Aloha, all!
Two events have crossed paths in my Craft Room this first week in November, and today I get to talk about them both!
FIRST – It's, once again, time for the biweekly Stampin' Up! Only Challenge. The theme for this month of Thanksgiving in the United States is, "Thankful." I truly love making greeting cards with Fall colors, and our Thanksgiving time provides the perfect occasion for many types of cards.
SECOND – We're in the first week of offering Stampin' Up!'s newest product – Stampin' Blends – for sale. These are Stampin' Up!'s newest and best alcohol markers that coordinate with Stampin' Up! colors. Over to the right there's a link to a page with much more information about these wonderful projects. Stampin' Up! demonstrators have had them already for several weeks and we're just having a blast with them. It makes coloring projects so easy to shade.
That's how I came to have this particular card, colored with Stampin' Blends for the new SUO Challenge!
Last year I made quite a few cards using this beautiful basket of gourds from the Basket of Wishes Stamp Set. But this year I could actually shade them much better, including adding several colors that blend together so well (thus the markers are called Stampin' BLENDS!).
Here is a sample of the colors that I used for this project as I started designing this card.
Once I finished coloring the basket, I decided to use one of the papers from the Wood Textures Designer Series Paper Stack as a mat for the colored-in stamped image as well as the sentiment, from the same stamp set. After that I just matted it with the Pumpkin Pie and Old Olive Cardstock, both colors in the stamped image, tie them with some of the Jute Twine that's in the Stampin' Up! Holiday Catalog, and mount it all on a Whisper White Cardbase. I have to tell you that that was just about the ugliest card I have made in years. Oh, I've made some doozies. But this one just took the cake. I have no idea what I was thinking when I just lined all those images up on a matted card. So, no, that's not what you see on this page.
What you do see on this page is the central design that I rescued from the less than wonderful card. I had to lighten up and bit and make the card a lot more interesting if I was going to show it off anywhere buy in my craft room (even then I might have hid it somewhere). So I found a lovely Old Olive Print in the Petal Garden Designer Series Paper Stack. When I went looking for something else to add to the layering, I finally found what I really wanted and that was a bit of bling for the design – Gold! I first added one of the Gold Foil Snowflakes from the Stampin' Up! 2017 Holiday Catalog.
For my second piece of gold, I got out my Gold Metallic Thread and played around with it a bit trying to make it work between the two stamped elements on the card front. Then I remembered all the cording I had made when I used to do counted thread work, and made some gold cording out of the thread. For those of you who make cording, I used three 30" pieces of the thread, folded the group in half and twisted the threads until it was a fairly lightly-wound cord. I let it fold back on itself. It was plenty long to be able to wrap in around to the back of the stamped layer and the wood print paper and adhere it in the back.
Once I added the stamped layers to the card using Stampin' Dimensionals, I added several Gold sequins from the Metallic Sequins Assortment.
This card is SOOO much better than the original. And, no, I didn't photograph that one before I started. It just wasn't worth a photograph. But the stamped and colored design was definitely worth keeping. I'll be sharing some more projects with Stampin' Blends later this week, with a bit more information about our best new product for this fall (my humble opinion).
Here are the products I feature in this project. Let me know if I can answer any questions about any of them – and even the Stampin' Blends!
