If you're within driving distance of Paper Anthology in Kenvil, NJ, I'd love for you to join me for this adorable Holiday card class featuring oh so cute (and festive!) Lawn Fawn stamps and dies, there’s even a shaker card in the mix!
It's week two of our Jingle Belles Christmas Creature celebration, and you still have time to join the fun! This week I've made a little winter landscape in shaker card form, for my adorable Lawn Fawn Yeti to inhabit. The background is several scraps of miscellaneous snowy patterned papers, and the shaker is full of Eyelet Outlet Snowflake Sequins.
Be sure to visit Jingle Belles to see Stephanie's card, and start planning what you'll make!
The new Distress Ink shade, Villainous Potion, has arrived at The Ink Pad in all its glorious varieties of Ink Pads, Reinkers, Sprays, Paint and Embossing Glaze, and it may actually be the ULTIMATE Purple! My favorite Distress product is Oxide Ink, and my favorite way to get acquainted with a new color is to test out lots of blends with the existing palette to see which combinations will be my favorites.
I like to use little ATC-sized pieces of cardstock for this exercise, and I take time after each blend to write the color names on the back in the order I used them; having learned that after ten or twelve combinations, I may not remember which red I used on which combo! When all the swatches are completely dry I punch them with my Crop-A-Dile and secure them with a brad or small book ring so that the next time I want to make a background I have some awesome ideas to start me off.
When selecting colors to try together, I generally begin with those closest to the new color and work outwards. With an intense shade like Villainous Potion, that means starting with the deepest Distress colors; and with a purple, the closest "relatives" will be the other purples, the blues and some reds. The closer the colors are in either hue or intensity, the more smoothly and seamlessly they blend. As you move further out, you increase both contrast and drama. In this case, a few "slam dunk" shades you might like to try include Dusty Concord, Wilted Violet and Seedless Preserves... which let you segue into all of the reds and pinks in the line; while Prize Ribbon, Chipped Sapphire and Blueprint Sketch will serve as a bridge into lighter blue shades, as well as greens.
If you're not confident combining colors, I highly (highly!) recommend using a Color Wheel. In the meantime, remembering the order of the spectrum with the acronym ROY G. BIV: Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet will at least give you a starting point, as the colors which are next to each other are always analogous, which means they're going to be blend-friendly.
Here are the exact colors I used for my twelve favorite blends so far; working from top left to bottom right in the photo above; each blend is listed from top to bottom on its card: 1. Carved Pumpkin, Candied Apple, Villainous Potion; 2. Villainous Potion, Blueprint Sketch, Lucky Clover; 3. Villainous Potion, Seedless Preserves, Barn Door; 4. Salvaged Patina, Salty Ocean, Villainous Potion; 5. Broken China, Blueprint Sketch, Villainous Potion; 6. Villainous Potion, Aged Mahogany, Crackling Campfire; 7. Dusty Concord, Villainous Potion, Chipped Sapphire; 8. Kitsch Flamingo, Candied Apple, Villainous Potion; 9. Seedless Preserves, Villainous Potion, Weathered Wood; 10. Speckled Egg, Weathered Wood, Villainous Potion; 11. Rustic Wilderness, Prize Ribbon, Villainous Potion; 12. Pickled Raspberry, Seedless Preserves, Villainous Potion.
Halloween is this Sunday, but there's still time to make a happily haunted card featuring Eyelet Outlet Ghost Brads!
As the weather starts to cool off and the colors of the garden start to fade away, we're having one last celebration of all things floral at Shopping Our Stash.
I found a few sheets from Simple Stories' "I Am" line that I absolutely fell in love with at Paper Anthology a couple of years ago, brought home and... promptly forgot all about?! So this seemed like a good time to cut into those! I've used bits of two different journal cards, fussycut some flowers from another sheet and used two of the texty styles as backgrounds. A wordfetti sentiment, skinny black kromekote mats and a few Eyelet Outlet Enamels and I called it a day.
Hop over to SOS to see the amazing DT creations and start planning your own floral masterpiece!
This fortnight at Jingle Belles, we're asking you to break out the animals for this week's holiday card … it could be one of Santa's reindeer, a sheep next to a manger, or possibly even a monster or a Yeti if you're in a Halloween mood and want to stretch the theme (b/c some of us are Just Like That, lol!) In this case I split the difference and went with a real creature (Lawn Fawn's adorable Winter Narwhal) at the North Pole (thanks to Pebbles' Fairly Accurate Map!)
We're still celebrating PINK CHRISTMAS at Jingle Belles and you've got until next Wednesday evening to join the fun and help us raise a little money for the Breast Cancer Research Foundation!
This week's card was as fast to make as last week's Pink Couch card was slow! After I made a design of seven or eight miscellaneous washi tapes featuring every shade of pink and red, on a salmon pink ledger paper background and topped it with pink poinsettias from MME's (older) Sugar Plum collection, all I needed was an anonymous diecut sentiment, a few Eyelet Outlet Glitter Enamel Dots and a bit of machine stitching.
Over at Jingle Belles you can see Stephanie's beautiful card and start planning what you'll link up with us this time!
If you've guessed that this fortnight's challenge at Shopping Our Stash is a celebration of all things autumnal, then well done! You don't need to include a literal pumpkin (though of course you can!) just channel thoughts of Fall, Halloween or Thanksgiving and that should point you in the right direction. Here's what I made:
Anyone who's played along with us at Jingle Belles probably already knows this, but it's worth mentioning again anyway. As always, the first prompt of October is PINK CHRISTMAS and it starts NOW!
...is a card still "Clean and Simple" if it features five Eyelet Outlet Washi Tape styles and nine Brads?! I say yes; but then I'm not exactly a minimalist, lol!
Inspired by this cute tree sticker I found in my stash, I started looking through my Eyelet Outlet goodies for autumnal items in the right colors, and found Pumpkin Brads, Sunflowers, Mini Leaves, and the orange calico cat from our Feline Brads. To ground my embellishment grouping, I made a tape stack starting with Pumpkin Tape, Wood Washi, and my favorite Script Tape, to which I added some shorter pieces of solid color Skinny Tape. Since I had obviously made a tiny stylized landscape, it seemed like a good idea to finish off with Sun and Cloud Brads... so I did!
In addition to hostessing some of the challenges during Paper Anthology's WCD Crop Weekend, I also participated in a few that my friends Elisabeth Ostrowski, Shari Morris and Linda Duke were responsible for, and this seems like a good time and place to post those.
It's Day Three of our Paper Anthology Online Crop celebrating World Cardmaking Day and here's the third challenge I'm hosting:
I own a LOT of nested die sets and use them constantly, but one shape I didn't have until quite recently were hexies. Luckily, I nabbed Hero Arts' Hexagon Infinity Dies at Paper Anthology, and used about eight of the seventeen (17!) perfectly scaled dies in the set to create a pattern from lots of lovely pink patterned paper scraps. I used my Altenew Bold Alphas on some ancient pink burlap paper and added a secondary sentiment with my Taylored Expressions Simple Strips Birthday stamps and dies. I had envisioned a bunch of other embellies making an appearance, but that was before my hexed background cast its spell, lol; in the end I decided it was finished just like it is!
Be sure to join us on the Paper Anthology Facebook Page to see all the challenges and join the fun!
Welcome to Day Two of Paper Anthology's Online Crop to celebrate World Cardmaking Day! I hope you've been tuning in to the PA Facebook Page for all the fun! Today I'm hosting a sketch challenge, with your choice of card sketch (on the left) or layout (on the right):
Welcome to our Paper Anthology World Cardmaking Day (or in this case Weekend!) Online Crop. We've got ten inspiring challenges that will roll out over the next three days, plus trivia quizzes, chats and more. Be sure to visit the Paper Anthology Facebook Page for all the details. This challenge might be self-explanatory, as the name implies, we'd like to see gift card holders. With the holiday season approaching, we'll all need at least a few of these ubiquitous items, and frankly the store-bought variety are just too expensive and not cute enough, imo! (PS: your holder need not be seasonal; any theme from wedding to birthday to all-occasion is fine!)
We're still celebrating snow in all its forms at Jingle Belles and you're still invited to join the fun! This week I've invited a sweet little Doodlebug snowman to the party:
