Five projects with the Simply Succulents bundle

 

I’m a day late with this blog post but you know what? I think I am going to switch to Tuesdays as it will give me my weekends back. It’s obvious when you think about it really.

Anyway, I’ve had a really busy weekend with my BOGOF sale for customers and an actual outing to meet friends for a socially distanced dog walk and picnic, which was lovely. This is why I’m a day behind, but now I am here, I want to show you this gorgeous Simply Succulents bundle, which is very enticing – I keep seeing more and more gorgeous projects with them.

They are in the Jan-June Mini Catalogue from Stampin' Up!® but I'm pleased to say that both elements carry over into the new Annual Catalogue. 

 

 

However, I must warn you that they are only available as a bundle for the duration of the Mini catalogue so hurry along if you want to save 10% by buying them together. 

 

 

This card uses a fun technique which gets extra mileage out of your dies. Die-cut the large pattern using any cardstock, then use it as a mask for embossing paste. Remove the mask and allow the paste to dry to create this interesting textured effect. 

The foliage behind the greeting label is created with dies, too – they are coloured with watercolour pencils to make them stand out. The greeting is stamped and embossed in white onto Bumblebee cardstock (one of my favourite colours!).

 

This project, too, uses white embossing for this stunning watercolour effect. Begin by embossing the image with white embossing powder, then heat set. Now it can be coloured using ink and Water Painters (or a wet paintbrush); just make sure you allow each colour to dry before switching to the next one. This is coloured using Old Olive, Mint Macaron, Highland Heather and Pool Party. 

 

 

This treat bag is decorated with a cut-out image of succulents and tied with Baker’s Twine. The image is stamped in Memento Black and coloured with Stampin’ Blends in Calypso Coral, Soft Sea Foam, Daffodil Delight, Old Olive and Smoky Slate. 

 

 

This is a much simpler project, but no less effective. It uses a rich Cinnamon Cider card base stamped on top using Gorgeous Grape ink, which sounds radical but works really well. 

 

See that cool striped Designer Series Paper behind the greeting? That’s just a piece of Mint Macaron cardstock with some hand-drawn lines using a Dark Just Jade Stampin’ Blends Marker. Be brave and you too can make hand-drawn patterned paper for your projects!

 

Sticking with the same colour scheme, this is a Mint Macaron card base with the image stamped in Gorgeous Grape and coloured with Light and Dark Just Jade Stampin’ Blends. You can use Stampin’ Blends with any water-based ink pad, so they are ideal for colouring images stamped in any of our core colours.

Does your wish list come to more than £99? 

 

There’s a fabulous deal at the moment which gets you LOTS of lovely craft supplies of your choice. Please get in touch and I will help you get more for your money and unlock discounts all year round.  

 

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Starburst Christmas card with Pine Woods Dies

Crafty Friday finally happened! We had to postpone for a week because some of the kits took SO LONG to arrive. In fact we gave up on one of them and my husband drove another one over to the lady's house; inevitably, the first kit arrived in the post the next day! It had taken nine days to arrive.

I’ll only show you one of the cards we made here as the other one was a direct copy of this. 

Yes, we were sponging again and I thought it was a good opportunity to have a go at the Starburst technique. We all began by making our templates. I always take a pretty rough and ready approach to crafting, winging it as I go. One lady, however, measured all her angles using a protractor! It was to be expected, I suppose, as she is a retired maths teacher.

These are the three stages of template making. Others have suggested making these out of window sheets or other acetate but I’m not convinced; I think that would allow ink to pool and make it more likely to smudge and blob.

We sponged on to the Pretty Peacock cardstock in whatever colour ink we had to hand. I had Pretty Peacock, of course (to me, ink pads are like Pokemon; gotta catch ’em all!)  but others achieved good results with Just Jade and the now retired Island Indigo. I really like this colour combination; Pretty Peacock, Just Jade and just a splash of red. 

 

The greeting panel is from the same die set as the sprigs of evergreen; the Beautiful Boughs dies, which was released last year but never goes out of style. 

I ran out of the red ribbon from the All The Trimmings Ribbon Combo Pack which I’d used for the samples as I’d had to donate my prepared kit due to the postal issues. Therefore, during the actual session, I used this gorgeous Just Jade gingham from the Flowers For Every Season Ribbon Combo Pack instead.

These Pine Woods Dies are one of my favourite products ever. Both of these trees have open foliage which pops out but, as you can see, the back one, in Mint Macaron, has retained these pieces. That’s because I was lazy and didn’t clean out the die. But you know what? I like the effect!

 

To get the greeting, from In The Pines, onto two separate lines, you have severa; options. The stamp set is photopolymer, so cutting it up is really easy. But that felt a bit drastic for one card. Another option is to mask each section off using tape or a sticky note, but that is fraught with danger. Instead, I inked and stamped each word separately using a Stampin’ Write Marker, cleaning the stamp very thoroughly in between. 

 

If you’d like to order anything you see here, please visit my store and, if shopping in November 2020, please use the host code RMK743TS. The host code allows me to earn Stampin’ Rewards which I use to order thank you gifts for my online customers.

10 quick cards using Flowers for Every Season Memories & More Cards

Socially distant crafty get-togethers have been a bit of a life-saver during lockdown; it’s so lovely to meet up with other crafters via Zoom to create our projects.

For the past five weeks I have been running a One O’Clock Club on Tuesdays, where we make two quick cards at each session. These quick cards are easy to recreate at home with Stampin’ Up!®’s Flowers for Every Season Memories & More cards.

My first One O’Clock Club series comes to an end this week but I will be starting another round soon using the Whale of a Time Suite – please get in touch ASAP if you’d like to join in. This time the projects will be repeated in a Saturday session, so you can hop in and out of Tuesdays and the Saturday to fit around your other plans.

Check out the projects we made...

We’ve been using the Flowers for Every Season Memories & More cards from Stampin’ Up!®, along with the Flowers for Every Season Memories & More cards and envelopes, with guests using their own greeting stamps and ink pads. Week 1 saw us use Bumblebee and Cinnamon Cider – two great new In Colors™ which work really well together.

One of the great things about these Memories & More Cards – from the Flowers for Every Season Suite – is that they use the new In Colors™, so many of the people who took part in my In Color Shares had their new ink pads to play with.

For this project, we used ‘Feeling’ from the sticker sheet and cut out word strips from one of the Memories & More cards. The flowers and leaves are white stickers which we sponged using yellow and green inks.

It’s no secret that Magenta Madness is my least favourite new In Color™ – I’m just not a pink fan at all. But I have to say I am warming to it, and think it packs a certain punch when used in small doses. No small doses for this project though! It’s a bit more subtle in this one...

It was all about the blues in Week 3, when we focused on Misty Moonlight. The Memories & More card does all the work here, with just a simple greeting stamped onto one of the stickers from the sheet which comes in the pack.

I really love the sunflower pattern on this card. The greeting comes on the sticker sheet and we stuck it to some Misty Moonlight cardstock, then cut freehand around it to create an on-trend border.

The colour combo is simple here: just the Poppy Parade of the Memories & More card, with white and the silver edged card base. The Tasteful Labels dies do a lot of the work here. Don’t have those yet? Trust me, you really need them!  

You have have already noticed that once again I broke my personal rule not to use retired products. However, in these unprecedented times (aren’t you just SICK of hearing that?), I thought it would be ok to take advantage of the foil-edged cards and envelopes being heavily discounted at retiring time, so I could keep costs down for the guests. I stocked up big time but have completely run out now!

It’s our last session tomorrow and we’re finishing off with two Just Jade cards. The sunflowers get another outing; they’re fussy-cut from two different Memories & More cards and the big greeting is from Rooted in Nature.

It’s another appearance for the monochromatic look, too – this time in mellow Just Jade with a flower sticker to finish off. The Stitched Nested Labels dies provide layers to house the greeting, from the Tasteful Touches stamp set.

If you’re in the UK you are more than welcome to join my Zoom sessions – because with Zoom, location is no barrier. I’ve had several new ladies join me who can’t normally come to my events due to transport issues. 

And if you’re already a demonstrator, I hope this post has inspired you to try your own distance classes and workshops. Every guest received half a pack of Memories & More cards, half a pack of Memories & More cards and envelopes, plus card bases, cardstock, ribbon and embellishments. I did all the die-cutting in advance so the projects were really speedy – just right for a lunch break for those homeworkers out there!

Forever Greenery - letting the dies and DSP do the work

Staying with the Forever Greenery theme... I realised I never showed you the Make & Take from my catalogue launch party last month. It's a simple note card decorated with just die-cut pieces and Designer Series Paper, to allow me to send out prepared kits for guests. They used their own stamp set to stamp a greeting.

The Forever Fern stamp set has been consistently in the top-selling stamp sets since the launch of of the new Annual Catalogue and with very good reason. Do you have yours yet?

Die-cut your leaves then trim them into smaller pieces for even greater versatility.

In Color™ Shares - and a time-saving tip for the Lovely Labels Pick a Punch

These bookmarks show off the new In Colors™ well and are inspired by the project on page 140 of the new Annual Catalogue. I don’t have the new ink pads yet as they weren’t available to pre-order but I got a similar look using Versamark; a must-have ink pad which creates a watermark effect.

I am very much loving the new In Colors™ and was excited to present my 50 new colour combinations to the world at the weekend. You can find them here.

 
I am also excited to present my annual In Color™ shares, with three fabulous options to get your hands on the brand new products. I will be ordering soon, so please get in touch if you’re in the UK and would like one.

 

The new Lovely Labels Pick a Punch got some heavy use for these bookmarks (I made way more than you see here!). This clever punch works with three widths and produces two different label ends. So a great time-saving tip is to punch two strips at the same time.