Lighthearted Christmas

We still have a month left of the Holiday catalogue, but the items on the Holiday catalogue retiring list are only available while stocks last. Today I am sharing a card using two of the retiring sets, Santa's Gifts and Lighthearted Leaves.

If it hasn't been said enough before, I'm adding another voice to the chorus: Lighthearted Leaves is such a versatile set! While the set comes with sentiments, the leaf images can easily be used for a wider variety of occasions. For this card I have used one of the images as mistletoe. For something different, I wanted the outline to be Smoky Slate. So the colour wouldn't run, I stamped the image in  Smoky Slate first, then stamped over the top with VersaMark and then embossed the image with clear embossing powder. One of the great things about photo-polymer stamps, as this set is, is being able to see through and see exactly where you are stamping. This is a little complicated when you are stamping with VersaMark as you can't see the clear ink! So to make it all easier, the Smoky Slate image was stamped with the assistance of the Stamp-a-ma-jig, which I left in place while cleaning the stamp and reinking with VersaMark. By keeping the Stamp-a-ma-jig in position when stamping both images it makes it even easier to have things line up exactly.

Todays colours are...

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Father's Day In The Garden

Anyone else feel like the year is rushing by? I can't believe we are coming up to Father's Day already!

My Dad is a keen gardener, and ever one to buck the system I decided to make a male card with butterflies on it. This card was a lot of fun to make as I took advantage of the flexible nature of photopolymer stamps and varied how it was shaped as I randomly stamped it in Always Artichoke and Garden Green. I even mixed my inks a little as I skipped cleaning the stamp between inking it up, when I wasn't just sponging a bit of the other colour on to give the fronds some colour variation. Cutting out the fronds wasn't quite so much fun, but it is funny how you can zone out and time flies when doing something like that. To create the little sign I simply trimmed down the cardstock after stamping and punching it out. To get the even notches at the top of my "fence" I lightly penciled a line across on the back of the cardstock at the desired distance from the edge, then used the Christmas tree punch cut the little wedge out between the pailings.

Here are the colours I used:

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A Day Stacked With Ice Cream

It's been pretty chilly here lately, and the only way I usually do ice cream in this weather is on the side of some hot dessert (mmm, pie). However, with the new set Sprinkles Of Life I can have the ice cream without the extra chill! Well, I do also miss out on the delicious flavour... I might have to do something about that later...

So for this card, I wanted three scoops, but just to be difficult I wanted the card in the landscape orientation. To help accomodate that I teamed the basket stamp with part of the cone stamp, which I inked up using the Crumb Cake marker. This stamp set is a transparent photo-polymer one, but using such a light colour it was still hard to line things up perfectly, so the handy-dandy Stamp-a-ma-jig ably assisted with that :) To get a light impression on the Vanilla cardstock, since we don't have Vanilla ink I inked the stamp with Crumb Cake and stamped it off on scrap paper a couple of times before stamping on the cardstock.

The ice cream theme dictated the colours they used - they had to be yummy!

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