Hello there and a happy Sunday to you! This is Cindy Coutts and for this week's Mid-Week Inspiration at the Paper Craft Crew, I have a fun card for you using Flurry of Wishes. I will have a short video available for you shortly describing how I made the card in order to get more subscribers to the Paper Craft Crew You Tube Channel. We would LOVE it if you subscribed to our channel and give our videos a big Thumbs Up so that we can upload videos that are longer than 15 minutes. For any of the products listed below that you would like to purchase, I did not link any products, but please visit your favorite Stampin' Up! Demonstrator on our design team to pick anything up that you would like. The Flurry of Wishes Stamp Set and Snow Flurry Punch are a bundle and you can save 15%!
I played a little hard a fast with the sketch putting my sentiment up at the top and leaving out the left side panel. I just couldn't resist this little number. In the video, I talk about trends for the holiday, which are pastel and non-traditional colors, metallic and snowflakes. I think I have a little bit of it all covered in this card. I don't know if I would consider Hello Honey a pastel, but it was close enough. My Designer Series Paper is from the Annual Catalog of Sweet Li'l Things, which is actually baby-themed. Go through your catalog and see what you have that you can put on a Christmas card or any other card, that has a different theme to it and turn it into something else, like I did with my card. As you can see, the DSP is actually stars.
I keep my card super monochromatic but my embellishments really help it out a lot. There's a little bit of everything going on here, including using the Softly Falling 6 x 6 Embossing Folder. I ran the Very Vanilla and DSP through the Big Shot at the same time and it worked out just fine. Stampin' Up! has such deep patterned embossing folders that you can easily put two pieces of card stock through at the same time.
I started out with a piece of Hello Honey card stock and cut it down to an A2 tent size. I then cut a piece of Very Vanilla card stock to 4-1/8 x 5-3/8. My DSP was cut to 4-1/8 to 3-3/4. I layered the Very Vanilla and DSP on top of each other and ran through the Big Shot with the Softly Falling Embossing Folder for some great texture. The only stamp set I used on this card was Flurry of Wishes. I stamped my sentiment at the top of the card using Memento Tuxedo Black Ink. I tied a piece of Hello Honey 5/8" Striped Cotton Ribbon (love this stuff) around where the DSP and Very Vanilla card stock met into a knot. While I was tying the knot, I stopped midway and used a Glue Dot to keep it right where I wanted it. I then took some of new fabulous Gold Cord from the Holiday Catalog and made a few bows out of that, adhered it down to the halfway tied knot with another Glue Dot and then finished my knot. In the longer video, I have a ton of tricks and tips that I used, one that includes how to clean and keep your photopolymer stamps so that they will never stain on you, no matter what type of ink you use. The 2nd video is packed full of some great and very useful information that you will really benefit from, therefore making it longer. I also show you how to stamp your small snowflakes as they are one stamp, so that you can line it up perfectly with the coordinating Snow Flurry Punch.
It's very important to use your Embossing Buddy with these snowflakes since they are very intricately detailed. I stamped the snowflakes several times with Versamark ink onto a piece of Hello Honey card stock and heat embossed them using Gold Embossing Powder. I then lined up the images with my punch and punched them out. I added a Stampin' Dimensional to the back of each snowflake and adhered 2 sizes of our Basic Jewels: Pearls, to the center of the snowflakes, then adhered to the left side of the card. It really was that simple and easy to make! I think it also turned out very pretty and had just the right amount of bling and embellishments. Stamping my sentiment in black really breaks up the Hello Honey a bit and rounds the card out perfectly. I adhered the entire front panel to the Hello Honey card stock base using foam tape for extra dimension.
For the inside of my card, I cut a piece of Very Vanilla card stock to 4-1/8 x 5-3/8 and stamped my inside sentiment once again using Memento Tuxedo Black Ink at the top right and stamped a large snowflake at the bottom left with Hello Honey Stampin' Classic Ink Pad. Did you know that you can use any kind of embossing powder over our ink without using Versamark? Well, you can and that's just what I did. Before I stamped my snowflake image, I once again used my Embossing Buddy, sprinkled some Embossing Powder over the image and heat set. It turned out beautifully! To finish the inside, I added another pearl to the center of the snowflake.
I like stamping the inside of my cards this way, especially for those people that you see or talk to frequently, you really don't have much to say on the inside of the Christmas card and this kind of gives you an "out" so you don't have to write as much.
I hope that you really enjoy our videos that are being uploaded to our You Tube Channel now. Remember, the 2nd video is much longer as we go through making the card together and that's where all of the tips and tricks come in with various techniques. To give you a glimpse of what your stamp looks like after you clean it with your Stampin' Scrub and mist, I will show you a picture with this blog post and you would be very surprised, which is also explained in the video as to why it comes out looking the way it does.
I apologize for the lengthy post, but I had so much to share with you. We do hope that you like our Mid-Week Inspiration and would love to see what you make with this week's sketch too! Be sure to stop by all of the design team's blogs and leave them a comment to let them know how much you appreciate their always beautiful work. Thank you for watching our videos too. I try to make them short, but there's always so much to share with others when you are making a card of what you discover along the way. And that's what paper crafting is all about – sharing with others your designs, techniques, and a myriad of other things.
I did see in the comments of a participant asking when the challenge closes. If you look at the little blue box where you upload your project, immediately under the box it will show you how much longer you have to upload your card. I think that the challenge closes around noon-ish or so every Tuesday.
Everybody at the Paper Craft Crew thanks you so much for stopping by to visit us today and have a great weekend!
Here is my Merry Christmas card that I would like to share with you.
And this is what your photopolymer stamp looks like after it's been "cleaned."
Pretty shocking, isn't it? Don't worry. We will show you how to fix that in our video.
