My Pink Stamper challenge

Hi All,

I thought I would have a video for you for this post but I haven’t quite figured everything out yet. I am working on video and would love to share those with you when they are ready.

In the meantime I have a project to share. I read the My Pink Stamper blog everyday and love Robyn over there. She is energetic and fun. While our styles are very different, with hers being self-described as “so super cute” and mine shying away from cute, I still get a lot out of her videos. So, I thank her for sharing all the time and effort she puts into things. She had a challenge posted yesterday to make a project using green, pink and black. Since I wanted to send a spring card off to someone, I decided to make a card for my challenge. So here you go…

Card measures 8.5 x 5.5

Supplies:

Stamping up: Cardstock (Certainly Celery, Basic Black, Sahara Sand, Very Vanilla); paper piercer, template & mat; stamp (Wonderful Words); ink (basic black)
Cricut cartridge: Pagoda (branch cut at 2.5″, flowers at 2.5″ and “spring” mat at 5″
Tatter Angels (Glimmer Mist in Cherub Pink)

Tip: to get the flowers colored with glimmer mist, cut them out of Very Vanilla. While they are still on your cricut mat, protect your mat with scratch paper and then spray them with glimmer mist while they are still in place. Allow to dry while you complete the other steps of the project.

Inspiration lingers

I have been reading Creating Keepsakes magazine for years now. I started by reading back issues from the library and when those ran out I broke down and got my own subscription. This magazines, other magazines and blogs are filled with inspiration. Sometimes I find I am spending more time reading than scrapping. But all that time is not wasted. Ideas are being logged by my brain, sometimes without my even knowing it. For example I just created this layout.

I had fun cutting out cardstock in the vague shape of popcorn for the background, inking edges to mimic butter and adding a fun title. Now here is where the lingering inspiration comes in.

I created the title using Liquid Applique by Marvy. This is a glue like substance that you smear over your project, in this case letters I had cut out with my Cricut (Opposites Attract cartridge). Let the applique dry over night and then heat with a heat gun. The product then gets puffy and, well, popcorn like!

Puffy title created with Liquid Applique by Marvy.

I was pretty excited that I had come up with my very own technique! Well, the more I thought about it, the more I became sure that I had seen something almost exactly like this in a Creating Keepsakes issue. So it wasn’t an original idea, but it turned out to be a good idea!

If you ever feel like you are “wasting time” reading about your hobby more than doing your hobby, don’t worry! All that data is going into your brain, swirling around, combining with other ideas and it will eventually come out somewhere in your work. So you have my permission to pick up a magazine and go read.

Spring layout

I submitted this layout to The Paperlife blog for their spring themed feature. I just saw this morning that Amy over there decided to use my layout! Yeah! And thanks Amy. So I thought I would do a post on the steps I took to make this layout.

All the flowers in my yard are so spread out that it is hard to enjoy them all at once. So I wanted to bring all the pretty blooms together in one place. I began with the idea of a grid of 4 photos, each 4×4 inches. Then I wanted to support the color in each photo by matting them with coordinating pattern papers. Sorry this next photo is a little blurry! The top two papers are from Basic Grey and the bottom two, as well as the cardstock base, are from Stampin’ Up.

I decided I wanted to contain all the flowers within a large circle. Circles really are my favorite element right now. So I pulled out my Cricut Plantain Schoolbook cartridge and loaded in a sheet of Stampin’ Up cardstock. Using the centerpoint feature on the cricut I moved my blade to the middle of the mat, cut one large circle and then cut one circle that was about 1/2 inch smaller. This left me with a circular ring to use on this project. (The leftovers are a sheet of cardstock with a circle cut from it and a large circle that I will save to use on other projects.) I took that cut ring and laid it on my layout, moving it around until I got the placement I wanted. I ended up placing it on top of the photos and then tucking it behind a bit of the photos and mat at the top.

I then wanted to flood the edges with pretty flowers. But I also didn’t want to detract from the photos so I went with small neutral flowers. I used my Cricut Pagoda cartridge to cut out a bunch of flowers from cardstock. Then I used Glimmer mist to spice up the flowers in silver, pearl and latte. I crumpled up the flowers for added texture and placed gems, pearls and buttons in the center to finish them off. The final touches for the page were the tabs at each photo to label the names of the flowers, the title cut out of vellum with the Cricut Opposites Attract cartridge, and the date handwritten with my favorite Uni-Ball Signo white pen.