Guest Designer for So Suzy Stamps!

I am so excited to be one of the Guest Designers for So Suzy Stamps this month!  Suzy's stamps are available in a wide range of categories and are very crisp and many of them are quite elegant.

Speaking of elegant, I selected, as my theme this month, to do a wedding card and since I obviously love shaker cards, I couldn't resist.  The stamps I used are the Wedding Dress stamp, with corresponding SVG file and the This Day Forward sentiment stamp.

I started out by using the cutting file on my Silhouette Portrait machine to cut out the background for my stamp with Tim Holtz Distress Watercolor Cardstock.

I cut out several copies in case I made a mistake.  Once I had those ready, I mixed some Perfect Pearls in the shade Perfect Pearl, with some water and painted all of my dress cutouts.

I followed that with some heat embossing using Versamark and Sparkle 'N Sprinkle's Velvet Sparkle embossing powder.

I followed that same process using different colored embossing powders from my stash, a pink sparkle shade and blue sparkle shade (I have no idea just where those came from) and I'll make something with those another time.  I did notice, as you can see in this picture, that the embossing powder just didn't show up enough on top of the Perfect Pearls watercolor, so I used my Zig glue pen to trace the lines in the stamp and covered that with some Reflection Velvet Glitter from Sparkle 'N Sprinkle.

To assemble my card, I used some Neenah Solar White cardstock cut to 4 1/4" x 5 1/2" for a top folding card.  I used the other half of the cardstock to cut out my panel and my circular window.

I used the A2 stitched rectangle from the Stitched Bundle and the Simon Says Stamp Stitched Circle Dies for the center shaker window.  I used washi tape to hold the two dies together and ran them on the white cardstock and two pieces of fun foam.  I cut some transparency paper to make my little window.  I pulled some floral paper from my stash (My Mind's Eye "Fancy That" double-sided paper) and adhered my dress and some pearl embellishments, stacked my fun foam and adhered it to my card front and dropped in some marshmallow sequins, sparkling clear and silver shimmer seed beads from Pretty Pink Posh.

I stamped the sentiment on some of my paperstash (same as above), cut it in a strip and stuck it to the front of my card and added a small rose embellishment.

I played around with another card, but I thought it turned out too "pinky" for me, I'm showing it here anyway, just without a tutorial.

I can post a tutorial for the above card if anyone is interested in seeing it.

Until then, Keep Crafting Real!

UGH Birthday card

Sure did say lots of bad words last night while putting together my daughter's birthday card.  NOTHING turned out the way I wanted it to!

Anyway, she is turning 20 today and when she was little, I used to call her Manda Panda Monkey Bear - don't understand that at all, but it was something cute that started when she was very little.  I found this adorable set from My Favorite Things in their June release and it was PERFECT.


My Favorite Things HAPPY PANDAS Clear Stamps MFT MSTN10 - $17.99
from: Simon Says Stamp

Those little pandas are just SO adorable!

So I started out stamping the little pandas, a balloon (had to do that one twice), the banner and sentiment on some smooth white cardstock.  I colored the images with my Spectrum Noir markers.  I loaded them on to my PixScan mat, traced the images and added a .080 offset to get a small white border.

This is where it all went wrong.  After loading the images to cut them, I didn't move my Portrait out from the wall far enough and the pixscan had trouble loading all the way, reading the reference marks.  All of the work I had put in coloring and stamping was chopped up.  After a few CHOICE words, I decided to just cut the images out of cardstock without any coloring, stamp and color them afterwards.

Thank goodness for my MISTI tool...

I cut the white images and laid them out on the MISTI tool, carefully placing a piece of acetate over the pieces since they would definitely move and lose their positions.

After some sweating, the stamping came out beautifully - so I got my Spectrum Noir markers out AGAIN and re-colored the images.

To assembly my scene, I used some Ranger Watercolor cardstock and watercolored a background using my Color Theory stamps from Studio Calico.  I cut some grassy pieces from my Silhouette.  Once I had the pandas where I wanted them, I added some foam tape to the climbing panda.  I added some adorable little Enamel accents from
Doodlebug SUMMER SHAPES Sprinkles Enamel Assortment 4579 to complete my card.

I also added some clear Wink of Stella to the balloon and the banner to give it a little shimmer, trimmed down the watercolor piece and adhered it to some light blue cardstock.

You can see, I had some coloring issues with the markers bleeding outside of the lines on my balloon and banner but after two attempts, I was just DONE.  I tried using the Spectrum Noir blender marker but it seemed to have just made things worse.  Oh well...not everything turns out the way we plan.

I'll be back this weekend with some more projects and stay tuned to see what I create for So Suzy Stamps as I am a guest designer for June 28th!

Until then...keep crafting real!