Yes, it’s August, but I hadn’t have time to share last month’s Paper Pumpkin box. Here’s the video giving the details about it.
I only started putting it together today after my carding hiatus – I really love the stamp set although I confess that the torn notebook look on the designed card isn’t really me. I guess that’s why I made a few changes – I’ll share it soon. I also love the enclosed designer paper – I need to feature that on another card, these aren’t showing enough of it.
Monday is the 10th August (which means my brother’s birthday is Wednesday, perhaps I’d better make his card?) which is the special Paper Pumpkin Day. If you sign up by the 10th, you’ll get the August kit, if you’re later than that, you won’t get anything until September. Now is a fabulous time to sign up for the first time – new subscribers get half off (use the code HALFOFF) the first two months. Just click on the paper pumpkin button down on the left.
I think I’ve mentioned before that I wasn’t impressed with Paper Pumpkin when I first tried it last year. But the kits are getting better and better every single month. I used a refill kit at a class a while back and everyone loved it. Give it a try, what do you have to lose?
I was trying to do a colour challenge a while back which wanted a card made with watercolor wonder, cucumber crush and night of navy. Whilst trying to come up with my entry, I was playing with the new background stamp A World of Thanks. And although it didn’t fit the challenge guidelines, I rather liked how this card evolved.
I started out using my stampin’ write markers and colouring different words in various colours but it was just too much in your face and I decided to let the image itself just shine. I inked up the stamp (using my ink pad) using watercolour wonder and trying to avoid getting ink on the hearts. I then used a blender pen to clean up the edges of the hearts and coloured them in using the cucumber crush stampin’ write marker. After breathing heavily on the stamp to moisten the ink again, I stamped on very vanilla paper. I then mounted this on a base of watercolor wonder.
The envelope is lined using the new In Color collections which are available in family collections containing all colours in 4 designs – they replace the old Backgrounds DSP and I really love the new designs, this being one of my favourites.
I said yesterday that I’m rather fond of die cutting words; well here’s another example using the same one as yesterday with a totally different look.
The flower is from the You’ve Got This stamp set which was part of the Annual catalogue pre-order, so you’ve probably seen the image a lot – I used it myself earlier in the week. I stamped it in stazon black on watercolour paper – the stazon is necessary if you’re going to watercolor but it needs a different cleaner being an alcohol based ink. It’s not my favourite black. But currently winging its way across the country in my Holiday pre-order is a brand new archival basic black Stampin’ pad which I’m hoping I’ll like more.
I used my aquapainter and pumpkin pie ink for the centre of the flower and then rich razzleberry for the petals. The stem and leaves used old olive. I try to put on a pale amount of the colour and then build up – I’m no expert but I like playing with the aquapainter – it’s an enormous amount of fun and of course as I practice, the better I’ll get. There’s a hint of the old olive around the flower – a tip I was recently given which helps the flower really pop.
The thanks was cut out of rich razzleberry using the Greetings Thinlits. These look very fiddly and a worry to remove from the die, but I’ve found that I don’t even need wax paper to help remove the word, it pops up perfectly easily using a paper piercing tool. That is not to say that there isn’t a new base precision plate, designed to give better performance with detailed dies in my current order!
I mounted the piece of water colour paper onto a base of rich razzleberry using fast fuse. I had a love-hate relationship with this adhesive; when it worked it was great but the tape kept sticking to the fast fuse container and not working. I’d have to take it apart and get it back in working order seemingly every time that I used it. Then I discovered that the issue was with the crafter. I saw a Stampin’ Up! video on how to use it and now I love it! The basic tips are:
Don’t press down too hard
Make sure that you do a sharp snap to the side to break the tape
and MOST importantly – alternate the side that you snap the tape to.
This last keeps the tape in the middle. Sadly I hadn’t consciously noticed that the tape ALWAYS stuck on the right hand side which coincidentally was the side I always snapped the tape to…
I finished the card off with a matching envelope liner in rich razzleberry in one of the retired background colours. I don’t have the brights collection of new backgrounds. Yet.
The greetings thinlits are new in the annual catalogue and I’ve found that I have a weakness for die cutting words. The goody bag at the recent crop weekend had a piece of all the papers in the Farmers Market DSP, not a paper that I would have chosen, but I would have been making a mistake. The papers are really fun.
I matted my piece of DSP on mossy meadow and then mounted that on soft suede, both colours of which are in the DSP. The orange is actually tangerine tango but I found that pumpkin pie went better with the DSP. And now I have a tangerine tango thanks cut out and ready to use on another project. I used the 2 way glue pen again to make it easy to adhere the word although there’s a new fine tip glue pen to try out soon which might be even easier. I used a scrap of the DSP to line the outside of the envelope flap.
It’s a hard choice, but I think that the English Garden DSP is my favourite paper in the new Stampin’ Up! catalogue. Some of the patterns can stand on their own as a card (I’ll post an example in the upcoming days).
The bee paper is in whisper white, soft suede and hello honey so I mounted it on a piece of soft suede. I then cut out a banner in whisper white and made the banner part using the new triple banner punch – it’s very easy. Simpler than using scissors and a ruler. I matted that with a banner of soft suede and popped the banner up on stampin’ dimensionals. The hello is cut out of hello honey using the Hello You dies – I really like the diecut words that Stampin’ Up! has and I was happy that these were carried over to the new catalogue and thrilled that there are more in the catalogue also. I forced myself to allow the hello to fall off the edges of the whisper white to the edge of the soft suede banner and I like the effect. I used the two way glue pen to adhere the word and it’s now my method of choice – the angled tip makes it very easy to get the glue just where you want it. The soft suede piece is mounted on ordinary whisper white card stock – I have yet to try the extra heavy whisper white – I think I’ll add it to my next order. As you can see, I lined the envelope with another piece of the DSP.
Here’s the photo in the catalogue of the English Garden DSP – as you can see, there are lots of really pretty patterns. I usually find DSP hard to use but this one is so lovely, it’s just screaming to be put onto cards.
