Leanne at the Paper Players has put together a very fall inspired colour choice this week – I think she’s hoping it will fix the hot weather! It’s done so in New Jersey, so thanks for that Leanne. It inspired me to pull out my Totally Trees set – not that it was put away. I can’t see it being put completely away for a very long time.
And here’s the banner which inspired my card
I made this card right after my Merry Medley one and so wanted to make a very CAS card to balance what felt like the busy-ness of that one! I started by stamping the green ground in pear pizzazz and the tree itself. For the leaves, I did the baby wipe technique. You grab a baby wipe, put it on your stamp-a-ma-jig mat or some other plastic (to prevent getting your grid paper wet) and add drops of ink from your re-inkers – I used crushed curry and cajun craze. Then when you ink up your stamp, you get an interesting blend of colours, just perfect for turning leaves. You can keep inking up your stamp and making more cards for a while so it’s not as wasteful in ink as it first looks. I then stamped the sentiment from Watercolor Wishes.
I matted this in pear pizzazz and put it onto a cajun craze card base to finish my very CAS Totally Trees card. Love all the white (well, very vanilla) space.
A friend of mine came over recently to make some invitations to an annual dinner party and we looked at cards I’d made to get some idea of what she liked. It was clear that fairly monochromatic, florals with texture were the way to go and she then invented what I’m calling the Sam Squishing Technique. “Could we”, she said, “glue the cut out onto the card and then emboss it”. I said let’s try it. And we ended up with the die cut looking embedded into the card. It’s really fun. So, as I told her, I’m stealing it! On Sunday, I got together with a few of my friends to make cards, I showed them the Sam Squishing technique and they approved.
I cut the die cut from the Flourish thinlits dies in dapper denim and then glued it to a piece of very vanilla – I find that the 2 way glue pen is good for this. Then I dry embossed this with the Elegant Dots TIEF. It’s a great look. I mounted this onto a dapper denim card base and then worked on the sentiment which comes from the Designer Tin of Cards. I stamped it in dapper denim onto very vanilla (I really love these colours together) and then cut it out with a circles die. I cut the same size in dapper denim too. The blue circle is glued to the card front and the sentiment is popped up with dimensionals.
I used the same embossing folder on the envelope flap to tie it all together.
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.
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.
I was reading Susan Itell’s Simple Stampin’ blog this morning and she likes to issue a personal challenge on Mondays. Today’s was to use four colours from the same colour family. I started off using the subtles but moved onto an autumnal idea and the regals. This is also a sneak peek of the new catalogue (going live tomorrow!) since the stamp set, Sprinkles of Life is the new charity set – for each one purchased, Stampin’ Up! donates $3 to Ronald McDonald.
I started by stamping the tree in always artichoke on very vanilla card stock. I then decided to use the baby wipe technique for the leaves. You take a baby wipe and put drops of different re-inkers onto it. I used cherry cobbler, crushed curry and cajun craze and then pressed the leaves stamp firmly onto the baby wipe to get inked up. As you can see, you get a great variegated image. I liked it so much that I decided to do the same thing for part of the sentiment. The sentiments are both from the Endless Birthday Wishes set – a familiar set if you’re in the US, new tomorrow if you’re not.
I mounted my very vanilla piece onto a piece of cajun craze just 1/8 inch larger than the vanilla. This then was mounted onto a crushed curry card base. I didn’t think about my envelope until I’d cleaned the stamps so I decided that some dry embossing was the way to go. I used the retired folder Pretty Print to coordinate with the script of the sentiment.
Yesterday was my one year anniversary of starting to make cards and also of becoming a Stampin’ Up! demonstrator. What a year of fun it’s been. I’ve made 587 cards (not all different) and had a great time, met a lot of fun new people and sent way more cards than in the previous year! Why not join in the fun? You won’t regret it. Just fill in the Contact Me form and we can chat.
