Delightfully Detailed Golden wedding anniversary card

I don’t normally do card commissions but my Mum laid on the emotional blackmail pretty thickly so I caved in for this one. To tell the truth, I’d agreed to create a golden wedding anniversary card before the true scale of the job was revealed. Gold-themed card? No problem. “With their names on...” Aaaaaaagh!

I have known Jean and Tony all my life so know Jean isn’t a fan of bright colours and favours pastels. (She also likes frogs but I held back, despite the temptation of using Animal Outing...) So I created a gentle watercolour wash background and, thankfully, managed to stamp their names right first time using the Pick a Pennant stamp set.

You may recognise the watercoloured background from these projects, which were made from the leftover pieces.

You can’t see from the photo but I have applied Wink of Stella all over the laser-cut DSP to give a hint of glitz, and the sequins and gold “celebrate” are a further reinforcement that this is for a 50th anniversary celebration.

I Think You're Great gift bag and card

I’m typing this at night, trying to ignore the irritated flapping of a moth trapped inside the lampshade. As somebody wiser than me once said, if they like the light so much, why don’t they come out in the day?

But we can’t always see what’s good for us - which is probably why it took me a good two years to learn to like Calypso Coral. And now, here it is, adorning a card alongside Hello Honey and Lost Lagoon. 

I confess that I didn’t make the card you see below.  My involvement was limited to fetching items from the cupboard for Kelly to use. I did decorate the bag, though. I even used the Stamp-a-ma-jig to line up the pattern on the tag!

The bag was an idea I picked up at Stampin’ Up!® training day last weekend. It was Shetland demonstrator Rhoda MacPherson who provided the inspiration; she suggested carrying business information inside a card in a bag similar to this so you can hand it to anybody you happen to strike up a conversation with, as soon as you manage to steer the conversation around to crafting, that is. 

I need to practise this more so, to challenge myself, this evening I made eight cards to go into eight bags, which I hope to hand out over the next few weeks. Wish me luck!

These polka dot bags are retired and sold out now so I was using them up, but there are plain ones in the new catalogue and, even more excitingly, some translucent bags with white polka dots. They’re on the list for 2nd June when the full catalogue goes live!

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15 Stampin' Up!® products you can used for Mixed Media projects

Yes you CAN use SU products for mixed media, as I’ve been enjoying finding out lately. I decided to make a list of some of the items you can use. I bet you already have loads of these, so what are you waiting for? Get messy!

Mixed Media flower garden with THREE Sale-a-Bration items

It’s a long one today, and a surprisingly complicated project. No, you haven’t come to the wrong blog, I just fancied a change!

For a while now, I’ve been intrigued by mixed media techniques, but I wasn’t sure how to blend it with Stampin’ Up!® products. My dabbling began with my foray into texture paste but it wasn’t until this week that I had chance to have a proper play. 

But where to begin? Of course, Pinterest came to the rescue. Pinterest has really opened my eyes to a lot of new techniques. Sometimes I just click the search button and then “DIY and Crafts”… it’s amazing what you discover this way! 

This time, I simply searched “mixed media” and after browsing a few blogs, this is my first attempt, which takes inspiration (pinspiration!) from this blog post. Despite normally leaning towards the clean and simple style, I really enjoyed creating this project and it turns out I had almost everything I needed in my SU stash, as you’ll see from the supplies list below. I even managed to include, count ’em, THREE Sale-a-Bration items - can you spot them without reading the list below?

The great thing about this sort of project is that it’s very difficult to go wrong. Well, I say that, but Sunday’s attempt ended up on the fire! 

Happily, today’s project was a little more successful, so here’s a step-by-step guide to creating this project. No pictures, I’m afraid, I was having way too much fun!

1. Cut a piece of watercolour paper to 12.5cm square and wet it
2. Using Coastal Cabana and Wild Wasabi re-inkers diluted with a tiny amount of water, paint rough horizontal stripes across the paper. You can add more to strengthen the colour if you wish. Allow to dry, or speed it up with a heat gun
3. Take some bubble wrap and ink it up with Coastal Cabana at the top right. Repeat with Old Olive at the bottom. 
4. Stamp the solid stem from Lotus Blossom (SAB) in Garden Green. Stamp a few more with the less solid stem, stamping off as required. I also sponged a little Garden Green in the bottom two corners to fill in some gaps. 
5. Punch out six bird wings from Flowerpot DSP, and one 3/4” circle. Doodle around the inside edge of the circle. Arrange the wings to resemble a flower and stick them down. Doodle around the edges. Put the circle of DSP to one side for now. 
6. On Very Vanilla cardstock, Stamp “Our friendship is a very happy thing” from the A Happy Thing stamp set (SAB) in black ink. Cut out the words and adhere them to the project. 
7. To get the newsprint effect, you will need real newspaper. Tear into small pieces, then apply smears of Mod Podge (Tombow might work, too – I didn’t try it) roughly to the background. Put the paper, face down, to the Mod Podge and rub it with your bone folder to transfer the ink. Gently peel back the paper to leave the ink behind. You may end up peeling away some of the colour but this doesn’t matter. 
8. I found that I had some shiny patches around the newsprint so decided to Mod Podge over the whole surface. This takes some time to dry and gives the whole background a slightly glossy effect. 
9. Apply sequins (I simply pressed these into the Mod Podge).
10. With the Chalk Marker, doodle around the sequins and words.
11. To make the frame, I glued some Typeset DSP to some Very Vanilla cardstock (using the glue stick) and used the two largest dies from the Square Framelits set to cut out a frame. Ink it with Baked Brown sugar and then press the whole lot into a Versamark pad so it can be embossed with clear embossing powder. 
12. Cut some grass from Old Olive cardstock using the Fringe Scissors, then taper the ends with your Stampin’ Snips. Stick this behind the frame (I used washi tape).
13. Attach the frame to the front of the project using Stampin’ Dimensionals, cut in half (Ha! Like I don’t do that all the time!).
14. Using the In Color Accessory pack (SAB), separate some of the threads from the Hello Honey twine and thread through a Tangelo Twist button. Attach to the DSP circle and then to the project. 
15. Mount your finished piece on a 5 1/4” square card base of Kraft cardstock.
16. Make a cup of tea and have a sit down before having a go at another one!

tams# 2911

Product List

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Bokeh technique with Big Day

At Crafty Friday (my easygoing Friday morning class) this month, we played with the bokeh technique. 

Like many fabulous ideas, the word ‘bokeh’ comes from Japan and literally means ‘blur’. You see this effect in photography, in the out-of-focus sections of an image. Sometimes this creates circles of light, which is the look we are going for when trying this technique. 

It looks like a complicated technique but it really isn’t.  All you have to do is create a multi-coloured background and then sponge the circles in Whisper White craft ink on top, using a template or stencil. 

We tried two ways of creating the background: watercolour paper and reinkers was the first; sponging on Whisper White was the second. 

This is the watercolour paper technique and I followed an excellent tutorial by Diane Dimich.  After wetting a piece of watercolour paper, we dabbed small amount of ink onto it, to watch it spread. As Diane says in her tutorial, keep going until the whole surface is covered, and the colours will blend into each other. 

Once this was dry (we speeded it up with a heat gun), we sponged through some Window Sheets to create the circles. These look best when overlapped in certain places, but you have to let the ink dry or be very careful not to spread the white around when you move your template. 

And that’s it! This was the first time I’d tried this technique and I was really happy with the way it turned out. I used it to create this card for my downline, Alison (Patsy), whose birthday is today. Sadly, I completely forgot to post it to her so she’ll have to wait! 

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