Watercolor and bird

Happy Monday everyone!

Today I'm sharing another card made from my practice on watercoloring.  I actually just wanted to play with watercoloring, not so much about making a card.  I stamped the bird image on watercolor cardstock, then colored it and left it alone.

But now I realize that my co-worker F will be retiring so I want to make use of the colored bird:

I simply trimmed out a panel around the bird to fit the card base, add some gold foil tape (Caution, this tape is addictive!) at the top and bottom of the panel, stamped the sentiment "best wishes" and it's done.  So glad that I'm turning a practice into a card! :)

I'm entering the card to the following:
Simply Create Too - Use Feather
Deep Ocean Challenge - Things with Wings
Creative Craft Cottage - Things with Wings
Sunny Day Crafting - Anything Goes

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Watercolor & Cat

I have been trying to play more with my watercolors these days.  Watercolor in card making has been popular for a while but it seems to be continue to be favored.  I have several mediums but I'm not good at any of them.  Oops. :p

So I'll keep practicing.  Coloring is indeed therapeutic.  I did buy one of those adult coloring books but I found it quite overwhelming.  In contrast I love coloring stamp images a lot more.

I colored the cat from Purr-fect Halloween, this months' Stamp of the Month:

Another easy Halloween card is made. :)  I'm planning to make several this year for kids.  Great opportunity for me to practice water coloring.

I'm entering this card to:
One Crazy stamper - Fall/Halloween
DRS - Monsters, Witches and Ghouls
Paper Creator - Keep it Simple
Crafty Catz - Anything Goes/Hat

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SMILE!

It has been a long time since I could play and relax at my craft desk.  How I miss my craft goodies!

I started playing with coloring the flowers in the Hawaiian Hibiscus set.  I've tried different coloring mediums and I like this one done with watercoloring the best.  I've turned the images into a card:

It took me quite a while to arrange the flowers and the leaves.  Guess why?  There's a boo-boo in the lower left on the big hibiscus and I have to use the small one to cover that up.  Oops.

The pattern paper comes from the Florence paper pack.  It will retire after the end of this month.  Grab it while it's still available!  I purposefully wanted to use a more generic sentiment so I used Jennifer's Hand, an alphabet set to create my own sentiment.  We could always use more smiles on our face, right?  I used one of the card sketches in Make it from Your Heart - those patterns make my life A LOT easier.

I'm entering the card to the following challenges:
H2H - Florence
Craft Your Passion - Anything Goes
Stempegarten - flowers/garden

Thanks for stopping by and have a great week!

Halloween

Happy Monday everyone!

Today I'm sharing a Halloween card made with this months' Stamp of the Month Purr-fect Halloween.

I'm using one of my favorite sketches from Originals again.  See another one here.  The patterned paper came from the retired Taste of Summer paper from last year.  I used tone-on-tone stamping to create the pattern on the top orange panel.  Then I colored the cat using regular color pencils and fussy cut it out.

I love this set because you can mix and match the cat eyes and hats.  You can also fill the bracket shape with different sentiments.  Two step stamping is always fun.



I'm entering my card to the following:
Crafty Awesomeness - coloring
A bit more time to craft - anything goes
One Crazy stamper - fall/Halloween

Thanks for stopping by!

Purr-fect Halloween

Let's take a look at the great Purr-fect Halloween stamp set, which is the Stamp of the Month of August:



I love that you could mix and match the images to personalize it!  Imagine you could put the different greetings in the label, different hats and eyes for the cat.  How fun!

Let's look at these great examples made by Close to My Heart Corporation:

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For my mom

This is the card I made for my mom:

I've used the retired Happy Times paper from Close to My Heart, then I've used the tag dies and squre dies from Lawn Fawn.  The flowers are stamps from Altenew.  Boy, I can't tell you how many times I've practiced stamping those layered flowers before I finally found one that's acceptable.

They are fun to play with, and the end result is gorgeous but I needed a lot of practice.  I didn't have the Altenew inks that were designed to work with these stamp sets (its a set of inks of the same family, i.e. light to dark blue), so I have to see which combination of ink pads in my stash works well.  It took me a while to figure that out.

It's all worth it.  It's for my mom, who is my role model, my best friend, and also my biggest fan.

Thanks for stopping by!

More Magical and new Annual Inspirations

I've previously mentioned that the Magical paper is very versatile.  Today I'm sharing yet another project that is not theme park related.

My friend has a cat and a dog.  While he's away, I have done a bit of pet-sitting.  He's about to return and I think it will be fun to make a card for him from the pets' perspective:

Isn't that fun?

This card was extremely easy to make:  I followed one of my favorite patterns from the Originals book, then cut the Magical paper as instructed, then stamped the images to the main panel.  I added some red enamel hearts to the pets.  Finally I added a banner and stamped "Welcome Home" using Etched Alphabet and Jennifer's Hand.  I love these two alphabet sets - they have a lower price point yet the font are neutral.

So there you have it.  Magical paper is really fun and versatile!

The new Annual Inspirations 2016-2017 goes live today.  Click here to enjoy all the great new products!

Thanks for stopping by!