Sketch Challenge

November is here and that means another DCWV sketch challenge. Check out the sketch.

I was inspired by the triangle layers and decided to use them to draw focus to photos on a two-photo layout (instead of the three in the sketch). I added in more arrow type elements to keep the eye flowing around the layout. I used the Blue Citrus stack, a 6×6 Printed Cork stack and a mat stack from DCWV to make this layout. Hint, that white paper is just the backside of a print from the Blue Citrus stack. This is a great use for those prints that aren’t your favorite. The solid white adds a calm foundation to a busy mix of pattern and shape.

If you don’t know what scoliosis is, it is an abnormal spinal curvature. There can be known causes for this condition, but more often its onset happens in adolescence and is of unknown cause. A simple bend-forward test can be done to check for the typical hump of the back of scoliosis patients. Two of my children now have this condition, which isn’t surprising since there is a genetic link. You should have your children’s backs checked for scoliosis, especially daughters as this condition is far more likely to become severe in girls. For more information on scoliosis, please visit The Scoliosis Research Society.

Share Handmade Kindess

Perhaps you have heard of Jennifer McGuire. She is a crafter who is very active on YouTube and on her blog. She is a very sweet and generous crafter. In order to encourage us to use our own crafty generosity, she is hosting a project called Share Handmade Kindness. Each week of November Jennifer will provide a challenge to share something homemade/handmade with people in our lives. And of course she is offering prizes! I would play along even if there were no prizes because I love to craft, I love to share and I love to send a little joy off the others. Perfect.

For this first week she challenged us toShare Handmade Kindness with “friends and family.” Easy, easy. I’ve got birthday cards that needed mailed out, so those are off on their way now. I also sent the flower/hello card that I made last week off to a friend who I haven’t been seeing very much anymore.

Here is a photo of the three items I sent in the mail today.

I’ve been very into watercoloring. (Who hasn’t?) My favorite way to use watercolors is with a wet on wet technique. See those HB letters on the birthday card? First I used clean clear water to draw the letters on watercolor paper. Then using a brush dipped in liquid ink I touch my brush to the bottom of each of the letter and let the color flow naturally onto the wetted paper. With a different color on top, the water naturally allows the colors to blend in the middle. You never know what you are going to get exactly but it is fun. And the tension of the water molecules holds everything into the shape you originally drew, in this case the letters HB so the colors don’t just bleed all over your project. So lovely.

I hope you can give this watercolor technique a try and also send some handmade kindness. If I win any of the prizes I will be sharing them with a card making class I teach at my kids’ school. Just more ways to share!

October sketch challenges

I’m having fun playing with the DCWV October Sketch challenges for layouts and cards. Take a look.

Sketch:
October Layout Sketch

My take:

I used one of the Premium Paper Collections available from JoAnn.com. This stack contains 5 specialty papers. The background is a chalkboard paper. I added white stamping for my title to give a nod to the style of paper without going to a full chalk-board look. The printed paper has the gorgeous gold foiling print which I used to add glitz and contrast to the layout. The floral paper is actually a glittered paper that I think is perfect is small doses, as accent embellishments, and used with a die to cut title lettering. The little banners accompanying the floral embellishments were cut with another die using the kit’s cream colored fabric “paper”. With a slight translucent quality, this fabric adds a pretty touch. Finally, the solid pink paper has a slight shimmer to it and worked very well for photo mating, journaling tags and as a third lettering style for my title. Add in a little more bling with some Doodle Bug sequins and I have a lovely page! (Dies: Technique Tuesday, banners, title word; Lawn Fawn, title letters; Die-namics, circles.)

And the card sketch:

And my take:

Using another Premium Paper Collections available from JoAnn.com, plus a bit of leftover cream fabric “paper” from the previous kit, I came up with this card. I think the textures of these papers together make for a very touchable card!

Check out these lines of papers from DCWV. They add a lot of pizzaz to projects!

Peter Pan

My middle kid is the budding theater kid. It helps that she has a super wonderful theater arts teacher and program to be a part of. Each fall their group puts on an ensemble musical performance. Last fall it was Peter Pan. I wanted to capture the story without being super Disney-theme overboard. What I ended up doing was using my Silhouette to purchase a few pirate, mermaid and fairy themed cuts to go along with the characters in the play. I used the die cuts as misting masks to get a subtle theme that supports the photos. I also used the very large ship die cut (so glad I can size die cuts in an electronic cutter!) mask to add another background layer to my focal photo.

The font for my title worked great to support them theme as well. (Unfortunately between starting the cut project and actually making the cuts I had some software glitches and I don’t know what the font is!) To add extra interest to the title I added an ombre ink effect.

Try these techniques for subtle theme enhancement on your next layout.

Here we go again

So I was featured again by the DCWV challenge entry for February. I entered both the layout sketch challenge (10th photo down) and the card sketch challenge (7th photo down) and was chosen as a top 10 for each category. From those top 10’s, prize winners were chosen. And guess who won a prize again? Yep, me. Woot! Check this cool prize out…

Prize pack — Premium Paper Collections from DCWV

I won eight Premium Paper Collections as well as a mini album this go around. Each collection contains 5 sheets of specialty paper, from glitter to gloss to laser cut. These collections really are very beautiful with wonderful textures and finishes included. I only wish there was less packaging involved as each sheet was individually wrapped.

I wanted to put this prize to use right away on this month’s sketch challenges! I used the same Premium Collection Pack for both the card and the layout.

Layout Sketch…

And my take…

Then the card sketch…

And my take…

Wish me luck on another top 10 (and who knows, maybe another prize?).

Now YOU go enter. It’s fun!

Hedgehugs

Normally I don’t go for the really cutsie images (read: inanimate objects with smiley faces). But the Lawn Fawn hedgehogs really spoke to me for some reason. I think they are really cute creatures in life so the stamp set felt more realistic and less over the top cute. I have to admit that it made me squee, which I don’t usually do over stamp sets. Plus, the low price point and the matching die makes the set really a great deal.

When I saw the DCWV stack-a-holic card sketch challenge for March, I knew I had the perfect idea for combining the sketch, the stamp and a needed get-well card.

First up the sketch…

And my take…

I used the DCWV Glitzy Glitter 6×6 paper pad. This paper is not simply a glitter glued down to cardstock. I’m not sure how this is manufactured, but the “glitter” is really fine and embedded/printed in a way that it does not come off. When you rub a hand over the glitter you can’t feel flakes, just a rougher texture. I love, love this paper since I can’t stand loose glitter flakes everywhere. I knew I wanted to use this paper since it had color gradient that worked well for the ground, grass and sky, plus pink for the hearts. And the card is a get-well card for a lovely little girl who had to spend a few days in the hospital. I wanted something very sweet and sparkly to cheer her up.

At first I tried stamping the images in regular dye ink on the glitter paper and that did not work well. The image was really faint. I could have tried Staz-On next but I decided to go straight for heat embossing to give it extra pop. When I heated the glitzy paper I soon realized something: there is a plastic quality to the paper that does not react well to heat. The paper curled quite badly very quickly. I was able to ease out some of the curling but didn’t get an entirely flat piece again. This made it harder to die cut since I had to tape the die down well to the cutting plate to get it to stay in place in the die machine. Once I got it cut, the continued curling didn’t matter to me as it gave the banner and little animals additional texture which I found I actually liked. However if you need something really flat this may be a problem. I may try to experiment with the heat more or squashing the pieces under heavy books for a while. If I don’t come up with more tips, just know for now, that you will run into this issue.

Once the embossing and die cutting was done, I added color to the hedgehogs (stamped on the same silver paper as the banner) using Copic markers. The paper did take well to the ink and I was able to add just a little shading and detail. Since it is such a small image, I don’t know how well true Copic blending would work on this surface, but I’d say give it a try and see what happens. I may try it with some floral images to test it out. I will let you know if I do.

(Note: The little hearts I ended up die cutting came from another lawn fawn set that had just a slightly larger heart die that cut in multiple.)

Final CKC

The last class I’m showing you about the CKC convention is Home Grown Cards with Basic Grey. Check out the YouTube video on the class presentation. For the most part I just followed right along with the instructions. There were a few techniques like using glue dots with micro beads (far right pear card), using stencils with mist and pen-work (direct middle, back; hard to see). The techniques were nothing very new to me. Also the colors of the collection felt to grunge for my current color taste. Most of the sentiments were not wording I would use for everyday cards. All in all, it was not my favorite class, but I think it was really taste dependent. If you like Basic Grey or this color pallet, I would say go for it.

My favorite card was the front one that I made inspired by one of the design layouts but I mixed it up since I had accidentally cut apart the intended greeting image. I like the brighter pink/yellow/green pallet with brown just for contrast. Plus the four color-blocked design works really well I think. I don’t know why I’ve not tried the color-blocking on cards before.

Final thoughts, look over the instructions and projects first to make sure you have all the parts you need for making the projects you want to follow step by step. Then feel free to mix, match and even change entirely the things you want to change.

Playing with Watercolor

I’ve been intrigued with watercolor for some time now. The loose flow and blending of colors is surely a favorite. I’ve never been good at drawing real, representational images but I’ve been practicing here and there with a few things. Last week I decided to just pull out my watercolors and try my hand at that. I had fun, but I must say the real life representation is still lacking. My flowing watercolor gets very tight and restricted when trying to capture the image. Well, more practice is in my future. For now, enjoy some zero calorie cake!

Quick & Sassy Pocket Pages: A CKC class

In this class the approach was simple, spice up some pocket sized cards and use them in some pocket pages. I’m not a pocket scrapper and didn’t pre-register for this class. I ended up adding it because, like I said in an earlier post, the convention was small and the vendor fair didn’t keep me busy between classes. I’ve been keeping pocket page ideas in the background with the thoughts of adapting them to traditional layouts. The reason I don’t like pockets is that the page confines me to specific photo size & orientations and I don’t want that limit. But adapting the pocket products to traditional layouts certainly seems easy and can make scrapping faster to get more stories told. So that is what I did.

But first up, what the class shared…
There were ideas on small embellishments, inking, doodling, journaling tips, hiding elements that don’t fit the theme & still being able to use the cards, storage & organization and of course how to bring them onto traditional 12×12. Of all the classes I took, I am likely to really read the instructions from this one to get those last couple of tips a good look.

And the two layouts that I pulled out of the pockets…

Okay this one I admit I just used up some cardstock base that was leftover so the color isn’t the best fit and I tried to connect it in with a few sequins and one pocket-card of similar tones. It is a stretch, I know, but sometimes you have to put things together and call it done!

(Look closely there is a spider near that sticky note. The overlay reflection certainly didn’t photograph well!)

Of course this being a pocket page class, I didn’t pull the layouts together in class. Instead I spent time at the crop playing with the materials & ideas provided in class to put these together.

Trendy Techniques with Gossamer Blue: A CKC class

This class (visit their YouTube description for more information) was sponsored by CKC and as usual, their class kits & print instructions were generous, modern and trendy. I’m happy with the results of the pages that I came away with but the class format could use some improvement. The class could have been called “spend all your time misting things.” Our class was large and we had to work in groups to take turns with the materials. It took a long time to get through misting all the elements. And that was the end of the trendy techniques, or rather technique.

If you have experience with mist and dripping, then you may want to skip this class. Even though I get misting and use it often, I am still glad I took this class because I wasn’t very familiar with Gossamer Blue as a company and I found I liked their products (loved the printed transparency overlays in gold on one side and silver on the other for color options! And I have plenty leftover to play with).

My take on the top layout: I didn’t have as many photos as the layout so I just used what I had. I think this layout may have been better with the higher number of photos. As is, it is a little too busy for my two photos. But that is okay. I’m happy anyway.

And my take on the bottom layout: For this one I had a huge amount of photos I was trying to squeeze in to one layout and I managed to do it. I took the flag/banner border pieces and drew them together across the layout to create an upper and lower section to fit all these photos. I think the layout works well. But I think the style & color of some of the elements didn’t fit (the woodgrain card? Where does woodgrain fit in ). The misted scallop journal card was particularly unsuccessful. The outlining the scallops with black pen was too overwhelming; I would have left that off and used a lighter misting for a less busy journal card.

So there you go, my thoughts on that class. Watch their video (linked above) and see if you are up for this mist-tacular class.