Monthly Archives: December 2014

Larger than Life for monogrammed cards

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I recently earned a free stamp set from Stampin’ Up! – it must be about my fourth in 6 months. This time, I had just seen monogrammed notecards on Susan Itell’s site and decided that I really like the Stampin’ Up! Larger Than Life set and that it really would be useful. It’s pricey (about $45) so it’s a good one to get for free or, failing that, as a 50% off item when you earn one through holding a qualifying party. Let me know if you’d like to learn how to do that.

Stampin' Up! Larger than life in rich razzleberry

I didn’t use the notecards as Susan did, but a regular sized 5.5″ by 4.25″ card in very vanilla. I cut an upper layer a quarter of an inch smaller and using the stampin’ scorer scored each side 3/8 inch from the edge. I then flipped the paper over so that the embossing was a mountain instead of a valley. I used rich razzleberry to stamp the e (I am known as Liz but a lowercase L doesn’t look as good as an E!) using my stamp-a-ma-jig and stamping twice to get a really good image. I lined the envelope with the backgrounds DSP in rich razzleberry from the brights collection.

I really like how this came out and can definitely see making a box of them for somebody although I think I’d make them all different colours. Since I started making cards, I’ve become far more excited by colour.

Can you combine butterflies and rainbows?

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That’s the question that my mother posed. She needed some mini cards (3 by 3) with both butterflies and a rainbow of colour.

Stampin' Up! Butterfly Wheel

Three by three is a fun size and you can get 8 cards from a 12 by 12 piece of paper so it’s also very economical. I used my stampin’ scorer to score lines around each side of the card (hard to see in the photograph) but on the inside of the card so that the line sticks out from the card – whatever the reverse of indented is. I then took a baby wipe and 7 re-inkers. The way that I’ve seen the baby wipe technique before is to randomly dot colours over your baby wipe but I wanted a more or less recognisable rainbow so I did 3 drops of each colour together and then put the next colour next to that so that I had 7 rows of colour. I used elegant eggplant, night of navy, marina mist, pear pizzazz, daffodil delight, tangerine tango and real red.

The stamp I’m using is a remnant after I de-wheeled the now retired butterfly wheel. When you pull the rubber stamp off a wheel, it’s too long for any of the clear blocks so I cut off a column of three butterflies which created a little stamp perfect for this card.

Pressing the stamp into the baby wipe caused a fair bit of ink to pass through to the paper beneath. I found it was useful to use a plastic sheet from a photopolymer stamp set to stop getting ink on everything – and of course it is easily cleaned with stampin’ mist. I then used my stamp-a-ma-jig to position my butterflies correctly as well to prevent the dreaded wobble. It seemed to be more critical to not wobble when using this technique because the stamp got more ink on the edges than it would under normal inking. I was making a set of twelve so I was careful to clean the colours off the stamp before stamping the next card so that I wouldn’t get my colours mixed. This technique meant that each card was not identical which was rather fun and I’m happy to report that my mother loves them.

This was a rather messy operation and my hands ended up pretty stained with ink. I’ve found that the easiest way to get them completely clean is to wash my hair! Vigorously. 🙂

Flower patch resist embossing

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When I was trying to create a card with 5 colours for the last Fab Friday challenge, I pulled out the Stampin’ Up! Flower Patch set and played around with clear embossing powder and sponges. That card didn’t work out for the challenge (too many colours!), but I liked the effect and put it on my list of cards to make. Here’s the result with just two colours!

Stampin' Up! Flower Patch

Using a piece of crumb cake, I embossed the flowers in the clear embossing powder. After that I used a sponge and some cherry cobbler ink and, starting in the centre of each flower carefully sponged towards the edges letting the colour fade as I got further away from the centres. As I was heat embossing, I also decided to heat emboss the happy birthday sentiment (from Sassy Salutations) in cherry cobbler. I mounted this on a base of cherry cobbler.

I pulled out a crumb cake envelope and pondered how to enhance it. I’ve just received the Fresh Prints paper stack (it’s on the clearance rack) and it had some handy prints so I lined the outside of the envelope’s flap.

Stampin' Up! Flower Patch with envelope

Ho Ho Ho – embellished events

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I recently got the Stampin’ Up! embellished events set and the santa hat just jumped out at me. I noticed recently on Susan Itell’s site how great some scoring looks to create the card’s border and it seemed like a good idea here.

Stampin' Up! Embellished Events

I used a piece of very vanilla 5.25″ by 4″ to stamp on, using both the hat and the sentiment from the Embellished Events set and real red ink. Then I flipped the paper over and scored at 1/4 inch from the edge on all four sides. This means that the scoring is raised rather than a valley on the front of the card. I then adhered it to a base of very vanilla and apart from a greeting stamped inside, I was done. It was “christmas greetings” from Endless Wishes in case you’re curious. I went to my stash of envelope liners and found that I was out of real red. No worries – I grabbed a 12 by 12 inch piece of the backgrounds DSP in real red and cut it into eight 3″ by 6″ pieces. Then I cut the liners two at a time (I figure that the DSP is much thinner than card stock) and then scored them 2 at a time as well on the Stampin’ trimmer. I glued one to my very vanilla envelope and the card was complete. Easy and effective.

If you have any questions or want to buy supplies, get a catalogue, come to a class or join my team, please email me. I’d love to help – it’s amazing how much fun this is, and how much fun it is sharing.

Addicted to family and CAS

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The current challenge at the addictedtoCAS site is Family. Here’s the banner:

This seemed like a great time to pull out my new stamp set, Zoo Babies. I also decided to use some of the Fresh Prints DSP stack (currently a great value on the closeout list at $2.79) and took my colour choices from there.

Stampin' Up! Zoo Babies

The colours on this DSP are coastal cabana, crumb cake and whisper white (also real red but not on this piece) so I stamped the giraffes in the crumb cake and the sentiment in coastal cabana both on whisper white. I cropped the whisper white to give a decent border of the dsp which is only 1/8 inch smaller than the base of whisper white.

For some reason, I like to use the alphabet embossing folder on baby cards. Maybe I think that the alphabet will somehow sink into the baby’s mind. I’m not sure. But it is fun to dry emboss the flap of the envelope with it.