Aloha, all!
When I see a stamp set in a Stampin’ Up! holiday season catalog and its name is, “Festive & Bright,” I think “Christmas.” But the stamp set in the current Stampin’ Up! July – December Mini Catalog with that name also has some dynamite Halloween stamps. The stamp that I’m featuring in today’s post is one of those – the Festive & Bright Stamp Set. And I almost forgot I owned it. The reason for that is that, as I scanned across it in my stamp set cache, I thought, well, “Christmas.”
What a Fun Stamp Bundle!
I wish I wasn’t so wrapped up in planning for and taking my vacation this month. I would have love to take the time before I left to stamp and die-cut this Halloween Witch Hat stamp in different ways. Usually when you see a whole image cut out as this one is, you’re looking at one die that cuts around the entire image. Not so with this bundle. There is one die that cuts the left side of the line of hats and another that cuts the right side. So this stamp can easily form the edge of a card front. Most examples that’s I’ve seen have stamped the image near the right edge of the card front – or one of its layers – and then cut the right side of the stamp to form a new edge for the card. So cool!
Coloring the Hats
What was really fun with this stamp was coloring the Witch Hats. As I frequently do, I looked to the pack of patterned papers that I was going to use as a layer in this card – the Cute Halloween Designer Series Paper set. The colors that I focussed on were Old Olive, Pumpkin Pie, and Highland Heather. I really like that as a Halloween color combo. So off I went to retrieve the Stampin’ Blends alcohol markers in each of those colors. I also needed a color for the brooms. I tried a few of the browns and yellows, and the Daffodil Delight Stampin’ Blends worked just fine for me.
The colors aren’t quite as light in real life as they look here. But I also didn’t want them to be too dark or the little bit of shading that the Blends allowed me to create wouldn’t have shown up at all.
Cutting the Image
As I mentioned, there are two dies to cut out this strip (if you want to make it a strip). However, I found it difficult to cut both of them at once. The one problem I ran into was that, to get the dies to cut as closely as I wanted, they overlapped at the top and bottom. That would make it hard to get it through the Stampin’ Cut and Emboss Machine – or any die-cutting machine. But both dies worked just fine, so it wasn’t that big of a deal.
And The Inside of the Card
I first thought of just cutting one of the hats out of this image and gluing it onto the inside of the card. But stamping is so much easier. Aha, there’s a witch in a current stamp set! So I stamped the witch from the Frightfully Cute Stamp Set at the top of the inside of the card. Hmmm. Witch seemed a bit lonely up there. So why not get the Black Cat from the same set to create a fun tableau. It think it’s, well, cute (a word Stampin’ Up! features in its Halloween products this year).
And I Made More!
I had so much fun with this card that I went ahead and made a few more. I was getting down to the wire with my time for making Halloween cards, and I needed 20 at a minimum. (Did I mention that I bought a 20-stamp sheet of the US Postal Service Halloween stamps this year? I definitely needed 20 cards to use up all those stamps!)
I hope you have had time to make Halloween cards this year. If not, there are still a few more days to get it done!
Whatever you’re making this week, Happy Stamping!
