My Sweet EMBOSS-able You

This fortnight at Jingle Belles we're asking you to create holiday cards that feature EMBOSSING... either pressure embossing OR heat embossing... or BOTH if you're an over-achiever! 

I am currently somewhat re-obsessed with the emboss/resist technique, so I chose to go with heat embossing. I stamped the gorgeous oversized Snowflake Spin background from Stampendous in Ranger's Clear Emboss It Ink, sprinkled with White e/p and once it was cool I applied a combination of Picked Raspberry, Kitsch Flamingo and Spun Sugar Oxide Inks, which I splattered lightly with a waterbrush for even more variation of shades. The "Merry" die is so old I'm actually not sure who made it, but I love how it looks cut from magenta glitter paper and mounted on some coordinating May Arts ribbon. 

This challenge runs until Wednesday evening, July 17th. Hop over to Jingle Belles to see Stephanie's beautiful card and start thinking about how you'll approach this Emboss-able Mission!

Happy (Almost) Fourth of July

Tomorrow the USA will celebrate its 248th birthday and here's an appropriately red, white and blue card featuring Eyelet Outlet Flag and Hat Brads, Flag Washi, Heart Tape, Red Jewel Strips and coordinating Star Brads!

Shopping List:

Flag and Hat Brads

Star Brads

Flag Washi

Heart Tape

Red Jewel Strips

Eyelet Outlet has all the embellishments you need for ANY occasion! 

SOS525: NBUS

In case you're wondering, NBUS stands for Never Before Used Stuff; and this fortnight at Shopping Our Stash, we're asking you to create a card that features items in your stash which are more than one year old, but haven't, for whatever reason, been used yet. Here's my card:

In the photo below you can see my Never Before Used item: a fabulous IO stamp set called "Aloha" which Stephanie gave me for my birthday last year (or possibly the year before?!) which I absolutely LOVE but somehow, despite the fact that I've gotten it out periodically and re-admired it, I had still never inked up?! I did my own variation of "spotlight stamping" by using the MISTI (also a gift from Stephanie, quite a few years ago, which I do actually use ALL the time!) to stamp a panel of tropical flowers and leaves. Then I carefully lined up my Altenew Bold Alpha dies to spell "ALOHA" and cut them from the background. I left the surrounding area plain, but used my Tombows to color the flowers and leaves of the diecuts, which I then shadowed with a second set of diecut letters in bold blue, before placing them back in the holes from which they came. I added tiny (ancient!) Prima paper flowers with Eyelet Outlet Pearl centers; added a bold blue mat and a surrounding panel of 49 and Market's Sunburst collection and called it a (sunshine-y, tropical) day!

Take a look over at SOS at what the rest of the Crew have made, then dust off one (or more!) of your Never Before Used items and make a card to link up with us! The NBUS Challenge runs through Monday evening, July 15th.

Week 5: Index Card a Day Round-Up

It's another week of Index Card goodness and a reminder that the Daisy Yellow Art Blog is a fine source of information and inspiration; as are a few selected Instagram accounts including mine (@llaurenb) and the official @indexcardaday feed!

ICAD24-31: Mandala Monday

It’s a loosey-goosey, wavy-gravy, somewhat deconstructed Mandala Monday; Tombows and Letter It Fineliners on an index card divider.

ICAD24-30: Sepia

A super fast One Staple Collage in (mostly) sepia!

ICAD24-29: Off-Prompt

The most random of all random collages everrrrrr?! Off-prompt and a bit fishy on Day 29.

ICAD24-28: Steampunk

A fairly tangential take on Steampunk, lots of vaguely wheel- and cog-ike shapes, glued on top of ink-blended circles of Distress Oxide Inks on a green index card. Not exactly where I thought this would be going when I started out, but that is the fun of ICAD you can take a left turn at any point and wait to see what happens next!

ICAD24-27: Ranunculus

Flashing back to a prompt I skipped last week; at the time I didn't have an interesting idea, but suddenly I thought that if I just kept cutting wonky flower layers and stacking them up, the result would be cool and possibly a bit ranunculus-like, which I think kinda worked! Also a fab use of quite a few patterned paper scraps although I still have PLENTY left... sigh...

ICAD24-26: Strawberry

Not my favorite card ever but... the pattern was fun to doodle and they are more or less recognizable as strawberries so my work here is through!

ICAD24-25-: Off-Prompt

Have already made several doodled cards involving strips or stripes, I decided to try my hand a collage of strips. I chose a few vintage book pages with similar colors, tore them vertically, glued them onto an index card, and added super-simple stitching.

♥♥♥