Once again Nichole has hit a home run with her sets this month. They are SO easy to work with and so many ideas kept popping in to my head as to how to use them. I decided to keep it REALLY simple this month and focus on making the projects easy to replicate. This first card was made using the Snowflake Serenade set, the font used on the larger words in this set is just GORGEOUS.
For this card I began with the May Arts ribbon. I adore the slight shimmer and the colors in this particular ribbon. Then I only needed my Versamark pad, Soft Sky ink pad, I Kand-ee Pearlescent Chalk, Egyptian Gold EP (this EP is SO over the top sparkley - I just couldn't resist), some Powder cardstock, and my piercing tools.
My biggest tip with this type of design is to stamp the "Peace" first, sprinkle it with the embossing powder and then heat set it. Next stamp the snowflakes one at a time and shimmer them up with the Pearlescent chalks. If you stamp your snowflakes first unfortunately they still have some "sticky" to them and guess what - the EP sticks to them as well. Hmmm - guess how I know that Ü. It was an OK look, but... I really wanted it to look clean and sophisticated. I know that you could make a whole series of these cards in no time at all and that was my goal for this project - simple sophistication.
Next was the Eat Cake set. One of the first techniques I learned as a beginner was "stamping off". Using this technique you ink up your stamp image and then stamp, stamp again and then stamp yet again without reinking your stamp image. This was a bit of an experiment on my part being that I was curious how acrylic stamps would do with this particular method. Well... they worked just great. I believe that chalk ink will be your best bet when using this technique with acrylic stamps.
To create this project I inked up the cake stamp using two different colors of chalk ink and then stamped it off three times on Shimmery White cardstock. I then inked up the flowers and stamped them on each of the three layers. Being that you can see right through the stamps it was simple to place the flowers in the same position on each of the three layers. I sighted on the lower right flowers and the top left flowers, finding my intersecting points on the cake and just stamped away. To create the layered look I cut the lightest layer out in it's entirety, shortening the edges on the underlying layers that needed to be hidden beneath. Then repeated my cutting using only two layers and lastly one. Using pop dots I positioned the cake in layers and added Micro Twinkle Stickers to the centers of the flowers. In hindsight I would have used a deeper color on the flowers to make them pop just a little more off the cake, but... time was of the essence.
The polka dot paper is Nichole's very own. You can find the digital paper here. Yes, I know it is blue - but that is the joy of digital designs. By opening it up in your photo editing software you can easily change the hue and saturation of the colors and voila - it coordinates perfectly with whatever color scheme you are using. In this case I used Begonia and Peony - two of my favorite Memory Box colors. The little "swiss dots" were created using a Fiskars texture plate, tan embossing mat and Wizard. A little texture adds so much to these simple projects. The scalloped edge was once again cut using my Create-a-Cut. Oh how I wish I could share more information as to where you could find one of these, but unfortunately I have no idea what has happened with the manufacturers of this product line. I absolutely love my cutter and I have received many, many emails from you as to where you might get one and I just don't know.
Just a quick update on the Micro Twinkle Stickers - unfortunately there have been some manufacturer difficulties and we will not be able to get any more of this size in until (catch my breath) the end of November. We have plenty of Mini Dots, Mini Hearts and Mini Stars though - so hopefully you can think "big" for a while Ü
I hope you enjoy the simplicity of these projects - it is such fun to have the opportunity to stamp!!!