A Touch of Winter

It is time for Flourishes release party this week.........the first peek of the week is A Year in Flowers Calendar set 1 .
This week I have combined a new stamp set with SCS color and design challenges. Christmas is coming fast, even though the outside temp is in the high 70's today. So it is all about saving time this month. One card for three different events saves time!
The stamp set comes with four different flowers all approx the same size, 2 " x 2" for a variety of uses. Here I have paired January's crocus with barely banana, raspberry, and artichoke papers. The image was stamped then colored. I covered the area around the floral image with a square cut from copy paper and used an air compressor to add Copic E97 and a SU artichoke marker to "recolor" the yellow background paper while leaving the immediate area surrounding the crocus the original color.
I have used cuttle bug embossing folder, Spellbinders frame die and Spellbinders fancy tags to add interest with a little metal Finishing Touches.

Thank you for stopping by and check out more at Flourishes.blogspot.com for many more Calendar ideas.

Finally, it has been soooooo long since my last post I will have to see if I remember how to do this. But first a tid bit of advice.......if you happen to break your camera lens close, I mean even two months away, from Christmas.......don't wait to replace it. Go out immediately and buy a new one or you will have to wait till after Christmas or special order it. Bah humbug! No one has it in stock.
Now I am reduced to taking pictures with my little Sony Cyber shot... you know....that camera I thought was just the best thing for all my scrap book pictures, and it was for some time when I was taking all my pictures outside.
Once I started taking more and more pictures inside, I found that the flash was just not good enough and besides I had a 35mm camera.............that took film pictures............that you had to develop and throw out all the bad shots. Now, once I started making cards I found out in a big hurry that a 35mm nor a small digital was not giving me the quality type of shots I needed for Webb posting. I am not very good at dealing with lighting, sun light or indoor light, I like my 35mm digital where I can be a foot away from the card and still get a good flash shot at night!
whine whine whine I'll get the glasses and you can join me......... At least I have a back up camera.

I played along this week on SCS color challenge of Very Black Suede. I would not have thought I would like the combination for a Christmas card as much as I do ...........even though I planned on doing just that.
I started with Flourishes Classic Ivory Card stock, stamped the image on the left side of card using rich cocoa, then I stamped it a second time, then a third time before I re-inked my image and stamped twice on the right side of the panel, I was wanting the "forest" to have some depth to it.
The deer and sleigh was stamped right over the trees, no masking which makes it fast. I stamped a second image of half of the sleigh, colored it, cut is out and place over the first stamped image. Walla.....it keeps the trees from showing though. I daubed around the edge of my planel with close to cocoa, then took the chcolate chip ink pad and ran it over the edges.


I finished of with faux suede ribbon and a ribbon slide from Finishing Touches that I colored with Copics, I only have the silver slides.
I have also seen numerous cards using Spellbinder dies in many clever ways, If you don't believe me than take a look at the Flourish newsletter for an excellent example. I used the fancy tag to finish off the look.

Thanks for continuing to check on my blog, I will try to get more posted............with decent pictures

Christmas Bouquet

Christmas from Flourishes! We have more to show you and what could be a better start to Flourishes sneak peek week than a floral from Marcella's sketch book.

This is a simple card using just white as the base card and image layer and red as a background layer, with plenty of green in my coloring and ribbon. Copic's give me the color depth in my images that I have come to expect with my color medium of choice.
Christmas Bouquet is my favorite of the month, in fact I used it for my ATC swap too.


Christmas Bouquet comes in two sizes and both are easy to color. If you are making just one or many what better way to celebrate than with a Christmas Bouquet.

Flourishes newsletter will provide more looks at a Winter Bouquet.





Flourishes design team have come up with more to see with this beautiful set.

Sketch With a Purpose

Which comes first.................? The image or the sketch design?

In this case it was the stamped images that I had colored and "matted", then I to find a sketch design to show case them! I turned to SCS with all of their sketch challenges. It makes it easy just to go to the thread that has all of the challenges listed by number.
I went down the line, well I stated close to the bottom, until I found a sketch that would work. The sketch I found was SC248, that seemed to fit very well with the two images I had stamped.

I stamped the image with SU true thyme, then colored them with atyouspica glitter pens. You are able to see just a hint of sparkle, click on the image to see it better. The best thing about this card, for me anyway, was the fact that I used some of those snowflake brads that I have had for a number of years.

I could have done much better on the picture, but I got my foot tangled in my cell phone cord (it was charging on my work table) and pulled it off onto the floor. Yikes!!! My camera came off the table with it. They both fell onto a carpeted floor so when I picked them up everything looked OK. It wasn't until I got ready to take a picture of my finished card that I saw the lens to my camera was bend at an angle...........not good. It will no longer auto focus, so here I am moving my whole body back an forth trying to get my card into focus.

I do have a long range lens for my camera but the closest I can take a picture is from 30 feet away...........not good! Do I see an early Christmas present in my future??? I Believe!

Thank you for stopping by.

Time for A Challenge

As soon as I went to the site for SCS inspiration challenge for Saturday I knew I would play along. Franz Porcelain has so very many beautiful pieces that I have to talk myself out of buying something every time I look at one of them. This card instead, along with taking pictures to show how I color with Copic markers using the color collections as sold at Flourishes. I used the Poppy collection for the poinsettias as well as a couple of markers from the soon to be released Fuchsia collection.

The first thing I do is to lay down the lightest shade in which ever collection I will use, in this case it is R20 blush (as shown at the bottom left). As you can see this first picture shows the four stages of coloring I used for the poinsettia.

When I am coloring with Copics, I like to hold all (or most) of the markers I am going to be using in one hand. That allows me to color fast, especially when I have so many flowers to color. And, when I am coloring I do not work on more than 1 image (if it is small) or 2 at the most. Copic's blend their best while they are wet, and being alcohol they dry fairly fast. That is not to say it is impossible to blend more images (like I am doing with these four and taking pictures too) at a time, I just don't want to use more ink than I have too. There is always the blender that you can use....although I have not mastered that...I find I lighten areas TOO much when I use it.

After I lay down the color with my 1st marker I go back and use the next darker shade, R24 prawn (I think, why is the writing so small, it is hard for older eyes to see) . Sometimes I will blend the two colors using the lighter shade(R20), not this time.

I went to R29 to add color in the areas I wanted a little darker, then using R39 I touched up the darkest areas of the poinsettia where I wanted depth.

That is when I went back to R24 to blend all the colors together, that "smooths" out the color transition from lightest to darkest which allows the dimension of the shades to pop!

I knew I wanted to use the poinsettia's as a "frame" but I did not know around what or what shape of what to do with the rest of the image! My inspiration comes from this Franz Porcelain plate.

I hope you enjoy my card as much as I enjoyed making it.

Thank you for stopping by.

The first thing I would like to do is say how much I admire all of you woman out there that have jobs, little kids and a household to run ......WOW! How do you do it? Or maybe I had forgotten how tired and stressed you can get trying to fit everything in, then on top of it all..... many have extra curricular activities.......with more than one child!

I have had two of my grandchildren for the last four days while their parents are on a cruise....de-stressing....from their jobs and raising kids and dealing with extended families. I am just about "played out"!

I have to admit that I have more time and am willing to spend time playing and not worrying about the house work and mess. It can all get done once the kids are back home.

I had my card done at the middle of last week, but ran out of time to get it posted, well that and I thought I would wait until the DT from Flourishes posted their "fancy folds" cards. I just didn't find the time to spend that long on the computer. I have a 4 year old that wants to do his e-mail every time I do mine.

This is not a hard fancy fold to do, especially with double sided designer paper. I cut one 4.25x11 piece from a 12x12 (I do not have any double sided 8.5x11 paper) sheet of paper. And folded in half with the folded edge on the bottom.

The kraft paper measures 4.25x8.5, then used a Martha Stewart border punch along the short edge.

The kraft paper was adhered to the back and folded over the top front. I cut 6 designs from Spellbinders Flourished accent and arranged them in a circle pattern. The bird with the blue back layer was a left over piece of 7gypies paper from another card.

The inside card holder is designed the same as the front panel, with it being just large enough to hold a gift card for that special someone.

Late Night & Early Morning

After the release party over at Flourishes forum on SCS, I was so wired I could not go to sleep. They were kind enough to post the inspiration challenge early enough for me to play along before retiring for the night.

I took a look at Xenia Taler site for decorative tiles and ideas starting coming to mind, lol....in reality the ideas in my mind did not start out to be these finished cards. I may get to my original idea sometime this week, I guess the blue of the late night appealed to me more.

I air brushed the background with Copic B99, then I inked the tree with Night of Navy Craft ink. I did not plan on using SU craft ink but it was late and I just grabbed, as soon as I smushed my stamp into the pad I knew it was not the "right" one. Craft pads are a lot more "juicy" than classic pads, most of the time it is "too much ink"! To my surprise it was just the right amount of ink for the fur tree. I will be using craft pads more on the stamps I find a little difficult to get full coverage when using the drier pads.
Whew...saved, I was ready to get rid of my craft pads because I have not used them much in the three years that I have had them.
The Flourishes deer is stamped with navy and colored with Copic B99. As you can see, I have masked off for the moon before air brushing, and the tree before stamping the deer.

After a late night of stamping, It still took me awhile to fall asleep, of course it could not be the fact that my feet were freezing and the had windows open and the fans going. Not sure the what the temps were last night but it is only 50 degrees now.
Maybe that is why I was up before daylight to make another challenge card. This one took me quite a bit more time to design. I have trouble finding papers to match my colored designs, I will have to try picking papers first then colors for the stamps.
This card is more dependent on the embellishments to "highlight" stamped image than the last card. Not sure which one I like the best! What do you think?

Stamps:
1.Flourished Christmas, Forest of Trees
2. Summer Blossoms

Ink:
1. Night of Navy, Copic B99
2. ballet blue, burgundy

Paper:
1. classic white, night of navy
2. classic white, cranberry, Memory Box dp

Embellishments
1. none
2. ribbon, pearls, sentiment, popped up embellishment from dp cut with Spellbinder inverted circle

It was a late night and early morning, now I have to get to work!