Hello, Stampers!  It's time for another Stamping with Friends blog hop.  For those of you who are unfamiliar, Stamping with Friends is a group of Stampin' Up! demonstrators who share our love of card making with you through monthly blog hops with various themes. If you are following the hop, then you'll have just popped over from Rachel Merrick's blog.  I hope you took a minute to leave a comment for her.  If you are starting the hop with me, thank you so much and I hope you enjoy what the other hoppers have prepared for you today! This month, the theme is to create a monochromatic card in your favorite color palette.  Wikipedia  defines monochromatic as " Monochromatic colors are all the colors of a single hue. Monochromatic color schemes are derived from a single base hue and extended using its shades, tones, and tints. Tints are achieved by adding white and shades and tones are achieved by adding a darker color, grey or black".   My favorite ...

Well, another Mystery Monday Stamping with Sharon Armstrong, Independent Stampin' Up! demonstrator has come and gone and I loved this project. The layout was very simple and only a couple of steps.   A little DSP, some cardstock, a few embellishment and voilà the card is done.    For my project, I knew I needed a couple more Christmas cards so my theme was a given. I then decided on the Heartwarming Hugs Designer Series Paper out of the multiple choices I had from the current Annual and Mini Catalogs. I loved the font used on sentiments in the Christmas to Remember bundle and hadn't used it nearly as much as I wanted to so I had to incorporate that as well.  Lastly, had to add some of the die-cut elements from the Christmas Season Bundle.  Both cards are the same layout, just the reverse side of the DSP...and don't you know it...one card becomes two. Measurements of the card:  1.    Cardstock – 5 ½” x 8 ½”, scored at 4 ¼” 2.  Desi...

So today, I share this card I created using the Stampin' Up! Celebrate Sunflowers stamp set.  This card was created for a "sunflower" themed card swap for a swap group I'm in on Facebook called, The Card Shack.  It also gave me the opportunity to put ink to stamp.  In this card, I used masking, heat embossing, and water coloring...yes, water coloring, techniques to create this simple card. I started by stamping the image on the left with Versafine Clair Pinecone.  I created a mask, covered the first image then stamped the second...I had a little too much space (or so I thought) but kept on going by masking the second image and stamping the third.  If I had wanted the middle image to be in the forefront, then I would have stamped and masked it first then stamped the left and right sunflower image. Because of the drying time of the Versafine Clair, I was still able to add clear embossing powder over the complete image then heat set it with the heating t...

Hi there, Stamping Friends!  It's time for another Stamping with Friends Blog Hop.  As you know, Stamping with Friends is a group of Stampin' Up! Independent Demonstrators who enjoy paper crafting, creating cards, and other projects to share with each other and with you. If you've arrived from Karen's blog, welcome!  This time, the theme is to create a card or project based on a favorite technique.  There are sooooo many techniques that I love but with this project, I'm going to focus mainly on two.  Can you guess what one of them is? Yup, you guessed it...masking!  There're so many things you can do with this technique from: simple masking to creating seamless backgrounds and adding depth...hmmm, I think I've decided to do a blog series focusing on the different things you can do with masking. For this post, I chose to start with a simple spotlight masking technique. Let me show you how I created this card. Now I incorporated several other techniques (dry ...