Aloha, all!
Now that I've got Christmas out of the way (well, for at least a couple of months!), I'm finally getting to play with my new fall-themed products from Stampin' Up! I just love fall colors – probably better than the colors for any other season of the year. Being out here in Hawaii, I really miss the fall leaves from the Shenandoah Valley and Skyline Drive in Virginia. There was a year when my husband was a doctoral student at Virginia Tech and I lived in the Washington, DC, area. I loved the drive down Interstate 81 in the fall to visit him – there just can be no more beautiful Interstate drive anywhere!
Now, however, I have to leave it to my paper crafting to give me a taste of the fall colors that I love so well. And who better to provide the products for that than Stampin' Up!
I don't even know where to start with this card – although I should probably start with the idea for the layout that I got from the September 2012 issue of CardMaker magazine. But the images for that card had to be hand cut – and these leaves from Stampin' Up! were die cut with the Sizzix Autumn Accents Bigz Die. No, the leaves are NOT part of a framelits die set – they're in a traditional die format. But using my Stamp-a-ma-jig helped get the stamped images somewhat centered on the Very Vanilla Card Stock that I cut with the die.
The stamp set for the leaves is the Wonderfall Stamp Set from the Stampin' Up! Holiday Catalog. Ooooh, I love plaids, too. And now that I look at this card, I've decided that my next project with this leaf image is going to use the "Rock and Roll" inking technique.
But enough of that – now for the papers! Both sheets of Designer Series Paper are from the Orchard Harvest Paper Set. The colors in this set include the colors that I used for stamping the leaves and the colors of two of the buttons that I used to accent them: Cajun Craze, More Mustard and Lucky Limeade. Two of the buttons are from the Regals Designer Buttons (Cajun Craze and More Mustard), and one is the Old Olive Button from the Brights Designer Buttons. I tied a small piece of Linen Thread through each of the buttons.
Now for the other "stamped" image. That's not a stamp! No, it's an image that I created using My Digital Studio 2. There is one thing that I did with this "stamp" image from the Autumn Harvest digital set: I used two colors on the same stamp. So now what I can do with a rubber image and Stampin' Write Markers, I can do with My Digital Studio images. There's a way to "brush" on different colors. It's called the "Coloring Tool" and so far it's my favorite new tool. So anyway – I colored the whole stamp in Lucky Limeade (just like we used to do with the original My Digital Studio) and then used the coloring tool to color in the leaf and its stem using Cajun Craze. I then placed the whole stamped image on a digital Modern Label"punch" with a "mat" of Cajun Craze. I stretched the digital image just a tad so that I could punch the whole thing (printed on Very Vanilla Card Stock) using my regular Modern Label Punch.
After that I went a little bit crazy, and stopped just to do some coloring on a digital stamp I bought just for this purpose. I'll share that image and how I went about making it over the weekend. Just too much fun!
And where's the ribbon to tie the card together you might ask? It's definitely there – along both vertical edges of the Very Vanilla strip on which I've adhered the leaves.
Oh I'm so busy these days that I've not had as much time for playing with My Digital Studio. But for sure I'm going to make some time over the next couple of weeks and I'll be sharing my efforts with you, along with my regular paper-and-ink cards!