The Season

Good morning! Emily here with you today to share a pair of cards that are an homage to my efforts to use what I have. I have been trying to be more conscious of all of the beautiful stamp sets that I already have and truly make use of them, and in doing so I have noticed that I neglect some of my stamps and dies more than others. Let’s get started with my projects for today!

This first project uses the adorable Pineapple Print background stamp. This was released last summer, I think, but I’ve never quite had the right idea to go with it. I was looking at the Party Fans set and thought, well that would create a cute little background for these adorable balloons, right? So I heat embossed it in black onto a white A2 card base. Next, I die cut some of the adorable balloons and balloon strings from Party Fans and stamped them with the Peony Collection ink trio using the “rock ‘n roll” method to ink it up. It’s a super easy way to add dimension to a simple stamped image.

For my next step, I die cut the giant and gorgeous “hugs” die from the coordinating Brushed Hugs stamp and die set using some glossy black card stock. I trimmed a piece of vellum, arranged my die cut greeting on the top, and determined where I wanted the rest of the greeting to be placed. I stamped the “sending big” from Brushed Hugs, and the “birthday” was trimmed from one of the stamps in the Party Fans set. I heat embossed them both in black on the vellum. I added my pink balloons, then added dimensional adhesive by hiding it behind the die cuts on the front of the vellum. The last step was to add some pretty pink sequins randomly across the top of the vellum to tie in that little pop of pink from the balloons. I love how striking black and white with a pop of color is, don’t you?

For my next project, I wanted to do something a little different, for me anyway. I call this card “a study in depth.” I wanted to use stamps that were in varying degrees of “zoom.” In this case, a little scene featuring the cherry blossoms in the foreground, the girl riding the bicycle in the mid-ground, and the city skyline in the background. To start, I die cut the skyline using the Vogue Skies die set and some gray card stock. Next, I die cut and stamped my super stylish and slightly impractical fashionista on bicycle, as well as the sentiment banner, from the City Girls: Special Day stamp and die set. The bicycle and basket of flowers from   Beautiful Day: Bicycle were die cut and stamped with Caviar ink. I also die cut and stamped the pretty cherry blossom branch from Always Cherry Blossoms.

After I had die cut and stamped all of the different elements, I dug out my (very dusty and unloved) Copic markers and began to color all of the images (love that the Caviar ink is Copic-friendly!). After I’d colored everything, I turned to my card base. I wanted to create a pinky sunset behind my city skyline, so I used my Clarity Stencil Brushes to blend Peach Blossom and Hollywood Star inks on the top half of my card base, adding a “street” blended using Light Onyx at the bottom half of my card base. I adhered my skyline with liquid adhesive, then added my bicycling fashionista with one layer of dimensional adhesive, finally adding my cherry blossoms with two layers of dimensional adhesive to further enhance the differences in depth.

Well, what do you think? Did my experiment in depth come across as intended? I hope so, otherwise this is kind of an odd mishmash of stamps haha!

Well, that’s all for me today! Don’t forget that you have until the last day of the month to enter a project into our Challenge Blog‘s linkup! The theme this month is a super fun interactive Tic-Tac-Toe board.

Have a marvelous day, friends!