Monthly Archives: April 2015

Paper Pumpkin for Mother’s Day

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Are you stumped for Mother’s Day? Or are you planning to get her flowers as usual? How about something that would last longer?

Paper Pumpkin for Mother's Day

Paper Pumpkin is perfect – it’s “Creativity in a box”. Every month that you subscribe, a red box arrives with a fully designed project kit – including instructions, stamps, ink, accessories and pre-cut paper. All you have to add, on occasion, is some adhesive. There’s no cutting or decisions to be made – unless you decide to take your kit in a different direction of course. I promise that the Paper Pumpkin Police won’t be at your door if you do something else.

You can sign your mother (or yourself, or both!) up for a monthly option where you pay each month that you want to receive the kit. You can put your subscription on hold if you like and restart it whenever you want. You can also buy a prepaid subscription for 1, 3, 6 or 12 months – the latter two options giving you a cheaper option per kit. One perk of being a subscriber is that you can order past kits or even past kit refills where they are available. I’m about to order the kit from last December myself. Sadly, I won’t be ordering a subscription for my mother because she lives in England and this is only available in the US and Canada.

1 - Month  $19.95 USD
3 - Month  $59.85 USD
6 - Month*  $113.70 USD  Save $1 per month
12 - Month*  $215.40 USD  Save $2 per month
*Guaranteed to secure or maintain favorite child status!

 

There’s no risk – from the FAQ on the Stampin’ Up! demonstrator site:

If you are not thrilled with your Paper Pumpkin, please call us at 1-800-STAMP UP, we’ll chat and make everything hunky dory.

Just click on the friendly red paper pumpkin button to order:

PPlogosquare

and once you’ve done that click here to get a gift certificate that you can give to your mother. It’s that easy!

I haven’t made a card for today’s post – I’ve been too busy checking out the online preview of the 2015-2016 catalogue and preparing my wish list ready for the pre-order on Tuesday. It’s good to be a demonstrator and set everything early!

 

 

For the birds – retiring

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This is a set that’s retiring at the end of May and I only recently acquired it. It had its first outing at the crop earlier this month.

Stampin' Up! For The Birds

I started with a quarter sheet of the watercolour paper and stamped the image from the For The Birds set in jet black stazon. Since the paper is bumpy, you need to give a bit more pressure than usual to get a good image. I gave it a few minutes to dry and then used my aquapainter to colour it in. The colours are pear pizzazz, so saffron with a little calypso coral on the birds’ breasts and real red for the heart. I tried several different mats and a skinny basic black one set off the card the best. Since the piece of watercolour paper was only 3″ by 4.5″ this leaves a pretty large border around the edge of the card which I think it very effective. The card base is pear pizzazz. As is the envelope liner – from the retiring backgrounds DSP.

I think I’ll take this card to the shop where I got an outfit for last week’s interview. The lady was extremely helpful – even steaming the creases out of the blouse for me.

See you tomorrow,

Liz

Perfect Blend

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Here’s another stamp set which is retiring – Perfect Blend; I thought I should ink it up before it became obsolete. I have used the images before but had borrowed the set from my sister. And so it seems apposite that I’m caseing the coffee splodges from her also. See her recent post here.

Stampin' Up! Perfect Blend

I also made this card to fulfill a challenge from Susan Itell’s site – to use one colour of card and one colour of ink and I further decided that it ought to be one of the five retiring colours. With that decision and the memory of Caro’s card from a couple of days ago still fresh, I got out the Perfect Blend and Gorgeous Grunge stamp sets, very vanilla card stock and baked brown sugar ink. Since this is a very simple card, I didn’t want to make it a single layer – I like the effect of having a layer of the same colour as the base. After stamping the cup and the sentiment, I added the coffee splodges from Gorgeous Grunge. Since the stamp was inked up, I also added some splodges to the front of the envelope.

See you tomorrow,

Liz

Painted blooms – a card with no stamping

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This is a very unusual card – there is no stamping on it at all. This is another of the cards made with a sixth of a piece of the Painted Blooms paper.

Stampin' Up! Painted Blooms DSP

Rather than stamping a sentiment in the white space, I decided to stay very minimal (my brother thought it looked almost Japanese!). The twine is one of the March Sale-a-bration items, in blackberry bliss and I wrapped it around the piece of DSP before adhering the paper to a base of blackberry bliss. I lined the envelope with paper from the Park Lane DSP, also in blackberry bliss. If you like this paper, you’d better run to the Stampin’ Up! site since it’s retiring and available only whilst supplies last.

Mixed bunch of feelings

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Every year Stampin’ Up! retires items from the annual catalogue prior to bringing out the new catalogue. There are, apparently, 112 stamp sets on the list (no, I didn’t count them), twenty of which I own so I thought I’d pull some of them out and play. They are also retiring the 2013-2015 in colours to make room for the upcoming 2015-2017 ones. Whilst there is excitement at seeing what will be in the new catalogue, I’m sad to be losing strawberry slush which is my favourite pink. Twenty is a lot of stamp sets but of course it could have been a lot more. This card uses two of my soon-to-be-retired sets, Mixed Bunch and Lots of Thanks.

Stampin' Up! Mixed Bunch and Lots of Thanks

It looks fairly simple but it took a fair amount of work with ruler and pencil. I made the piece of very vanilla 5 inches across so that each stamp had an inch and I marked the centre of each inch – as well as having a horizontal line. After I stamped them and erased the pencil lines I managed to smear the ink and the lines didn’t erase completely. I’d show you the smeared result but it is now glued to the card that you see in the photo. It’s so useful that there are two sides to a piece of card! This time I had only a bottom horizontal line and vertical lines below it to show the centre of each stamp. I then erased the part of the horizontal line that would be stamped over and tried again. As you can see, no smearing. The ink colours are strawberry slush and sahara sand – a combination I got from another retiring item – the colour coach. The sentiment is from Lots of Thanks – a very useful set. I assume that there will be a replacement.

The sahara sand mat is 1/8 inch bigger in each dimension and is mounted on a strawberry slush base. I dry embossed the envelope flap with spring flowers since it was still out after a class last night.

See you tomorrow,

Liz