I have probably broken every rule about keeping a blog. I had no intention of launching a blog and then disappearing for 3 months.
The usual story...work, vacation, family visitors plus a craft room make over! I spent a month crafting in my old makeshift space with things boxed up or scattered around waiting to box up. Then another month digging through boxes in the living room to craft on the kitchen table.
It was all worth it now that I have a functional craft space. Things are better organized and easy to get to. No more climbing over boxes of stamps & paper to get to ribbon in the corner. I now have a L-shaped tabletop with plenty of open space in the middle of the room. I would show you before & after photos but I was too embarrassed to take a before shot!
I'm settling in to the new space and making cards. I had two specific occasion cards for family members that I made using a piece of pattern paper from BasicGrey's Grand Bazaar collection. I ended up with one small piece that I matted on a piece of orange card stock I had in my scrap pile.
Does anyone else start out with a piece of paper or a stamped image and them spend hours trying to make it look good on a card? I tried putting this on a card front that I had stenciled with some Distress inks. That didn't gel at all. Plus I had no idea what stamped images to use that would match the paper...which seems Southwestern-y to me. I left it on the desk for a week during which I remembered the iguana from the Create A Smile set "Jungle Fever" This is the image that it needed! But, oh how long it took me to get the image to look the way that I wanted. I tired coloring with markers ...EPIC FAIL.
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| Poor Iguana...so many outfits and everything looks so bad! |
I now had the blended colors that I wanted. I cut out the little guy and thought I was home free. WRONG! A few more hours messing around with layout and the thought of trashing everything crossed my mind so many times. I finally ended up with this card. I'm not totally in love with the layout but I do enjoy the Iguana and the final scrap of paper.
Using the same BasicGrey paper collection, I cut a background and "grounding" strip using the Mama Elephant "Femme Frames" die. The original scrap was first cut using a Simon Says Stamp "Frames" die but I couldn't work it into the layout in a way that I liked. I chopped it down to the part of the pattern that I liked the best and thought it looked like a flower pot. (Looking at it now, I think I should have flipped the pot.) I stamped some flowers from the new Clearly Besotted "Celebrating You" set using the same Distress Ink colors and cut them out. I white embossed the sentiment from the Jungle Fever set and added a background using a cute starburst from the Essentials by Ellen "Merry & Bright" set. I adhered to my card base and added some Ranger Black Enamel Accent to the Iguana's eye and some clear Wink of Stella to the flower centers.
I do love how the Iguana turned out and hope to try some other cards using this stamp and watercolor method again. What do you do when you hit a creative wall with a particular stamp, paper, embellishment, etc? Do you trash it or keep working until you have a finished card?
SUPPLIES:
STAMPS - Create a Smile "Jungle Fever"; Clearly Besotted "Celebrating You"; Essentials by Ellen "Merry & Bright"
INKS - Ranger Archival "Jet Black"; Ranger Distress Inks "Chipped Sapphire" "Wild Honey" Evergreen Bough"
DIES - Mama Elephant "Femme Frames"; Simon Says Stamp "Frames"
PAPER - BasicGrey "Grand Bazaar"
EMBELLISHMENTS - Ranger "Black Enamel Accents"; Wink of Stella "Clear"
