A quick post to share a card for Papertrey Ink's Make It Monday challenge. I had a lot of time today in the craft room and took the opportunity to play. As it often happens, a fair amount ended up in the circular file, and this card is a far cry from the original idea in my mind. Nonetheless, it ended up an extremely bright and cheery birthday greeting.

The card base is Bright Buttercup. I die cut a Pierced Frame from watercolor paper and used my watercolors create an ombre effect. The Pierced Frame dies are new and I think I'll get a lot of use from them. The balloons were die cut with dies from "Balloon Bash" from a piece of watercolored paper I'd embossed with the Cover-up Grid stamp (also new). It didn't work for the original plan, but it made pretty cute balloons. I die cut the "Balloon Strings" from watercolor paper as well.

The repeated sentiment is from "Ways to Say: Birthday." It's a $5 set that sees lots of action here. Before I added any of the elements to the card, I stamped it in white with Hero Art's "Tiny Ink Dots." I've had that so long, I don't think it's available any longer. I found all kinds of things when I purged my stamp collection earlier this week. You can't see it in the first photo, but it's visible in this one.

Tomorrow a friend and I are off to Buffalo Stamps and Things for their annual garage sale (hence the purging of stamps). Even if I don't sell many of them, I'm much better organized, and I've cleared out a lot of space, especially in my storage cabinet for wooden stamps. Hopefully, I'll restrain from buying any more stamps, though that probably won't be easy!

The current challenge at Seize the Birthday is Stripes.

To create the stripes for this card, I die cut the My Favorite Things "Striped Sentiment Strip Cover" from PTI's True Black cardstock. I adhered it to a white card, and embossed the greeting from Papertrey Ink's "Wishes Come True" in white. I didn't glue everything down completely so I could tuck in some bright blue flowers stamped and die cut with Papertrey's "Warm Regards" stamps and dies.

I always find lining up two and three part stamps a challenge, but these flowers from the "Warm Regards" set are among the easiest I've found. I love the bright blue against the black and white. 

This is a two week challenge, and I LOVE stripes so I'm pretty sure I'll be back with another entry before the challenge ends.

Typically, I do a separate post for each challenge, although I notice many submit to several challenges at once. I finally had time to sit down and play for awhile yesterday. I started out playing with a new-to-me set from Simon Says called "Cups and Succulents." I used the opportunity to also play with my Copic markers and start a Copic Combo chart. Thanks to Cathy Zielske, I have a decent-looking chart. There is, however, some bleeding of the colors. I used Neenah Solar White cardstock to print the chart which is supposed to be Copic-friendly, but I also had some trouble with bleeding when coloring my images. If anyone has some suggestions to prevent bleeding, I'd appreciate them. Sorry for the shadow on the chart, I snapped this in a hurry with my phone and didn't even notice it until I uploaded it.

I pulled the succulent set out before we left when I saw the challenge on Fusion, called Cactus Door.

Most often when I'm playing along with this challenge, I use just the photograph, but this time I used both the sketch and the photo.

It's an Ripe Avocado card base with Bitty Big paper in Simply Chartreuse. I never realized how well those two green work together. 

I played around with several Copic combinations, but I'm happy with the pot and the succulent. I attended a certification in Copics years ago, but never put the practice time in to be particularly good at it. Now I'm determined to improve!

The next card uses the same set and is for the Time Out Challenge which has a quote for the inspiration.

This time I started with a Soft Stone card base and Bitty Big paper of the same shade die cut with a Stitched Rectangle from Simon Says. I put a very thin green mat of Pinefeather behind it.

The sentiment is from a Simon Says set that came with a card kit two years ago called "Happy and Smile." I'm not sure why I haven't used it much as it has some really useful sentiments. 

The inside sentiment reads "It's Your Day!" 

Last, but not least, I wanted to play around with Papertrey Ink's Make It Monday, with Laurie Schmidlin, creating shadow backgrounds. I've used this technique before so I didn't think it would be particularly stressful. Just when you get cocky, you find out that's it's not so easy after all. I chose an oldie but goodie, "Friends Til The End." The focal flower in the set comes in two sizes. I used the smaller one for the background, and the large one for the colored focal point.

The problems started when I realized I needed to mask the background stamp. As it turned out, I needed two separate mask. Not that it's hard, but cutting these flowers is a bit time-consuming. I had already gold embossed the large flower on hot press watercolor paper and colored it with my Zig and SAI watercolor pens, so I wasn't willing to change directions then.

Fussy cutting the large flower was also more of a problem than I expected since watercolor paper is pretty heavy and cutting into the small areas is risky when the image is embossed. In the end I was pretty happy with it. I love the "Penned Elegance" sentiment as well. It's the first time I've used this particular sentiment, and I realize it works for a thank you note or a birthday card so there's no inside sentiment for now.

All three of these challenges expire in the next two days, so I'm off to link up, and look for more inspiration.

I love the look of vintage linens so was drawn to this challenge at Inspired By . . .

The photo reminded me of one of Papertrey Ink's premade card fronts. I don't often make use of them unless I'm in need of a very quick card, but I'm happy to have this in my stash of birthday cards, and I thought it mimicked the florals in the tea towels in the photo.

I stamped and die cut the sentiment from Penned Elegance (one of my all-time favorite sentiment sets) in Pure Poppy, added a few pearls, and covered the flowers with the Spectrum Noir clear glitter pen for a bit of sparkle.

It's easier to see the glitter in this shot as well as the final touch of emphasizing the stamens of the pink flowers with a white glaze pen.

Off to link this up to the Inspired By . . . Challenge.

 

 

Someone wondered how I was doing on the #100DayProject, and you probably noticed that there haven't been any weekly updates in over a month. Although I planned for our travel in May, and managed to keep up, June was just too busy. There were literally just 5 days in the whole month that we were home without a guest or a family commitment. I packed a project box for our last trip to Chicago, but there was no time (and no clear spot) to work as we helped get Sarah's house ready for their move to Wisconsin. Today I got an email from the project, and if I had kept up, there would be just nine days left. But there was also this question: If you fell behind, are you planning to catch up? And, the answer is, yes. Yesterday for the first time in over a month, I had time to play with new stamps and new techniques. As the project has gone on, my Pinterest board for Techniques has continued to grow, so I do intend to keep working on them in a consistent fashion. Yesterday I created 10 different backgrounds or stamped images. I only had time to get one of them made into a card.

I spent a lot of time playing around with Copic markers and blending combinations yesterday. I had recently read this post, and set out to create my own blending chart. Before I could get very far, I got an email from Cathy Zielske offering a chart to her newsletter recipients she'd made after reading the same post. Let me just say, her chart looked a lot better than mine! The stamp for this card is a new one I ordered in May after a Simon Says release: "Center Cut Flowers." I linked it here so you can see how it works. There's an outer wreath, and an inner center. I used the inner part, and did a partial stamping on opposite corners. This is easy to do with the Misti stamping tool, once you've stamped one corner, you simply rotate the card to stamp exactly the same impression on the opposing corner. 

The sentiment is from Papertrey Ink's "Birthday Cheer" set. I've used it often, but I don't think I've ever used this particular sentiment. The sequins aren't really sequins. They came with a Simon Says card kit (I think) and the mix is designed for shaker cards. The colors were perfect, though, so I went ahead and used them. They are solid and sit a little higher which explains the shadow in the photograph. They'll definitely need some protection if they go in an envelope to be mailed. 

I'm entering this in the Simon Says Wednesday Challenge: Anything Goes.

The current challenge at Seize the Birthday is "Anything Goes." Black and red is one of my favorite color combinations. As part of the #100DayProject, I pulled out a lot of stamps I hadn't used in awhile, and this poppy stamp from Hero Arts was one of them.

After stamping the image in black, I used my new Polychromos pencils to color the poppies and stems. I cut a piece of New Leaf cardstock to frame the image and adhered it to a square Lasting Impressions card (another item that's been in my stash for years.) 

I die cut a Spellbinders banner and stamped the sentiment from "Ways to Say: Birthday" by Papertrey Ink.  I added three tiny black pearls to the side of the banner. The Lasting Impressions cards came with polk-dot red envelopes which was just perfect for sending off to a friend.

This week's challenge from Less is More is to use a bit from your "bits box." I have multiple envelopes filled with bits that didn't make it to a card when they were created. For this card, there were actually two:  the card itself where I had die cut a circle in the front of the woodgrain cardbase (Simon Says,) and the beautiful butterfly from Papertrey Ink's "Butterfly Hope."

To create the card, I die cut a circular frame from two Simon Says "Stitched Circle" dies from Raspberry Fizz cardstock. The sentiment was stamped inside from the "It's the Thought" set (PTI), and the butterfly attached to the side.

Here's a peek at the inside:

I need a few more challenges like this to use up my stash of "bits."