Stained Glass-esque Delicate Ornament

There are many beautiful products in the Stampin' Up! Holiday Catalogue, but the one thing I absolutely knew I would be top of my list was the Delicate Ornaments framelit dies. The coordinating Embellished Ornaments stamp set is of course lovely as well and available in a bundle with the dies for a 15% saving (which is what I bought!), but I was itching to get my hands on the dies in particular so I could play jigsaw with the little pieces, like I have in the past with the Lace Ribbon Punch and Butterfly Thinlets.

 I'll be popping this card in to go on the display boards at OnStage Local today, and will have a bit of a tutorial up in a few days showing my process for creating things like this. For now, I am off to enjoy my day of Stampin' Up! activities - including some sneaky peeks at the upcoming Occasions catalogue!

Colours used are:

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Lighthearted Birthday

While I think there are a lot of fantastic sets in the Stampin' Up! Holiday catalogue, one of the more popular ones seems to be the Lighthearted Leaves set. I'm not immune to it's charms either!

For this card I didn't colour in the leaves, or cut them out with the coordinating Leaflets Framelits dies. I chose to just randomly stamp the various leaves in in Basic Gray for the card base, and for the feature panel I used a mix of Old Olive, Lost Lagoon... and Cajun Craze. I love playing with all colours, but Cajun Craze is probably my least favourite Stampin' Up! colour. I've tried using it before but really wasn't happy with the end result. This time I was much happier, and that was even before I put vellum over it! Sometimes what makes or breaks a colour combination is how you balance the colours: how much you use of the colours and where you put them. Using a lot of white is one trick to try if you aren't sure of a combination, but for this card I was determined to give Cajun Craze a fair showing. Unfortunately the background was a little busy and made reading the "happy" difficult, so I softed things with the layer of vellum. I didn't have a current set with "birthday" in a font or size that really worked with everything else, so I went back to the trusty Basic Phrases for that one.

Here's the graphic for the colour combo:

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Cupcake At The End Of The Rainbow

It's well past time I cracked open my Over The Rainbow set, and once I got this idea I just had to make it...

A cupcake is a far tastier treat to find at the end of a rainbow! Most of this card is pretty straight forward, but I got a little creative to make the rainbow. I inked up the rainbow "stripe" stamp from Over The Rainbow in one colour, then wiped a lot of the colour off with a tissue before sponging on the next colour. When I stamped the subsequent "stripes" I overlapped them. So for the first stripe I inked in Real Red, wiped some off the lower edge and sponged on Pumpkin Pie in it's place. I then cleaned the stamp, inked up in Daffodil Delight and wiped off some ink from the upper edge and sponged on Pumpkin Pie in it's place... and so on to finish the seven colours of the rainbow. For the sun I sponged a little Pumpkin Pie in the center after inkling it up with Daffodil Delight ink.

Todays loooong list of colours:

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