MFT Sketch Challenge 342

Hello everyone!
Today I am here with a card for this week's MFT Sketch Challenge.  I missed out on entering the last card into the challenge by a couple of hours, so I thought I'd try to make it this week.  :P  The sketch for the week is:

When I saw this sketch and rummaged through my MFT stamps I saw three stamp sets I could combine to create a double scene.  I had so much fun working on this card.  All the stamp sets I used were from the Birdie Brown line (love!).  The sets I used were Magical Unicorn, Magical Dragon, and Our Story.  I thought  the top section as setting a scene where we catch a glimpse into the little girl's mind envisioning herself as the character in the book she is reading, which of course is loving the pretty unicorn and her as a princess.  The bottom part is of course her reading and engulfed in this books dreaming it could come true.  

I started by using MFT's Stitch Scallop Basic Edge to die cut the top panel from heavy weight white and mint green cardstock.  I then used MFT's Grassy Hill to die cut the mint green cardstock to create a grassy boarder.  I used my MIST to ink up the images I wanted to use and stamped in on to heavy weight white cardstock with Simon Says Intense Black ink.  I used my MISTI because I knew I would need to stamp it a few times to get dark lines.  I also stamped the image of the little girl reading a book on some pattern paper as I wanted to paper piece the chair.  I Copic colored my images and fussy cut them as well as the chair that I stamped on pattern paper.  I then lined the pattern paper chair with black marker so the white spaces would not show.  I moved on to the distressing I would be doing for my panels.  I used Mowed Lawn distress ink to give a deeper color to the grassy hill boarder and also give some contrast.  I used the puffly cloud stencil to create a light cloudy scene at the top of my white Scallop Basic Stitched panel.  I then taped off the bottom of my main panel piece and used Hickory Smoke distress ink to create a ground for the little girl sitting on the chair. I used Hero Arts Stylish Boarder stencil with Abandon Coral Distress ink to create a wall paper look.  I then stamped a sentiment from the Magical Unicorn stamp set on black cardstock and used Simon Says Stamp Silver embossing powder.  I popped the Scallop Basic Stitched panel up on the card to create almost like a thought bubble as well as the sentiment. I finished off the card by using Spectrum Niors Shimmer pen on the Unicorn's main, horn, and the Princess's crown.  I used glossy accents for the horn and crown.  I hope you like what I created. :)

Click Image to be taken to the page I was featured in! :)

MFT Sketch Challenge 341

Hello everyone!
Today I will be featuring MFT's Magical Unicorns.  I've hit a creative wall this past week and thought maybe a sketch would help inspire me to get my creativity going and I love MFT's sketch challenges, so I decided to pull inspiration from it.  The sketch for the week is:

When I saw the middle square, I thought of making a shaker card from it.  I used a colorful heart pattern paper from my stash and MFT's Scallop Basic Border 2 die to cut the edges.  I used heavy weight cardstock and my inside/outside stitched square dies to create a frame.  I then stamped the images I wanted to use from the stamp set onto heavy weight cardstock with Simon Says Intense Black in so that I could Copic color the image.  I then fussy cut my images. I used acetate to cover my square frame and popped it up with double foam tape so the sequins would share a bit more freely.  I used rainbow colors of sequins in 4mm, 5mm, and 10mm sizes.  I then heat embossed a sentiment from the stamp set on black cardstock with white embossing powder and cut fishtails at each end.   I placed the sentiment at the bottom of my square panel and glued on my copic colored images.  To finish the images off I used Spectrum Noir's Clear Sparkling Pen on my unicorn and rainbow.  I also put glossy accent on the horn of the Unicorn.  I hope you like my card.  :)

Edit: :( Sad times... I was 2 hours too late in entering the card for the Sketch challenge.  Oh well,I had fun creating the card :).

Crafting Desert Divas: Fairy Happiness

Hello everyone!
Today I am sharing a card featuring Crafting Desert Divas digi stamps once again.  I have been having some fun playing with the digi stamps; I usually use polymer stamps, so it was fun to be able to customize the size of the image to fit my layout.  I used my Cricut to print and cut the images.  I have been having some issues with the print and cut settings since the company upgraded their Design Space system from flash to html5.  The cuts are slightly off, but they were not too noticeable.  I do love how much faster the system is though.  Once I printed and cut my images I used my Prismacolor Pencils to color them in.  I had a layout in mind for the images and sized them to fit the card.  I used a grass boarder die to create two grass panels and distress them with Mowed Lawn, Twisted Citron, Bundled Sage, and Forest Moss.  I then used the clouded boarder stencil to distress some tumbled glass to create a clouded sky.  I then put the grass boarder popping up the front grass panel.  I then glued the images on and popped up the image of the fairy sitting on the flower up.  I stamped a sentiment using  Amy R's stamps with Simon Says Stamp Black.  The last touches was to put some clear sequins around the sentiment.  :)  Hope you like my card!

My Favorite Things: Ewe Have My Heart

Hello everyone!
Today I will be featuring MFT's Ewe Are the Best stamp set.  I made this card last week, but it was going to someone special and I didn't want to post it till he received it.  :)  I had an idea of what I wanted to create with this card; some details were changed but I liked the outcome.  At first I was wanted there to be a circle image piece to the bottom left, but as I was conceptualizing it and looking about my supplies I remembered I had a heart die that would be perfect.  I cut a piece of scrap printer paper with the 3rd largest heart die by Gina Marie to create a mask.  Instead of using the heart I used the opening to distress onto my card base.  I used Tumbled Glass to create a light heart outline, then used my cloud stencils to distress some clouds.  Once I finished distressing my cloud I used my Radiating Rays stencil to create some sun rays at the top of the heart.  After, I stamped the images I wanted to use with Simon Says Intense Black ink, so that I could Copic color my images.   Once I finished coloring the images I fussy cut them out. For my main sheep image I wanted it to have more texture and I remember I had this paint pen that puffed up when heated, so I used this on for the sheep's coat.  I actually forgot how to use the pen and had to google directions, which somewhat guided me, however, I remember how to use the product once I started working it.  I remember there needed to be a good amount of liquid, so on a separate piece of paper I let some of the liquid drain out so that I could pick it up with the tip of the marker to put on my image.  So, the direction says to wait for the liquid to dry before you heat it, but really its best to heat it when its still wet; it puffs up more.  Also, work in layers.  Once you finish on layer of puff and you still want more puff, put on top of the first layer of puff and heat to create a fuller look.  I loved how it turned out, it look so much like fur.  I then used a scrap piece of white cardstock to die cut the bottom of the heart to use for a grass piece.  I used Lawn Fawn's meadow grass boarder to die cut grass from the bottom heart piece.  I distress the grass piess with Forest Moss, Mowed Lawn, and Twisted Citron.  I was able to line up this piece with the heart on my base because I had distress the heart earlier.  I glued my images down, popping the sheep up with foam. I used a sentiment from the stamp set and stamped it using my MISTI with Versafine Onyx black.  I finished the card by putting some clear sequins as embellishments.   I hope you like the card I created.

Crafting Desert Divas: Interactive River Tubing

Hi everyone!
Today I will be featuring Crafting Desert Divas digital stamp "Cool Summer" (click to see the stamp at CDD's website).  CDD has been releasing a few new digital stamps for free by attending their Facebook Group release event here.  When I saw this image I thought of either pool or river, but then I remembered how my friends would go river tubing down the Sacramento River; I did not participate in this because I do not know how to swim :(.  When I first started this card, it was not going to be interactive. I usually do not make interactive cards because something usually goes wrong and I get really frustrated when the card gets ruined by lack of thinking or knowing how to make the interactive element work.  However, as I was putting the card together, I thought this would be cool if the Rhino could move down the river.  So, I put my feelings aside about interactive cards to try and create a card with the Rhino moving down the river.  There were a lot of ups and downs with this card as I actually had to tear apart one of my card bases because the slider motion was not working (I needed to double up my foam tape) and I did not expect the card to be so bulky (I had more foam tape for the front water), but luckily it all came together.

I first started with downloading the image onto my computer so that I could use Photoshop to add a white boarder around my image.  After I uploaded the image into my Cricut to print and cut.  I love that I am able to do this with the image because I usually fussy cut my images and that is not so fun.  Once I had my image I used my Copics to color the image.  At this point I was crossing my fingers that the printer ink would not smudge from the markers. Woo! It didn't.  Then I went on creating waves with both white cardstock and vellum and distressing the white cardstock with Salty Ocean and Mermaid Lagoon.  While I was distressing I took a 5.5 x 4.25 cardstock panel to distress the sky and sun that I wanted.  I then glued down my first 2 waves onto the panel and used a slider die to cut through the layers of cardstock.  Here is where things started go array.  I was using 110LB cardstock for both my waves and panel so the slider channel die would not cut through all the layers.  I tried putting some foam under to create more pressure but that did not work, then I realized I should just take the cut paper out and re-align the die to cut the last layer (duh!).  After I glued down the track piece to my card base and used 3M foam tape to pop the panel up so the slider mechanism would work.  Well, when I finally was able to put the front panel in, and put the Rhino on the track it wouldn't slide! I was almost over making this card as I had to tear the panel off of my card base and it was not a pretty sight, but I persevered (mostly because I already put so much time into making the card).   I put another layer of foam tape, luckly I was able to save the track piece to glue down onto another card base. Once the panel was down I put the Rhino back on the track and it worked! :) Well, I didn't really think about the 2 remaining waves and how I would have to double pop them up so that the Rhino could move down the track.  :( This ended up making my card pretty bulky and probably won't be able to send this in the main.  It will be a card I'd have to give someone by hand, but it works! :P  I was quite proud of making the interactive card.  I'm not sure when I will make another one though.  Sorry for the long post.  I thought I'd share my woes on making this card.  Hope you like it.

My Favorite Things: Blooms Background

Hello everyone!
Today I will be featuring MFT's Springtime Blooms stamp set.  The inspiration came from MFT's instagram post a couple days ago with a similar stamp set that used white embossing on black cardstock.  I love the simplicity of the card, but I want to take a bit further.  I loved the black with white heat embossing and wanted to see if I would be able to add color onto the black cardstock and it actually show the colors.  I had to think of anything very bright and opaque mediums in my stash.  I thought of my prismacolors as it works well on craft cardstock so I tested a few colors on a piece of black cardstock; the key is to pick bright and light enough colors to show on the black cardstock.  I then remembered my Kuretake Gansai Tambi pallet had some pearlescent colors in it that I could use.  I do not use my Gansai Tambi watercolors often because I am really terrible at watercoloring, still working on this.  I started by stamping my images onto the black cardstock with Simon Says Stamp embossing ink, which is similar to Versafine embossing ink.  I think Simon Says Stamp's embossing ink is a bit more sticky than Versafine. I used most of the images in the stamp set; first using the larger images to stamp then smaller images to fill in the spots.  I used Rangers fine white embossing powder to coat each of my panel (I made 2 one for each color medium) and heated the powder till it melted.  I started with my Prismacolor pencils.  With Prismacolored pencils the key is to use light layers to build the color, if you put to much pressure when coloring eventually it will create a waxy thickness that will not allow you to build anymore color.  Also, having a sharp pencil tip helps when coloring.  I currently do not have a blending medium for the pencils, but I found that if you lightly layer enough the colors will blend itself.  Maybe in the feature I will get a blending a medium, but for now I'm liking the bit of texture.  For the other panel, I used the pearlescent colors from Gansai Tambi.  I had to be careful about the amount of water I used for the panel because the paper I used was just black cardstock and not watercolor paper.  Its a good thing that the Gamsai Tambi pallet is super thick and opaque.  As I was watercoloring my flowers I realized that there is a white pearlescent color and thought, "I wonder if the pearlescent will show if I mix in other colors".  It did work!  I was super happy I was able to create different pearlescent colors for my panel.  When mixing the white pearlescent and the other colors make sure that you do not add too much color to pearlescent as it will become more opaque than pearlescent.  You have to play around with the mixture to get a good medium.  Also, because the pearlescent is white it will lighten the color you are using, so mix in a darker shade than you need.  I had fun mixing and creating colors I needed.  :)   After I was done with the panel I used 2 of the sentiments in the stamp set and stamped/embossed with Versafine Onyx black and clear embossing powder on a white cardstock to make it pop on the card.  I also popped the sentiment up on the panel.  I used MFT's stitched boarder dies to add a bit to the sentiment.  I cut done both panel 1/4 inch top and bottom so that when I put it on my white card base there was a bit of boarder.  Hope you like my card.

Update 7/12:
Ahhh! These cards were featured in MFT's You've Been Spotted this week! So crazy and am so honored to be on their blog.  Click picture to see the blog post on MFT's blog.