liners) that it would be handy to have access to from both sides of the table for multiple crafters.
Here’s my newest box (it’s still drying really) so that I have somewhere official to put my stamp sets in progress. Hopefully this will help me losing them in clear sight on the table. I am also thinking that I may put the DSP stacks in here but they may end up in the first one. Anyway, I’m thrilled with how useful these have been already in helping me not lose things. I think that they did a great job. I know that I’m very lucky in having a father and brother with the time and the knowledge and tools – plus the inclination – to do this for me.
