I was browsing the challenge sites that I like to frequent and found a very bright and cheerful colour challenge at the Paper Players.
Here’s the challenge graphic. I was amused that the addition of whisper white was mentioned, I don’t see how I could combine these colours without it!
This uses yet another set that you can get for free this quarter during Sale-a-bration, Botanicals for You. I love the huge sentiment; I’d advise getting this in wood mount because that sentiment is really quite large. And I actually used THREE It’s My Party enamel dots. I am certain that’s a first. I was challenging myself at the last crop that I attended to use one of the Home for Christmas enamel dots and I managed it. I’m quite pleased to have used three here!
I stamped the sentiment in tempting turquoise and then three of the largest flowers in real red. I’d been admiring the enamel dots recently and so they were out and although I initially intended to stamp some of the smaller flowers in melon mambo, I decided to use the enamel dots instead. I also added a slim (1/16 inch) mat of melon mambo to make the dots stand out.
After showcasing the flowers in the Flowering Fields set yesterday, I wanted to make the butterflies the main attraction.
So I selected the two leaf stamps and stamped them across the bottom the very vanilla in the archival basic black. I coloured the leaves in using four different greens, mossy meadow, pear pizzazz, old olive and wild wasabi. I like the interest it gives to the leaves. Then I added three butterflies and coloured them in rich razzleberry and pumpkin pie. I then decided to add a few more in different colours and my planned mossy meadow card base led me to last year’s in colours, so they are in lost lagoon and hello honey. It now occurs to me that it would have been fun to have coloured the initial butterflies in tangelo twist and blackberry bliss and have the full five of the 2014 – 2016 in colours. Next time!
I added a mat of hello honey and then mounted this on the mossy meadow card base. For a change, I matched the envelope liner to the mat rather than the card base. I have to confess this is mostly because I happened to have a liner already cut out in hello honey!
As I said yesterday, this set is a must have. It’s one of the items that you can get for free during Sale-a-bration (January 5th – March 31st); every time you spend $50 on any Stampin’ Up! product, you can choose a free item that will not be available after Sale-a-bration ends. Ideas for using this set keep popping into my head but I really need to get working on my card for this Thursday’s design team over at CAS Colours & Sketches. I think I’ll leave this set out so that I can use it again later on this afternoon.
Okay so you need to spend the $50 on some stamping stuff so that you can get Flowering Fields as a Sale-a-bration freebie. It’s loads of fun.
I stamped 5 of the 6 plants in this set in archival basic black freehand on very vanilla. I was just too lazy to use my stamp-a-ma-jig and figured I’d put a banner to cover up the stem ends. I’ve been using my aquapainter lately and for some reason, rather than using my Stampin’ Write markers, I continued. Mostly the colours are full strength – pear pizzazz, so saffron and calypso coral. The only place that I really went for watered down colour was on the second plant on the left – that’s coloured using calypso coral at different strengths. The banner didn’t work – it was covering too much of the plants and I suddenly remembered that I had pear pizzazz ribbon from a ribbon share last year. It covered the rather uneven stems beautifully and gave the plants some grass to grow from. It was a little plain and there is less happening on the left hand side of the card so I actually added a bow, attached with a glue dot. Quite a rare event. And it took a fair amount of agonising about whether it was a good idea or not! But I think it’s produced a cheerful birthday card and as previously mentioned, I’m sending more cards this year so it’s useful. I’ve sent/given four this week so I’m feeling pretty good about my progress on my resolution.
I lined the envelope with the subtles designer series paper stack in pear pizzazz using the envelope liners framelits to cut out the liner. I love the script pattern so it’s not likely that you’ll see the reverse (dots) any time soon!
When I was making my card for the challenge at CAS Colours & Sketches I first made this card. I like it, but didn’t feel it had enough WOW factor to be my first Design Team card. Do pop over to the challenge site and check out the other cards and add one of your own.
I stamped the image from the retired Moon Lake set in archival basic black on watercolour paper and then used smoky slate for the body of the goose with an aquapainter. Where the water has shading I used marina mist and then pool party for more of the water and the top of the reeds. Very clean and simple. I purposely put the image in the bottom right hand side of the card leaving a lot of open space for the goose to swim into. A very thin mat of smoky slate worked as the frame – I realised that I usually use black and anytime there’s a “usually” it’s a good idea to make a change! Plus black overwhelmed the soft colours. The card base is pool party.
I find that fast fuse is the best for firmly attaching the watercolour paper to the card but I use the multipurpose liquid glue for everything else because of the extra wiggle time.
Today is an exciting day. It’s the first challenge of the year over at CAS Colours & Sketches. That would always be a good thing, but this year, my sister and I have joined the Design Team! This is both exciting and a little intimidating – now I have to produce a card for every challenge and although I’ve been improving, I sometimes find sketch challenges tricky. But pushing myself out of my comfort zone is going to be good for me. I’m sure. So I eagerly waited for the colour palette for the first challenge only to find that it has grey in it. As I think I’ve mentioned before, after 7 years at school having to wear grey, I can’t stand the colour. Admittedly that’s over 30 years ago now, but I haven’t got over it. So I’m rather surprised with the card that I ended up with – in fact, I had to call my sister to tell her to sit down when looking at the photo I’d just sent her. She was stunned. So much grey!
Here’s the banner which inspired the card:
I was playing with watercolouring and produced a card with these colours, but it was just okay and didn’t wow me. And then, when I left the card on my kitchen table overnight, the skylight leaked and splashed some water onto the card. Definitely not fated to be the card for the design team. So since my pack of watercolour paper was out, I grabbed the reinkers and dotted a clear block with the three colours. After spraying the block with water, I pressed it onto the watercolour paper. And then left it overnight to dry.
I have a piece of clear plastic already cut with different sizes of circles that I use when I want to do the bokeh technique. It’s as simple as using a sponge dauber and the white craft ink and putting circles wherever you want. But then comes the tricky part. The colours have been altered a little by the interaction with the others and so matting this on pool party doesn’t work. Marina mist doesn’t look quite right either. So I contemplated black which worked but seemed a trifle overpowering. This of course led me to the smoky slate and with a black mat I think it worked well.
As I was thinking about placement, I realised that I just didn’t want to plop it in the middle. Too boring. And I was scared to stamp on the watercolour paper because I finished this card yesterday and I didn’t have time to redo it and have the watercolour paper dry in the middle. This led me to the Greetings Thinlits dies and the idea of having the word falling off the edge of the pattern. In order to stop the tail of the hello waving in the wind – or being bent to the cardbase, I cut the end of hello twice more, once out of watercolour paper and once out of basic black so that I could glue them underneath the tail.
I finished off the envelope using the neutrals designer series paper stack and the envelope liners framelits.
I really had to struggle with this card and I love how it came out. I also have another piece of bokeh-ed watercolour paper in the same colours but looking totally different. I’m looking forward to playing with that.
I hope that you’ll stop by the challenge blog and see what the rest of the team has produced and that you’ll have a go at entering a card yourself.
