Honey Bee Stamps

Happy Hallowe’en, Crafty friends!
And although I don’t have any scary spooktacular cards to share today, I AM working with an autumnal theme in today’s card, which features the Beautiful life and Country Wreath stamp sets, and the Autumn Sunset sequin collection.
Autumn is by far my favourite time of year, and after a walk in the woods this week, I was inspired to bring some of the colours of the forest to my card!

So I reached for my Kuretake Gansai Tambi watercolour palette and a piece of Tim Holtz watercolour cardstock, which I stuck to my craft mat with washi tape on all four edges. To get the soft, muted colours I went for a wet-on-wet look. With a wide paintbrush, I wet the whole piece of cardstock, and then dropped in dabs of watercolour. After applying the colour, I used a clean wet paintbrush to soften the edge of each paint blob, and to blend the colours into one another.

Once I had applied some colour, I used my heat gun to dry the paint, and then repeated the process. I probably did about 5 layers, and made sure that I diluted my paint for the lower section of the card so the colours would blend out into white.

Next I stamped the greeting using stamps from the Beautiful Life stamp set. I used my MISTI tool to stamp the images twice, as the watercolour cardstock is quite bumpy and I wanted to ensure a nice even impression.
Once my greeting was in place, I took some of the awesome leaf stamps from the Country Wreath set, and randomly stamped these in black ink, to create the impression of falling leaves. I coloured these using my Spectrum Noir colouring pencils, making sure to blend autumnal colours together on each leave to give a rich result. Over the top of each leaf, I added a little Twinkling h20 paint, which gives a gorgeous golden pearlescent sheen to each leaf. However, this ended up making the leaves less vibrant, which was a bummer. I then had the idea to stamp each leaf again, but offset it slightly, and emboss each image using a shiny gold embossing powder. Didn’t it turn out great in the end!?

To finish the card, I added a little stitched detail to the edges using a die, and I gave a little splattering of gold paint to the card. Last but certainly not least, I added some of these gorgeous Honey bee Stamps Sequins from the Autumn Sunset collection.

And that was the project finished!
well, I better go and get my pumpkins carved….I hope you have a beautiful day and a SPOOKTACULAR evening!

Hello Friends!

Today I am sharing a bright and encouraging card, and also focusing on a fun way how to stretch your stash when using dies!

This card started when I wanted to combine some of the floral images from Zen Florals, with the leaves and berries in the Country Wreath stamp set. I love how the images work so well together. First I stamped these with Mementio Tuxedo Black ink onto watercolour cardstock, and then used my Tambi Gansai watercolours to colour them in!

When playing with the Country Wreath set, I decided to play around and attempt to use the circular branch stamp into an oval shape. I was thrilled to find that it was easy to obtain an oval shape – and this means that this one stamp gives you even more versatility! I used my MISTI tool, but you can easily manipulate the stamp straight onto an acrylic block to achieve the same results.

So I stamped the oval in Antique Linen distress ink onto some white card, and I knew I wanted to add my floral images on either side. But I couldn’t make up my mind what I would like to put in the centre of the oval.

So I started looking at the Honeycuts dies that I have in my stash – and suddenly realised that I could use some of these dies to create my own custom greeting!

Earlier that day, Mister Postie had just delivered a new package of goodies from Honey Bee Stamps, which included the Beautiful HoneyCuts Die. I simply HAD to use that on the card! That much I did know! And so it made perfect sense to create a greeting which read ‘You are so Beautiful’. And before long I had it all figured out!

To create the bespoke die cut words, I simply ran my Honey Cuts dies through my cuttlebug a few times, and snipped out the letters that I needed. I used the ‘Y’ from the Prayers Honeycuts set and  ‘OU’ from the Fabulous Honeycuts to create the word YOU. And then I used the ‘A’ from the Fabulous Honeycuts and the ‘R’ and ‘E’ from the Prayers Honeycuts to create the word ARE. The word SO was also created by using the Fabulous Honeycuts!

I wanted to build up the die cuts to create a dimensional word – almost giving the illusion of a chipboard letter. So I used three layers of cardstock for each word. This also helped me when sticking letters together as it made a stronger bond between the ligatures.

If you look really closely, you can see the uneven join between the ‘R’ and ‘E’ in the word ARE, but it is barely noticeable. To help disguise this even more, I first added some colour to the die cuts using a ink dabber, and then I used clear embossing powder to emboss the whole letter. This gives a lovely even, shiny finish to each word!

To give extra special attention to the word beautiful, I decided to create a two tone colour effect using Squeezed Lemonade distress ink on the upper part of the die cut, and then added Picked Raspberry pink distress ink to the lower half, before embossing with clear embossing powder! I think it really makes it stand out!

To finish the card, I mounted the white card onto some pink cardstock, and then added this to a notecard covered with some yellow flocked scrapbook paper! I thought the flocked paper gave a really interesting, tactic feel to the card, and I love the way the swirls on this paper coordinate with the swirly motion on the brown branches stamp that frames the greeting!

And that was the card done…. well…almost! I simply couldn’t resist adding a few little sequins from the Birthday Bash Mix Collection and some gorgeous Clear Dew Drops on the centre of my larger stamped flowers!

Thanks for stopping by, and I hope that you are inspired to look at your dies a little differently to see what extra words you could possibly create using them!

Have a crafty day!