Butterfly Reflections, Ink

Hi everyone!   Norine here today, with a couple of simple Valentine's cards to share with you! I started by painting a wash of red watercolor paint on two sheets of watercolor paper.  I used the Gansai Tambi paints for some really rich, intense color that smoothly flows into a pale washed out color.   Once they were dry I could die cut them with the MFT's Peek-a-boo Striped Heart die , once with the heart positioned with the darkest color at the top and again with the darkest color towards the bottom.  Then I could push out the pieces from the one first card panel and replace them with the pieces from the second one.  And because I now had some leftover painted pieces that I'd removed from the first card, I decided to die cut the heart once again on a plain white piece of watercolor paper and add the stripes to that.  After all the pieces were in place and adhered to a card base, I die cut the word "happy" ( Concord & 9th...

Thanksgiving is hands down my favorite Holiday.  For me, it is all about family, and friends (and food!)  This year, I am blessed to be spending it with my parents and also some really good friends.  Of course we will have lots of food too!   For today's project I made a card and a matching tag, since this will be given to our Thanksgiving Hostess this year (Mom).  I made the tag to put on a bottle of wine as a hostess gift.  I started by twice stamping the beautiful cornucopia image and leaves from Sweet and Sassy Harvest Blessings stamp set.   It's a great little set, perfect for this occasion.  I colored everything with Copic markers.  I cut out the cornucopia and the leaves. On the card, I took a piece of watercolor paper and used Distress Inks to color the background.  I used Mowed Lawn, Fired Brick, Mustard Seed and Seedless Preserves.  I dried it with my heat gun, and then used the Avery Elle Wonky Sti...

Hi friends! Welcome back - it's another HUMP DAY...and my birthday celebration has NOT ended yet! :D Several girlfriends and I are doing an escape room Friday night, then dinner! THEN my celebration will officially be over! HA! Meanwhile, if you have followed along with Vanessa for very long, then you probably know about the loss of her brother! He battled some tough demons; Vanessa has kept her shop running, shipped packages non-stop amidst the angst and heartache. She's so strong! I created this card for her and sent her way; sympathy cards are never easy to make! I stamped the images with Versmark and embossed with white embossing powder then colored with a base layer of Tombow markers and finished it off with Prismacolor Pencils. I did an all over background wash of gray, then added some stronger shadows under the flower and leaves. The sentiment was embossed on vellum and layered on top of other papers. I die cut 2 stitched squares to accentuate the flower an...

Hello there! It's Saturday! Or as my niece calls it, "Party Day!" I'm back with another installment of yet another WPlus 9 stamp set. When this stamp set was released, I just shook my head and thought, "How did she do it...AGAIN?!" I think I mentioned this in my last blog post, but I think I own every floral stamp set that Dawn has produced. Her images are some of my favorites to use for no-line watercolor, and so I decided to bring in that technique for this card. My husband recently went out of town for his friend's wedding and was gone for almost the entire weekend. To keep from going crazy, I decided I'd tackle the Kind Soul stamp set and get out my distress inks ! I knew this process would probably take a while, but since it's more a form of therapy than anything else, I didn't mind! I first stamped the floral image on Tim Holtz Distress Watercolor Paper  in a light colored ink. I then selected Shaded Lilac, Worn Lipstick, a...

Happy Tuesday everyone!  Nicky back with you today with a very fun pop up box card using the brand new Scalloped Box Card Pop-Up by Lawn Fawn .  If you never fancied the challenge of a box card before ..... well, it just got quite a bit easier! No more measuring, the Lawn Cuts  craft die will do all the thinking for you and all you have to do is have lots of creative fun making the card.  I used Lawn Fawn's Lawn Cuts Grassy Border , die-cutting it several times over so that I could stack the grassy edges inside the card.  For today's box card I decided to use the relatively new Bearing Gifts stamp set by Reverse Confetti .   The bear in his car and the trees and background mountains were all stamped with Archival Ink and watercolour painted using Zig Clean Color Real Brush Markers .  They were then die cut and applied to the card, slowly but surely building the scene. The panels that are layered on top of the flaps were made using papers from...