Color Fusers Blog Hop August 2016-Part 1

Aloha, all!

     I am so excited to be part of a fun, new twice-monthly blog hop with a group called the Color Fusers. In this blog hop, each of us will be sharing with you a project of our own design that uses three Stampin' Up! colors. Not only is this a lot of fun, it really is a challenge for me because I almost always freeze when I'm told that I have to use certain colors and only those colors. Yikes! But I decided it's time to get over that silliness and join this wonderful group for the blog hop!

     There will be two blog hops this month, and the color challenge for both of them is to use Cherry Cobbler, Smoky Slate and Watermelon Wonder. Wow, what a great combination! And I immediately thought about one particular stamp set and the combination turned out just the way I'd hope it would.

     I'm sure you've already noticed that I used TWO stamp sets for this project. The set I originally thought of was the the Jar of Love Stamp Set, as I thought that any of the jar images would look great stamped in Smoky Slate. From there I was going to use the stems and flowers in the same stamp set and mix up the two reds of the challenge. But once I had figured out my layout, I realized that I needed a larger flower than those in the Jar of Love stamp set. I think that a small layer, such as the layer die cut with the Lots of Labels Framelits set, looks more effective if some of the stamped images peek out over the edge of the die-cut layer, and I needed a larger flower for that to happen here.

     So back I went to my stamp set shelf and quickly found another new set, the Penned and Painted Stamp Set. With this set I could also do a much better job of "fusing" the two reds in one flower.

     The flowers and leaves in the Penned and Painted Stamp Set each has not just two stamps (as in Two-Step Stampin') but it has three! If you look at samples, both in the catalog and elsewhere online, you'll see that any two of the three stamps work nicely together. But for the two flowers I wanted to use for this project, I used all three.

• First, I stamped the outline using Cherry Cobbler Classic Ink.
• Second, I stamped the large fill stamp using Watermelon Wonder Classic Ink. But I first stamped the ink off once lightly on scrap paper before stamping it over the outline stamp.
• Finally, I stamped the small fill stamp, again using Watermelon Wonder Classic Ink, but I stamped it onto the large fill stamp fully inked.

     I cut the two flowers out by hand, and then constructed the rest of the card before adhering them using Stampin' Dimensionals. The flower stem in the background is from the Jar of Love stamp set, and I stamped this by first inking up the whole stamp using Smoky Slate, then "erasing" the bud-like ends of the branches using a Blender Pen, before coloring the buds using my Cherry Cobbler Stampin' Write Marker.

     In my first try at the little jar, I stamped the "Thanks" stamp (from the Jar of Love stamp set) directly over the flower stems. But I didn't like the way it worked. So I stamped the sentiment on a plain piece of Whisper White Cardstck and cut it out close to the words before adhering it to the jar using Fast Fuse Adhesive.

     Oh, and I can't forget to tell you where that beautifully floral printed paper came from! It's one of the sheets in the A Little Foxy Designer Series Paper Stack! That's a set that's almost as much fun as making this project was!

     Here are all the members of the Color Fusers Blog Hop, and you will be wowed by every project! I hope you'll take the time to visit and comment on each and every one.

• Patty Bennett
• Jason Loucks
• Heather Osborne
• Nicole Tugrul
• Tammy Civello
• Paola Phillips
• Jo Anne Hewins
• Melissa Kerman
• Robin Messenheimer – you are here!

 

     The stamp sets and designer series paper I used for this project are brand new and fabulous! The Lots of Labels Framelits are now new, but still provide a fabulous background for central images.