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Color Hues #33

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Julie has a sparkling challenge for you at the Color Hues Challenge this time around.

Color Hues # 33.014

My card evolved during the rush of making holiday cards. I had recently purchased the Simon Says “Triangle Burst” 3-D embossing folder, and embossed this silver paper after seeing two cards, one Instagram and one on a blog, using this embossing folder. Finding just the right focal point to add to it took me longer than I expected, but this snowflake was just right.

SiverWhite

I immediately thought of this upcoming color challenge and abandoned any idea of creating a holiday card. I have several January birthdays and this card will soon be on its way to one of my best friends. 

SilverWhiteClose

The beautiful snowflake is Simon Says’ “Marie Snowflake” and is cut from white glitter paper. The sentiment is from one of my oldest Papertrey Ink sets “Vintage Picnic Sentiments.” I embossed it in silver on the same silver paper I used for the embossing folder.

SilverWhiteFlat

Although you can see some of the glitter and shine in the photographs, this card is much more beautiful in person. 

I hope this wonderful color combination inspires you to make a card and join us at Color Hues this time around. Check out all the inspiration the Design Team and our Guest Designer, Stephanie, have in store for you.

Nancy

Hannelie

Cindy

Julie

 Sheri

Kristie

Lindsey

 Tracey

Folk Garden 2

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We’ve been home a week, and I’ve been immersed in an online class, “Beautiful Blooms,” a botanical watercolor class hosted by Karen Abend and taught by Sarah Simon (also known as the Mint Gardener.) I have two of Sarah’s books and have perused both of them, but found the prospect of working through them a bit intimidating. Being able to watch Sarah work in watercolor was so enlightening, and it was easy to see the simple things I need to improve. More water when working wet on wet, learning some excellent “recipes” for mixing colors, and how to work in layers on a piece are just a few of the things I’ve been working on. Her books are a lot more inviting now! I’ll have more to share later. 

But, finally, yesterday, I was able to get back to card making and my newly acquired Pinkfresh Studio goodies won back in November. I started off by stamping and stenciling the Folk Garden 2 set. It’s a beautiful design that really appeals to me. The stamp creates a lovely background pattern, but what’s especially wonderful is that an accompanying die will cut out (in one go) all the individual floral patterns. The open design could easily be colored with Copic markers or colored pencils, but the coloring stencil does it all with ink blending in six separate stencils — a much quicker process. I ended up with three different cards from the session, with a few blooms left over.

FolkLove

I used two of the blooms on this card, arranging them at the bottom of an oval cut with Ellen Hutson’s “Essential Ovals.

FolkLoveClose

The sentiment is from another new Pinkfresh set, “Always Uplifting,” and the Pinkfresh Jewels are in Sapphire, my favorite blue ink color from Pinkfresh, and one of the inks I used in stenciling the florals.

FolkLoveFlat

The next card is a CAS thank you note.

FolkThanks

This time I added just one floral to a red panel die cut with The Greetery’s “Crimped Frame.”

FolkThanksClose

The sentiment is also from Pinkfresh. I don’t have many word dies with shadows, but I do love them. This one accompanies a stamp set “Sentiment Suite: Thank You.”

ThankYouFolkFlat

Lastly, a birthday card with another die cut sentiment from the Pinkfresh “Happy Birthday Sentiments.” Both this and the thank you set have been in my collection for awhile. Because they are a larger format, I often forget about them when I’m looking for sentiments for my cards. 

FolkHB

This card had a previous iteration that I tore apart this morning after deciding it was just “too busy.” I like this version much better. 

FolkHBClose

It’s always a bit nerve wracking to tear a card apart, but if I’m slow and steady, I can usually salvage the important elements. The only things that were trashed were a white panel and a blue card base. You can see I reversed that here. 

FolkHBFlat

I’m entering this one in two open challenges:  Seize the Birthday: Anything Goes and Happy Little Stampers Dies: Anything Goes. 

STB-AnythingGoes HLS Stencils

 

 

Watercolor Anemone

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In preparing for my Guest Designer jig on the CAS Mixed Media Challenge, I watercolored this Honey Bee “Winter Anemone” as well as the one I finally submitted. This was done with loose watercoloring. I got each petal and leaf wet with clear water, and dropped color in and let it do what it wanted. Because I had gold embossed the image first, it stayed within the lines, and didn’t look all that “loose” in the end. I did do some loose watercoloring as a background which I’m frequently reluctant to do for fear I’ll ruin the whole card. This time it worked.

WatercolorAnemone

This weekend I pulled it out and decided on a sentiment from the Gina K set “Wreath Builder. It fit in the open space perfectly, so I gold embossed it to match the florals.

WatercolorAnemoneClose

After matting it in black, I added it to a card base created with Gina K’s “Fuchsia” cardstock. I decided there was some room for a few gems, so that was the final touch.

WatercolorFlat

I’m throwing this in the mix at the Happy Little Stampers Watercolor Challenge which is Anything Goes.

HLS

It’s 17° now and headed downward. By tomorrow morning, we’ll be at 6° with a wind chill of -9°. Good thing I have lots to keep me busy inside, and no reason to venture out!

A Little Sparkle for a Friend

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We got home just in time for me to get a card posted for The Paper Players Challenge: Sparkle.

Pp572

In November I won the prize of all prizes: the complete release of the new products at Pinkfresh Studios. Since I was in the midst of card making and preparation for Christmas, I barely had time to even look through the collection of stamps, stencils, dies, and foiling plates. (Luckily, Santa brought me a Spellbinders Glimmer Hot Foil machine, so that’s high on the list of things to do in January.) I did have time to play with one of my favorite stamps in the collection, “Charming Floral Border.” I also used just one of the several layering stencils to add a touch of shadow to the image. I got the card in the mail to my friend, but had no time to get a blog post written. 

Honore

I embossed the floral border in silver and then added the detail with a medium shade of gray ink with one of the stencils. It’s hard to see the sparkle in the photo above, but here’s a clearer look.

HonoreClose

You can also see here where I added a few quick strokes of a dark gray Copic marker to add some detail to some of the stenciled areas.

HonoreFlat

The sentiment from Simon Says “Sketched Flowers” was also embossed in silver. I trimmed the stamped piece down just enough to show a narrow border from the card base.

We had an easy drive home, thanks to Tracy’s foresight. There was a band of lake effect snow predicted for the area west of Buffalo extending to Batavia (about 40 minutes west of Rochester.) Instead of taking a chance with the weather, we headed south  and east on Rte. 86 just after Erie, Pennsylvania and then north on Rte. 390 to Rochester. There were only snow flurries on our route for about 20 minutes, and then we had partly sunny skies a good part of the way. When we watched the news last night, we discovered the Buffalo airport recorded the highest snowfall in one day—17.8 inches!!! Our usual route takes us right by the airport. The change in route took about an hour longer if done in good weather, but most likely saved us time—and certainly saved me a lot of anxiety. 

Happy 50th!

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It’s amazing to me that our nephew turns 50 today! I remember well when he was born. After using the Ellen Hutson “HB2U” stamp for an earlier masculine card, I decide to give it another try using some different stamps in the set as well as different colors of Concord&9th papers.

MarcBDr 1

The stars came from an old Simon Says set that arrived as part of Card Kit called “All Boy.” I’m being more proactive about going through my stamp sets looking for smaller stamps that might work well with another set. I like these a lot. 

MarcBDFlat 1

It’s impossible to tell from the photographs, but I added just a touch of glitter to the tiny opening in each heart.

A favorite add-on to Photoshop Elements will no longer work with my computer. I recently got a new laptop when there wasn’t enough memory to update to the latest operating system. It’s a sneaky way to force you to upgrade even when you weren’t planning to. It’s proven to be worthwhile since my old laptop’s battery ran way down during one of my Zoom/GoogleMeet meetings. This one barely notices. At any rate, I’m giving the RadLab replacement a trial run. It has more features, but has to be used (to the best of my knowledge) as a separate editing tool. I have mixed feelings about it, but it does streamline the editing process, and uses many of the same filters I was used to. I have a week to use it before purchasing, so I have some time to play around before making a decision.

We’re head home from Wisconsin today. The virus is so rampant we considered driving straight through, but there’s also the weather to contend with. It appeared two days ago we’d miss the snow, but it looks now that from eastern Pennsylvania to home might be a bit snowy. We’d rather not drive that in the dark, so we’ll split the trip up into two parts. I had an email chat with a friend today, and admitted my Covid fatigue was increasing. She replied that she’s now in Covid despair. I’m not quite there yet, but I do understand where she’s coming from.

 

 

Christmas Card Roundup

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I made far too many Christmas cards of a single design this year. My goal for 2022 is to make a set of Christmas cards each month, so there’s not a big rush at the end. I post a few as I go along if I create one for a challenge, but typically wait to post until I know they’ve been received. So today, I thought I’d do a Christmas card roundup of some of the cards I particularly liked. And, in fact, there’s still one challenge looking for Christmas cards.

First of all, two cards created with one of my favorite 3-D embossing folders: the poinsettia from Altenew.

AltenewRed

This was was embossed with red paper and lightly swiped with a white pigment ink. I tried a couple of variations with this technique, but this was the only one I liked enough to make into a card.

AltenewWhite

I made two or three variations of this card with the same embossing folder and a red frame from The Greetery.

Deer

This card went to one of my best friends, a single man. It got posted on Instagram, but not here. I dry-embossed the frame and added the gold embossed deer and sentiment to a Nordic Circle die from The Greetery that a friend had die cut for me. 

Joy1

I used this oversized Joy stamp from Waffleflower on several cards–all a slight variation of this one.

Merry

Another card made with a 3-D embossing folder and a sentiment from The Stamp Market. I should have made a few more of these.

Mistletoe

This was one of the cards I made early on, and I made a set of them. It’s a set I’ve owned from Altenew for awhile, but never found a design I was happy with. Stamped on white and then die cut with a pierced frame.

SnowflakeRedSq

This was the biggest set of cards I made–25 in all. There were four different snowflakes so I could die cut them in sets so it went pretty quickly. I did the die cutting at home, and stamped and assembled them in November when we were visiting Sarah.

WhiteSnowRedCard

And one variation on the card above, I only made one or two of these because they required embossing of the sentiment which takes more time. I already know the first set of cards I’m making for next year and they do require embossing, but if I’m working well ahead of time, it shouldn’t be a problem.

All the following cards were made in one session with a group of pre-made tags and die cuts from 2020. Several of them use a new tag die from The Greetery that die cuts two tags at a time. I have more ideas for those tags for 2022.

DeerTag

PoinRedBlkTag

PoinQuote

PoinWreath

SnowflakeRedTag

And my favorite of the bunch:

RedGoldPoinTag

There’s still one of my favorite challenges open for Christmas cards, so I’ll be posting to AAA Cards, and then calling this season of card making done.

#205

 

Guest Designer

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My card here won a challenge at the CAS Mix-up Challenge in October, and I was asked if I’d like to be a Guest Designer for the first post of 2022. Of course, there was no hesitation before saying yes! I was thrilled to be asked.

PastedGraphic-2

Each challenge at CAS Mix-up involves some kind of mixed media and/or a technique. The challenge this round is “Loose Watercoloring.” If you know me well, “loose” isn’t something you’d typically associate with my card making. Luckily, however, the hosts of CAS Mix-up always include links to a variety of ways you might complete the challenge.

January

I definitely took advantage and watched all the videos for this technique. I tried three different takes on loose watercoloring, and ended up with this which I like quite a bit. It’s a much quicker method of watercoloring, and yet allows you to stay CAS – another requirement for the challenge.

Anenome

I embossed one of the images from Honey Bee’s “Winter Anemone” in gold on Altenew’s Watercolor paper. I added a heavy wash of clean water over the entire image, and then dropped in some pink and green watercolors from the Altenew 36 Pan Watercolor set and set it aside to dry.

AnemoneClose

I went back in with some more watercolor to brighten them, and then die cut the image. You can see that there’s no need to worry about staying inside the lines with this technique.

AnemoneFlat

I layered the floral on an oval die cut with Ellen Hustson’s “Essential Ovals” die, and dry embossed five lines on the card before adhering the floral with some dimensional tape. The sentiment from Pink and Main’s “Special Day” was embossed on black and trimmed out.

Please go take a look at what the designers at CAS Mix-Up have to show you It’s sure to be a lovely gallery with lots of wonderful takes on this technique.  

Color Hues #32

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Hannelie has chose Red and Purple for the first Color Hues Challenge in 2022.

Color Hues #32.013

I have quite a few stamps and dies that arrived thanks to sales during the last months of 2021, and I am determined to make good use of them. The Simon Says “Geometric Builder: Hearts” came to mind when I saw this color combination. 

RedPurple

I chose three different designs and die cut each from two shades of red (Gina K’s Red Hot, Concord & 9th’s Poppy) and two shades of purple (Papertrey Ink’s Amethyst Allure, Concord & 9th’s Eggplant), and then assembled the  hearts on a solid heart shape.

RedPurpleFlat

I knew I wanted a mini slimline design and die cut the scalloped die from Trinity Stamps'”Mini Envelope Builder.” Then I cut three hearts from that panel so I could inlaid the red and purple hearts.

RedPurpleClose2

The sentiment is from The Greetery’s “Sentiment Suite: Love” which I die cut with one of the “Sentiment Suite Basic Dies.” I chose the sentiment thinking this could be an anniversary card, a valentine, or just a thinking of you card.  I added dimensional adhesive to the scalloped panel and adhered it to a white card base, and added a few transparent gems.

I hope you’ll hop over to the Color Hues Challenge and join in the fun, checking out the cards made by my awesome Design Team members, and our Guest Designer, Tenia.

Nancy

Hannelie

Cindy

Julie

 Sheri

Kristie

Lindsey

 Tracey