Jingle Belles - my true love gave to me

 Playing along with the Jingle Belles true love challenge and I may have gone a bit overboard...I did hearts and all of the 12 days of Christmas so that I came out with 12 matchy matchy cards to use this year.  What a fun and productive challenge.

SOS - my heart beets for you

 This week's challenge at shopping our stash is to use vegetables or hearts on your card.  When I saw this challenge I was super excited as I knew I had the perfect stamp set to use for it.  A whole set of just vegetables that hadn't seen any ink yet.  Play along with us, will you?

Altenew educator's Level 2 final challenge

 So, this is it....the final challenge for level two of the Altenew Educator's program.  It was a year long journey of fabulous classes and tons of completed cards.  I took the long way through it and did every class and every card in each of the classes.  I learned a lot and refreshed myself on some older techniques that I had forgotten about in the past.

This challenge was all about the masculine for the cards.  The first card I did (my love card) was a reflection on the "For The Guys" class.  Masculine cards are generally harder for me and I always find I need them.  I chose to do the artistic background lesson for this card. I had tried my hand at foiling and had a "dud" foil sheet with the splatter background.  I chose to ink blend over top of it so as not to waste it and I really loved the result.

While lining up my stamps for the sentiment I may have discovered a new technique (at least I have never seen it anywhere before).  I turns out that if you put a clean stamp on to a foiled background the stamp "lifts" the foil off of hammermill paper.  I did this accidentally while trying to line up my stamps on the sentiment strip to emboss.  I wasn't sure if it was really a technique or just a coincidence of some bad foiling so I tried it again for my inspiration card.

  

I tried to film the discovery to show how cool the technique looked:

 

I continued on the foiling theme to do my masculine birthday card.  I was really inspired by the foiling class and I was excited to try out the new foil plates.  I chose to make the geometric lines in the plates into fun balloons.  Die cutting is by far my most favourite technique in card making and I don't have very many cards that exclude a die cut somewhere.

I used the negative die cut technique for the anniversary card.  I also did some layered stamping in non-traditional colours for the hearts.  I really like the way this card turned out.

I didn't feel that my orange card with the arrows was sufficient for the encouragement card so I did something a little different style with the vegetable card.  I heat embossed clear over some mixed media inks and layered it up a little.  I love the pop of colour on it even though it is still a simple card.

For my upcycled altered project I decided to recycle some cans from our dinner the other night.  Mmm chilli.  It is so cold here in the winter that a good hot food is necessary.  When I saw all the cans, I knew what I had to do.

  

I gathered up my washi tapes and measured up the cans.  I had several coordinating black and white ones and threw in a little purple and gold for a bit of colour.

I cut white cardstock to the size of the can and then covered it in the washi tape.  I put strong double sided adhesive on the back side of the paper and rolled it around the cans.

I foiled some pages in solid foil and then cut them with label tags and matted them on white card stock.

Then I decided to try out my newly discovered foil removal technique again to see if it worked on these tags.  It worked wonderfully with both the alphabet stamps and the flowers so I labeled my cans with what they would be used for and left the flowers on any cans that did not have a predetermined purpose.

once the tags were done I punched holes in and secured them to the cans with some twine.  I love the way they turned out.

The hardest part about it was trying to get a good picture of the end result.  And this is the final result:

SOS - Across the border

 This week's challenge at Shopping our Stash is called across the border - using any border punch or die on your project.  Seeing as how this winter it will be the only border we are crossing I decided to go all out and see what I could come up with.  I had a bunch of scraps in a pile from one rainbow making day and decided to see where my border punch would take me.  This year I am trying to use up all the bits and pieces so that I can streamline a bit of the massive supply build up I have accumulated in my room...in other words, I am running out of space in my already enormous craft room.  Play along with us, will you?

Jingle Belles - get fit

 

Joining in at the Jingle Belles challenge - get fit - by using candies and baking on your project - who can resist dreaming of sugar plums and sweets at Christmas time - I thought it may just fit in to the challenge well.

Altenew Educator Program - Masking unleashed

 Well, after one year and 157 awesome cards, I have done my last class for level 2 of the Altenew Educator's Program.  This one was called masking unleashed and it was full of great tips on how to do many types of masking.

I have never really used masking fluid before (only once or twice) and there is definitely a learning curve based on the type of product you choose...the end result is quite playful and fun even if there are a few areas where the masking fluid was not put on thick enough.  A great tip from this class is to use an adhesive eraser to get the masking fluid off...I have always used my finger and the eraser was so much easier.

Inside and outside masking was a fun project too.  On these cards I used both the positive and the negative of the mask for opposite Christmas cards.  I made my own background by stamping the little "peace" words in the the same colour as the ink blending so that you can see it but very subtly.

This card was made with two masks from the layered medallions.  I loved the look of this with the yellow and orange ink blending however the masking paper was very frustrating for this one.  The yellow layer mask stuck to the paper incredibly strongly and ripped the paper coming off.  The orange layer of masking paper wouldn't stick to the yellow ink and kept peeling off while ink blending.  This one may need some more practice or a different masking paper type.  I salvaged the damage and am very happy with the end result for the card though.

All in all this was a fantastic class and I am really glad I chose it as my final class for the level two classes...looking forward to my final challenge.  Thanks for looking.

SOS - starts with S

 Happy New Year to all!  I am hoping this post finds everyone well and raring to play with their stamps!  This week's challenge at Shopping our Stash is to use something that starts with the letter "s"...

I chose to use stamps, splatters, sequins, soya sauce, sushi, shiny paper, sentiment and a stitched die cut....play along with us, will you?

playing along with the Jingle Belles

 So starting a new year with new "resolutions" - or should I say challenging myself to do some things....one of them is to actually post my projects to different challenges instead of just lurking and playing along silently.  The Jingle Belles run a great challenge every year and I am going to try and commit myself to playing along at the correct schedule and make some Christmas cards all year round this year....winter is so long and cold here that I usually put the Christmas stuff away once it is over to try and coax spring here and don't pull it out again until it snows (October) but I am going to do it a bit different this year as I am donating 250 Christmas cards to the local nursing homes in our area so I may need a bit of a jump start on my cards.

This is what I came up with for their use new items challenge - I used new villainous potion ink, new Colorado Crafts stamp sets, new Gambi starry colour watercolour and new hot foiling dies.  I hope you like them.