Here’s a card that I made at the weekend when I was trying to make a card for the CAS Colours & Sketches Design Team for the upcoming challenge. It’s funny. It started off following the colour challenge but as I played more, things changed and it ended up somewhere completely different.

This is one of the plant stamps from Flowering Fields, stamped three times using stazon black on watercolour paper. I was trying another colour but it blurred when watercolouring but I liked the design of the card and started again using stazon. I then coloured in the flowers using so saffron and a fairly watered down rose red. The leaves are in pear pizzazz. I attached the watercolour paper to a skinny border of basic black using fast fuse (my favourite when using watercolour paper) and then onto a card base of rose red with the multipurpose glue. It doesn’t show in the photo but the flowers are also highlighted using my just received clear wink of Stella. It’s really fun in person. Just be careful when you first use the pen. You remove the black ring and then put the pen back together and squeeze the pen GENTLY so that the ink flows into the see through part of the pen by the nib. After that I haven’t had to squeeze at all so far. If you squeeze too hard, you get a nice puddle of ink on your (hopefully) scrap paper.

I lined my envelope using the retired backgrounds DSP in rose red and the envelope liners framelits.

By the way, there’s still time to play in the sketch challenge over at CAS Colours & Sketches before it changes to a colour challenge on Thursday.

See you tomorrow,

Liz

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.

See you tomorrow,

Liz

As I mentioned yesterday, my Stampin’ Up! order came on Wednesday but I was too busy to play with it. I had a card class last night but even though it finished after ten, I still wanted to play (and I’m happy that I have another 9 Christmas cards made due to the class). I pulled out a stamp set at random because it was so hard to choose and Flowering Fields came to hand. This is a Sale-a-bration set which means that it’s one of the items that you can choose for free after spending $50 before shipping and handling from January 5 to March 31. How did I get it already? I’m a demonstrator and we get to see the new stuff a month early – you can too, just go to the join my team tab and click on the join now button!

This card features last year’s in colours which I’m panicking about. They will be retired next June and I love them so I’m using them a lot and dreading their retirement. I stamped the flower in mossy meadow five times across the very vanilla cardstock and then using a blender pen added some hello honey and blackberry bliss to the flowers. I’m sure that the flowers aren’t “supposed” to be these colours but it’s my card, right? They can be any colour that us cardmakers like! I matted the very vanilla on mossy meadow and then put that on a blackberry bliss card base. Interestingly, to me at least, the card didn’t want a sentiment. I tried adding one at the bottom but all that did was make the space at the top look too big. Design is a fascinating subject and I’m sure would be interesting to read about but I just go with what feels right to me. As you should.

The envelope is lined using the envelope liner framelits and the retired backgrounds DSP to create coordinating stationary.

I couldn’t add the stamp set to the scrolling store since it’s not generally available yet.

See you tomorrow,

Liz