Monday, December 31, 2007

Baroque Motifs Card

I hope everyone had a wonderful Holiday. I wish you all a Happy New Year!

I got so behind on posting cards during this busy time of the year! But here is one of the holiday cards I did this year. We made this one at November's stamp club. If you can't tell, I just love this Baroque Motifs set. It is so versatile! I have used it for elegant wedding cards, for a background for a chip board journal, for this Christmas card, and a lot more.

Although this is a holiday card, this same layout could be used with different colors and a different sentiment to change the whole look. Imagine Soft Subtle colors and any other sentiment and you would have a completely different card using the same layout!

For this card, the large swirly image was stamped on Handsome Hunter card stock in Craft White Ink and then the Iridescent Ice embossing powder was sprinkled over it. It was heat embossed (tip: don't overheat when embossing the Iridescent Ice powder or the glitter in it will melt and then not sparkle). The picture doesn't show it real well, but the image is sparkly.

The tendrils were made by cutting very narrow slivers of the Brushed Silver card stock using a paper cutter. The narrow slivers are then wrapped tightly around the end of a small paint brush or any other small tool to curl them. The tendrils were then glued in place. Then flowers punched out of Rose Red and Bravo Burgundy card stock using the 5-Petal Punch were placed over the tendrils. There are several Stampin' Up! sets that have flowers that "fit" the 5-Petal Punch, in this case a flower from Looks Like Spring was used (the sets that have a flower that fits the punch include In the Spotlight hostess set, Be Happy, Priceless, Simply Said, Looks Like Spring, Heartfelt Thanks, Ginormous Flowers, and Office Accoutrement). The little dots in the center of the "poinsettia" were made using the silver end of the dual colored Paint Ziggy marker.

The Merry Christmas sentiment is from the Holiday Wishes set. It was stamped on Rose Red card stock in Craft White ink and embossed with the Iridescent Ice embossing powder. The Rose Red was layered onto the Brushed Silver card stock.

Theresa

**All materials for this card came from the Stampin' Up! catalog. The new Spring/Summer catalog begins January 2nd. See a preview of the catalog below.

Spring/Summer Catalog Preview

Wednesday, December 5, 2007

Thinking outside the box! Holiday card from nonholiday stamp set!

You can often stretch the versatility of your stamp sets by looking past the obvious purpose of the images and think of what other images you can get from them. I saw this idea somewhere out there in cyberland (sorry, can't remember exactly who I copied this idea from to give proper credit). Who knew a flower image (from Pick a Petal) could become a gingerbread man?!

This card also used other nonholiday sets such as Seeing Spots and Everyday Flexible Phrases. The white gel pen was used to draw on the gingerbread decorations and the dots and swirls on the tag (LOVE that gel pen)!

All materials used on this card are available from the Fall/Winter Stampin' Up! catalog that expires at the end of this month. Here are links to the list of stamp sets that are retiring from the catalog:

Theresa