Thanks for bearing with me through a rather disastrous weekend. As I said I’m happy that the house will end up a lot cleaner but we have a deadline – our father arrives on Friday. So that should keep the momentum going! But, to the real reason that you visited – a card. Today’s is using Totally Trees which is a set I can guarantee I’m going to use a great deal!
So easy to make beautiful CAS cards with this set. I first stamped the solid shape in crushed curry and gave it a reasonable time to really dry. Next I used the embossing buddy and the new, totally beautiful, copper embossing powder. You need this. Let’s just say that I’m going to be ordering another pot in my next order! I cut down the piece of very vanilla until it looked right and then cut a piece of crushed curry 1/8 inch bigger. Before gluing it to my card, I heat embossed the thanks from Watercolor Wishes also in copper.
And there you have it – quick and simple and rather elegant.
Time to go and clean something before I leave for work!
Apparently when I don’t have a card design in my head, I start watercolouring and then a card will appear. This is what happened with this card – what do you do when you want to make a card and you don’t have any inspiration? Tuscan Vineyard created a number of cards for me this way!
I stamped the image in black stazon, grabbed some inks and my aquapainter and started colouring away. I started with the tall trees in always artichoke, a colour that was completely replaced for me by mossy meadow. Now that mossy meadow has retired, I’ve started using always artichoke! Next the vineyards and bushes, round trees and fields were in differing strengths of garden green. I used crumb cake for the mountains and sahara sand for the house. I wanted to make the house stand out, hence the cherry cobbler roof. Finally I coloured the sky with marina mist. Once I’d completed this, I decided to use a cherry cobbler base to pull the house out even more but decided to have double layers of cherry cobbler. Before committing my watercolouring to the card, I made sure that my sentiment was good – it’s embossed in black and from my favourite Watercolor Wishes set.
I made this at the crop and thus didn’t have my dies with me (I’m never forgetting them again!) and had to borrow what was available. I cropped my watercolouring using one of the ovals collection but I didn’t want a really thick border. I actually trimmed down the black oval to the indentation that occurred when cutting it out giving me a smaller border. If you look carefully you can see that the oval isn’t perfect, but until I started writing this, I’d forgotten that I did it by hand, so the imperfections are not jumping out.
I hope that you have some time to play with Tuscan Vineyard, it’s a lot of fun. I have a few more cards made with this set to share in the coming days.
Today I’m sharing a third card made with the Moroccan DSP to put in my matching box which I’ve yet to show you. The box holds up to eight cards and because I’ve decorated it with the Moroccan DSP, I’m making the cards all with paper from this stack.
This is another fairly busy paper which would be overwhelming if it were covering the entire card front – well, it would be to me. So I cut a strip 1.5 inches wide (actually it started wider at 2 1/8 inches but I cut it back as I was designing the card) and decided to pull out the cajun craze from the pattern. The cajun craze strip is 1/8 inch wider than the DSP to get a lovely tiny border. Once you’ve got the liquid tombow glue on the DSP, use your trimmer or your table to ensure that you’ve got the edges perfect. This is why I use the liquid glue, you have a little time to wiggle the paper to make sure that the edges are lined up. I then mounted this on a very vanilla card base.
To continue featuring the cajun craze, I used that ink for the sentiment which is from Watercolor Wishes. I know that you knew that because I use it all the time! But I love the typeface, the sentiment and the way the sentiment is stacked together. It’s just perfect. I cropped it with an oval die and then popped it up on dimensionals.
In case you were wondering why I started with a strip of DSP at 2 1/8 inches, it’s because I’m lazy – actually, let’s call it efficient! It means that there’s less cutting for the envelope flap. Just get a 6 by 2 1/8 inch strip, put some tombow on the flap and add the DSP. Use an edge to ensure that the edge of the envelope and the edge of the DSP match and then trim the excess with your paper snips. Now you have a perfectly coordinating card and envelope.
Yesterday demonstrators were able to see the new Holiday catalogue and we’ll be able to order next Tuesday. It will be generally released on September 1st. I can’t wait to start playing with some of the goodies. If you can’t wait either, just think about signing up as a demonstrator. For $99 with free shipping, you can select $125 worth of product (including from the new Holiday catalog) with no requirement to ever buy more. If you want to stay active and enjoy the 20% discount, you just need to sell/buy $300 per quarter, not including your first quarter. This means that you’d have until the end of September to sell/buy a total of $300 to stay active. And that’s not difficult, believe me! Just click on the tab over on the left for more information and the link that you need to join my team.
Happy Thursday which means that it’s time for a new challenge at CAS Colours & Sketches, this time a sketch.
Here’s the sketch which inspired my card:
At the weekend I broke out one of my new sets, Tuscan Vineyard and started watercolouring. I really miss the retired mossy meadow, but if it hadn’t have retired, I wouldn’t have pulled out Always Artichoke which worked really well here. Silver linings right? After watercolouring the leaves in always artichoke and adding more colour to the parts of the leaves which were more shaded (the designers of the stamps make life easier for those of us who really weren’t stars in art class!) I pulled out rich razzleberry and did the same to the grapes. I then carefully added the sentiment realising that I should have stamped it before I’d spent the time watercolouring but it was perfect.
I trimmed my watercolour paper to be smaller than the card front at the sides to be true to the sketch. Unusually I made the card with the fold at the top which I feel works well with the side panels.
The photo shows that the card is sitting on something bumpy but not much detail – it’s the new Petal Burst TIEF and I used it to emboss the envelope flap.
I hope that you’ll pop over to the challenge site to see what the rest of the Design Team have created and to have a go at the challenge yourself. You don’t need a blog to enter.
On Friday I returned home after a week at one of our plants in Ennis, Texas. It was a really interesting week, I learned a lot, met a large number of really nice people and met up with my friend Rebecca (whom I haven’t seen in 12 years) a couple of times. As you presumably noticed, I had all my posts ready to go so that there was no interruptions but the one thing that was bothering me was that my Stampin’ Up! order was arriving the day after I left, on Tuesday. So yesterday, in between laundry and cooking, I found time to start playing. Usually I jump on the new stamp sets but this time it was the Fruit Stand DSP which insisted on being used first. I fully expected to be using the quieter sides of the the DSP, so this card came as a bit of a surprise to me!
The Fruit Stand DSP is absolutely gorgeous and the peach (or is it an apricot?) needed to be the focal point of the card. So I snipped around it with my paper snips which was no big deal. I decided to leave a white border and layer it on white so I didn’t need to be terribly precise. After a fair amount of playing around with the reverse of the paper and various colour of cardstock, I finally decided to use tangerine tango. I cut down my top layer of whisper white to 4 3/4 by 3 1/2 inches and stamped the sentiment from Watercolor Wishes in tangerine tango using the cut out peach to help position it. Then I added a skinny mat of tangerine tango (1/8 inch larger than the whisper white) before gluing that to a thick whisper white card base. I then popped up the peach on a lot of dimensionals – the DSP is pretty sturdy, but I wanted to be sure it wouldn’t sag.
I used another of my new products on the envelope – I dry embossed the flap with the petal burst TIEF.
I’m off now to go and play some more. See you tomorrow,
