The past week was especially busy, so I had to fit in the project in littler pieces. My first card to share represents several days of experimenting with two new stamps sets (loaned to me by a friend) as well as with two new techniques.

Both stamp sets are relatively new ones from Papertrey Ink: “Vogue Vases” and “Simple Stems.” You’ll eventually see more of the vases and the flowers as I stamped a few extras of both. The techniques were both from Betsy Veldman of the Papertrey Ink Design Team: creating translucent vases, and adding detail to the flowers with pens. I’ve owned a set of Staedtler Triplus Fineliners for years. I think I bought them at the Princeton book store when Sarah and Adam lived there 11 years ago. They worked perfectly for this and made so much difference in how the flowers looked. On the yellow flower, I used the finer tip of a Tombow marker since I didn’t have a good contrasting pen for that color. The sentiment is from the Simple Stems set.

The translucent vases are created by stamping them on vellum in a relatively dark color (I used Tropical Teal as did Betsy), and then overstamping with watermark ink and embossing with clear embossing powder. A stamp positioner like the MISTI is invaluable for techniques like this.

I also went back to color blending again as well as watercoloring a lot of flowers from an old set by Simon Says, “Artful Flowers.” I’ve always loved this set, but have never had much luck with it. A video by Nichol Sporh was the inspiration for these cards—you’ll see I duplicated much of her design on the first card.

The new die cutting technique I played with last week came in handy for die cutting the stems and the flowers for these cards. I’m much happier with these than with any earlier attempts using this set. 

One funny thing about this project is that I started it to work through the many techniques I’d pinned on my boards for Design and Techniques. What I’m finding is that I’m constantly adding to my list of things to try every week, so I am quite sure I won’t run out of ideas before the challenge ends. 

I’ll be back later today with another post to celebrate a special birthday. Off now to take a walk before the rain moves in later today. We’ve been blessed with three glorious days of warmer temperatures and sunshine, and I don’t want to waste a minute of it!

Today marks the end of the second week of the #100DayProject, and I’m trying to do a weekly update as I work through the project. I’ve already shared two of the cards here and here.

I’ll share a couple more today, and have a couple cards to post later for specific events. I tried some block watercolor smooching—a limited success, as well as some colored pencil work on gray toned paper—also a limited success in my opinion although I did make a card with it. Whether it gets sent or not is another matter. The first card for today is one using some of the block watercoloring effort. To do this, you add Distress Inks to an acrylic block, mist it with some water, and smoosh it onto some watercolor paper and weight it down for a few minutes. I watched Jennifer McGuire’s video here, and thought it looked pretty easy. None of mine came out as nice as hers, but I haven’t given up yet either. What I did this time, was die cut a circle from one of the attempts, and used it to create a background for another technique I tried at a friend’s house on Saturday—using Nuevo drops as an embellishment.

I die cut a stitched frame from Simon Says “Stitched Circles” and mounted it on a card made from Simon Says “Sunshine” cardstock. I love that bright color, especially when we’ve had one cold, gray day after another for the last week. I scored three lines down the middle of the card before adhering the circle which I stamped with a sentiment from Papertrey’s “Penned Elegance,” surely a new favorite of mine! I’m also in love with “Butterfly Blooms,” by Papertrey and you’ll be seeing several more cards made with that set in the near future. This time the only color added to the die cut butterfly was a variety of Nuevo drops which are dimensional.

As a final touch I added a few black pearls from Amuse. I have a little stack of watercolored smooched papers on my desk so may be able to use them eventually.

My grandson missed a whole week of school last week with some kind of stomach “bug.” By Thursday, I was feeling really bad for him and decided to make a card with a stamp set I bought with grandchildren in mind, but had never used. 

I love these cute little monsters from Your Next Stamps, “Silly Monsters,” set. I stamped them on Neenah Solar White cardstock, my go-to paper for coloring with Copic markers, colored them, and fussy cut them. I embossed the sentiment on a piece of shimmery black cardstock, and then popped up the three monsters around the circle.

These guys definitely needed googly eyes and, fortunately, I found a little stash of them in my supplies.

Yesterday I worked on a new die cutting technique and have a pile of lovely butterflies to use on cards as a result. I didn’t worry about trying to get the card(s) done as well. Tonight will probably be similar as it was a very busy day, so I’m hoping to do some stamping and die cutting with a stamp set a friend loaned me for a week or so. Although not all the results of my experiments were totally satisfying, I learned from each of them. It’s likely I’ll put them to the test again before the 100 days run out.