Triple embossing

When I saw that today's OWH sketch had a tag, it made me think of Tim Holtz, which made me think of Distress Inks, which made me think of embossing, so off I went.  I've had this "Love" stamp for a while (one of the first stamps I ever bought) and I've been playing around with it, coloring it, embossing it...without good results.   I decided to give it another try.

 

I pulled it out again, placed swirly Inkadinkado stamps around it and embossed it on a tag in red embossing powder.  For the second embossing, I colored in the word "Love" with my Versamark pen, and embossed it with Antique Gold powder.  Then I distressed the entire tag with Vintage Photo and embossed one of the flowers again with my Versamark pen.  I shook clear embossing powder over the whole tag. 

 

I hunted down some World Traveler 6x6 paper from Teresa Collins and used that behind the tag.  After playing with the paper, I ended up changing the entire card and it really doesn't look much like the sketch...but hey - the sketch still inspired me!

 

A little closeup of my triple embossing:

And here was the inspirational sketch:

 

I had a relaxing Thanksgiving weekend, and I'm sad to see it end.  I'm getting ready for my first card swap with 15 ladies.  I accidentally bought deep purple Stampin' Up paper (I thought it was blue) and thought a white/silver/purple holiday card would be great.

 

But....I really struggled with it.  I wanted to make a swing card, but couldn't get it right.  In the end, this is the card I'm bringing:

The deer is cut from the Winter Woodland cartridge; the embellishments are from Spellbinder dies and the white background is white glitter paper, embossed with the Swiss Dots Cuttlebug folder. 

 

Then I had to make 15 kits for the ladies.  Here's some of them on my desk...

And that's not all!  We're also doing a cookie exchange and I've got to churn out 7 dozen cookies!  I'm looking forward to it, but I'm going to be worn out from it too!

 

Thanks for reading my long post and wish me speedy cookie baking.....

 

 



Thankful color challenge

Happy Thanksgiving!  I hope you're enjoying a relaxing day at home with family or friends.  I made two cards for two challenges - the MWT Challenge at OWH and the Be-ye-thankful challenge at FCCB.

 

The MWT challenge was to use two colors together - turquoise & silver.  Since I started this at night, I had a hard time finding turquoise paper - everything looked blue or green!  I cut the word "thanks" from silver paper in my stash, using the Cricut Sampler cartridge.  I used both the positive and negative parts of the cut (on page 61) for the two cards.  I embossed the flower stamp in silver on white vellum and used an EK border punch for the scalloped border.

 

Here's my first card:

Here's my second card, using scraps left over from the first card:

 

I loved this color combo and of course, my pictures don't show the silver embossing very well.  I'm going to do some more of this for OWH Valentine's Day cards....fun!  Have a great day.

 

Challenges entered:

OWH MWT

FCCB Challenge #138

 

 



OWH Sketch 147

Happy Monday!  Yesterday, I spent a few hours crafting and I was so inspired by the latest OWH sketch - #147.  I loved it because it uses up scraps of paper.  In fact, I loved the sketch so much that I made three cards using it:

 

This was my first card using up scraps, so now I don't remember who created the paper.  I cut the small embellishment using my Cricut, which was supposed to have brads, but I made a mistake with my small punch and ended up punching two small holes and running a piece of twine thru the top.

 

My second and third card isn't for OWH, but for my holiday stash:

 

Each card need something between the small stripes and the larger stripe.  On my first card, I put a piece of Mrs Grossman's sticker (yes I STILL have those), the second card was a piece of paper and the last card used a piece of Martha Stewart ribbon.

 

I'm back in my card-making groove....thanks for the inspiration, OWH!

 



Fussy cutting

This week's OWH tutorial was on Fussy Cutting, which I do from time to time.  I found a digi stamp, colored it with Copics and cut around the basket.  I colored it in a dimly lit room, so I'm happy to see that the colors look good!

 

Here's the card:

I've been staring at the yellow/white background paper for a year and haven't been able to use it on a card, so I was very happy to finally use it up!

 

Hope you're having a great Saturday!





I got lucky!

I used two sketches tonight and got lucky with how both turned out....it's not like I spent hours pondering the choices on how to put the cards together, so I consider that lucky!

 

First, I saw Paula's sketch on her blog Handmade by Paula and thought it was a great way to use up scraps.  I'm still using up last year's Recollections holiday papers and punched out the squares to come up with this happy card:

 

Here's Paula's sketch:

I was about ready to call it a night, but I wanted to use this week's OWH sketch to make a Love card.  This card was much more time intensive, but I love the old-fashioned look.  I stamped a floral stamp onto watercolor paper using Versamark, then embossed it with white embossing powder.  Next, I used Perfect Pearls Perfect Copper and Perfect Gold with water and brushed it over the embossed image.

 

I had some doily paper from the cake section at Joann's and used Antique Linen distress ink to age it a bit.  The sentiment is from Stamps of Life, which I again stamped with Versamark, embossed in white and then used Antique Linen and Rusty Hinge to age it a bit.

 

I found two pieces of brown & rusty paper from my stash - got lucky there too - and here's the card:

 

 

Sorry for the crooked picture.  Yippee...I'm keeping up with OWH again and couldn't be happier.  I've also signed up for another online card class from Julie Ebersole via Ellen Hutson and can't wait to learn some more fun stuff.

 

Catch ya'll later....

 



OWH MWT and sentiment stamps

I signed up for the Holiday Card workshop at Online Classes and finally got a chance to participate today - the last day of class!  The class is full of ideas and videos from Kristina Werner, Jennifer McGuire and lots of great guests.

 

On day 9 of the class, Jennifer taught how to use sentiment stamps as background stamps, which is a great idea!  I wanted to participate in this week's mid-week throwdown at OWH, which is a color challenge of red, white and blue.  A while back, I bought the military hero stamp set from Papertrey Ink and I've used it many times to make AnyHero cards.  I thought I could use the sentiments to make a background for a card.

 

I laid out the stamps onto a scrap piece of paper & decided which color I would use for each stamp:

 

 

I stamped the paper twice - once with the stamps in a red ink and again with different stamps in a blue ink.  It took me several tries to get this right.  I learned that the stamps need to be close together to get the right effect.

 

 

I embossed the white background paper with a Cuttlebug stars folder and added a red ribbon behind the block of sentiment stamps.  I thought it needed some extra bling, so I added brads.

 

Although it doesn't look like it from the picture, the front of the card is shorter.  The red strip of paper at the bottom is actually on the back of the card.  When you open the card, it looks like this:

 

 

This was a fun technique to use on a card.  Since I totally missed the Oct 31 deadline for Christmas cards, I'm going to make them anyway and hold on to them until next year. 

 

Hope you're enjoying your Friday!  Thanks for looking!

Back from the band!

It's been almost a month since marching band took over my life and away from blogging.  I love volunteering with the students, but missed my creative time alone.  I've been keeping up with OWH and everything going on and I'm ready to get back in the swing of card-making.

 

First thing to get back into is November's Our Daily Bread Design challenge for OWH.  This time, we're challenged to use a neglected tool and I chose my rulers.  I remember when these were the only things besides stickers that we could use to embellish our scrapbook pages.  Here's my sad ruler:

 

 

I used red & green Memory Markers to draw a zig zag border on my card.  The stamps I used are from Technique Tuesday and I put a dab of Stickles on the holly and berries:

It turned out to be a very clean-and-simple card and will kick-start my card-making mojo!  Let's see if I can keep it up! 

 

Thanks for looking.