Twinkling Paper Studio: June 2020

Wednesday, June 10, 2020

Altenew Educators "Giving Thanks" Blog Hop and Linky Party + Giveaway

Welcome to the Altenew Educators "Giving Thanks" Blog Hop and Linky Party + Giveaway! Today there is a big hop brought to you by all of the Altenew Certified Educators. This is no ordinary hop! We want you to join in on the fun as well. There is a Linky Party going on at the Altenew Card Blog. All you have to do is link up your creations based on the theme of the hop, which is, “Giving Thanks” and mention that you are taking part in the Altenew Educators Blog Hop and Linky Party where you can create, share, participate, and have a chance to win a Gift Certificate to the Altenew Store. So what are you waiting for?! Link up!

You should have come from Christine Pennington's Blog. If you stumbled across my blog and would like to see the full hop, I will have the links provided for you below.

I have two projects for you today using one of my favorite Build-A-Flower Sets. I truly love Stargazer Lilies so this Build-A-Flower Set is my current favorite! In fact, I made a card similar to the second one and mailed it before I remembered to take photos of it. So I had to make a new one. May was a pretty hectic month around here, so it's okay.

Let's get on to our projects. This first card started with a Pink Top Folding 7 x 5 card base. The mat is Gold Foil Cardstock, the next one up is Black Cardstock, then the uppermost mat is a paler pink cardstock.

For the Mandala, I die cut that using Curious Skin Black Cardstock. I like to use this particular cardstock sometimes because it is completely matte and has an almost suede look to it.

For the lilies, I used a combination of inks from different sets. My base layer was Baby Pink from the Spring Bouquet Ink Set. Then Pinkalicious and Rubellite from the Cherry Blossom Collection, Rubellite, and Purple Wine from the Rose Petals Collection.

For the leaves, I used Sweet Leaf from the Green Meadow Collection and Forest Glades from the Green Fields Collection and Hunter Green from the Green Meadow Collection. I like to mix within the families sometimes and this was one of those times. I stamped my simple "Thank You" sentiment from Hibiscus (From Build-A-Flower Hibiscus) in Versamark and heat set in Antique Gold Embossing Powder.

For this next card, I changed things up a little bit. I love the Sugarplums Collection of Inks and in fact, I suggested these and the Tranquility Grays to Tasnim. I have a few more requests in my mind that I think I want to send to her. We'll see!

I used the Sugarplums set to stamp these blooms, but I like to take it one step further often. In this case, I stamped the base layer of the lilies in Baby Pink. Pastels are difficult inks to make and can tend to have a grayish undertone to them. To prevent this, I like to mix a more vibrant shade as the first layer and then proceed with the four colors in the primary color family I want to use. You can see that this provides a different look than just using the four colors in the set. I have found it's something you have to play around with to get the look that you want. Pick a small flower to see what combinations you like and be sure to keep a list or chart of the combinations you like.

Since I always have a touch of gold on my cards, I decided to Heat Emboss the stamens of the flowers.

I used Gleaming Lilac Cardstock for another 7 x 5 Top Folding Card Base. I used the Gilded Ombre Washi Tape to go along the bottom of the card front. I also cut another of the Mandala Dies to put behind the flower arrangement only this time I used Pearlescent Garnet Plum Cardstock for this. This die is really intricate, so I usually run it through my Gemini Junior - twice, and then I look carefully to make sure everything cut before removing the paper from the die. If it isn't cut all the way, I rotate the die 90 Degrees on the cutting plate and run it through again.

While I love the first card, I didn't want it to look the same as the first card so I chose to put the "Thanks" vertically down the right-hand side of the card using Altenew Bold Alphabet Lower Case Die Set. The Mandala Die Cut was attached with E6000 Non-Aerosol Spray Glue. It would take me forever to glue it with Multi Medium Matte, so I keep that spray around just in case. Then I arranged my flowers and leaves on the card front and kept it intact by lifting it with Press-N-Seal.

I used a double or single layer of Foam Tape to adhere everything in place on the card front. It was at this point that I realized I forgot the black speckles on the petals, but since I used foam tape, there isn't any going back and doing it now. Not all Lilies have the speckled petals like the Stargazer does, so it's no big deal. I have a few hundred lilies in my flower bed this year, so I can take a peek right outside and look. *Ü*

One of the things I really like about the leaves in this set (stamped in Green Fields Ink Collection) is that with the larger leaf, you can cut it in half and place those half pieces tucked in-between other for fuller foliage.

Prizes:
Altenew is giving away a $30 gift certificate to 3 lucky winners! Please leave a comment here on the Altenew Card Blog by 6/17/2020 for a chance to win.

We’ll also draw a winner to receive a $15 Altenew gift certificate from the comments left on each designer’s blog on the blog hop list below. All winners will be announced on the Card Blog on 6/21/2020.

There’s MORE!
Altenew will pick 2 of our favorite handmade creations from those who joined the linky party and they will each receive a $15 Altenew gift certificate!
Special offer:

FREE U.S. shipping with code HAPPY6T or $5 OFF international shipping with code SHOPPING6T at checkout on orders over $29. Offer valid from 6/10/2020 at 12:01 am EDT through6/11/2020 at 11:59 pm EDT. Shop HERE! Not valid on prior purchases. Cannot be combined with other promo codes. Not valid on Altenew Academy Classes and Virtual Workshops.

Blog Hop List:

I promise there will be lots of beautiful inspiration along the hop so be sure to visit each participant's blog and leave them a little love. Amy Hill is next on the list. We all work really hard to bring you beautiful and innovative content. I promise you won't be disappointed!.

Thank you so very much for stopping by today! I've linked the products I used below for your convenience and I very much appreciate your support.

Affiliate links may be used - Thank you for your support!

Altenew Antique Gold Crisp Embossing Powder Shop at: SSS \| ALT	Altenew Baby Pink Oval Ink Pad Shop at: ALT	Altenew Bold Alphabet Die Set (Lower Case) Shop at: ALT
Altenew Build A Flower Stargazer Shop at: ALT	Altenew Cherry Blossom Mini Cube Set Shop at: SSS \| ALT	Altenew Cherry Blossom Oval Set Shop at: ALT
Altenew Cherry Blossom Reinker Set Shop at: ALT	Altenew Gilded Ombre Washi Tape Shop at: SSS \| ALT	Altenew Gold Foiled Cardstock Shop at: ALT
Altenew Green Fields Mini Cube Set Shop at: ALT	Altenew Green Fields Reinkers Shop at: ALT	Altenew Green Meadows Ink Cube Set Shop at: ALT
Altenew Green Meadows Oval Set Shop at: ALT	Altenew Green Meadows Reinkers Shop at: ALT	Altenew Green Valley Mini Cube Set Shop at: SSS \| ALT
Altenew Green Valley Oval Set Shop at: SSS \| ALT	Altenew Green Valley Reinker Set Shop at: ALT	Altenew Mandala Die Shop at: ALT
Altenew Spring Bouquet (Includes Baby Pink Cube) Shop at: ALT	Altenew Spring Bouquet 6 Oval Set Shop at: ALT	Altenew Spring Bouquet reinkers Shop at: ALT
Altenew Sugarplums Ink Cube Set Shop at: ALT	Altenew Sugarplums Ovals Set Shop at: ALT	Altenew Sugarplums Reinkers Shop at: ALT
Crystal Katana Tool Shop at: SSS	E6000 Adhesive Spray - 8 0z. Shop at: SSS	Kokuyo Long Dot Adhesive Shop at: SSS
Neenah Solar White #110 Shop at: ALT	PP.com Curious Skin Black Shop at: PPC	Scor-Pal Scoring Board Shop at: SSS
Scotch 3M Foam Tape Shop at: SSS	Teflon Bone Folder Shop at: SSS	Tim Holtz Mini Craft Snips Shop at: SSS
Tim Holtz Tonic Paper Trimmer Shop at: SSS	Tonic 6 Inch Personal Trimmer Shop at: SSS	Versamark Ink Shop at: SSS
Versamarker (Pen) Shop at: SSS	Wagner Heat Tool Shop at: SSS

Thursday, June 4, 2020

Whimsy Stamps Special Guest Post

Hello, everyone! I am here today as a Special Guest for Whimsy Stamps! They contacted me several weeks ago to see if I would serve as a Special Guest Designer for them in June. I hadn't heard of them before so I went to check out the website and see what their designs were all about. My goodness, they have so many styles and types of designs so I picked a few that I wanted to work with and got them in the mail in less than a week!

"Goldie"

"Seashell Background"

My first card features one of their rubber background stamps called Sea Shell Background. This is such a pretty background! So I tried it a few ways for you. First, I Heat Embossed the background stamp onto a panel of Bristol Smooth Cardstock using Versamark and Simon Says Stamp Antique Gold Embossing Powder. Then I did Ink Blending over the entire panel with my brushes from Picket Fence Studios using Distress Oxide Inks in Salty Ocean, Mermaid Lagoon, and Peacock Feathers. I love these beautiful sea blues with the Gold Heat Embossing. I gave it time to dry then misted the panel with some Iridescent Gold Shimmer Mist. Once it was completely dry, I die cut the panel using a plain 4.25 x 5.5-inch rectangle die.

For this little lady, I wanted to stick with the sea blues, even on the tail. Because I don't have all of the colors in Copics, I just grabbed a few B colors and a couple of BG colors and then some of the E colors for the skin and hair. Even the little snail's shell is done in sea blues. I added Tonic Nuvo Shimmer Pen to all of the mermaid and also to the bubbles. You can really see it at this camera angle.

Both cards use a piece of shimmer cardstock for the Dream Big Sentiment. I think this sentiment is particularly fitting for this card as it's for my daughter's friend who was diagnosed with Hodgkins Lymphoma 3 days after her Wedding on March 13 of this year. They started Chemo immediately so their honeymoon got canceled and they are planning on making that trip next year. It's always important to have hope, so encouragement cards are one of my most commonly sent types.

For the second background panel, I heat embossed again using a piece of Arches Cold Pressed #140 Watercolor Paper. Then I wet the whole panel with clean clear water and did a wet on wet watercolor technique to get the variegated colors that you can see. I used a wide range of Daniel Smith Extra Fine Watercolors colors from Pink to Rose to Purple to Coral to Blue. It's always a hot mess until you set it aside to dry. I knew I wanted to keep as much of the background as I could in this case and so I die cut it with a 5.5 square die that I got when I bought my Gemini Die Cutting Machine.

I had recently purchased some Neenah Marble White #130 12 x 12-inch Cardstock, so I made my card base for that card from that cardstock by cutting a sheet 6 x 12 inches then scoring at the 6-inch mark and folding it in half. Since this is such a heavyweight cardstock, it works perfectly for the card base and doesn't do the splits as I call it. You can also use a regular #110 cardstock and make a cardbase that is top folding by using the method I did on a post here. The instructions for that are in the first paragraph.

My daughter and her best friend used to have a beauty blog together called "A Pair of Mermaids" and they both love mermaids so I made these cards with them in mind.

Next, I stamped my focal image, "Goldie" in Gina K Designs Black Amalgam Ink three times - two to use and a third just in case I messed up. That didn't happen, so I have another here to color. I'm not very experienced with Copic Markers, but I've had mine for a long time and I love the images that I found on the Whimsy Stamps Website. I hadn't heard of them before they contacted me but I've already placed an additional order with them and have a pretty big wishlist added as well. *Ü*

Next, I set about coloring the images. I have quite a few colors, but when I got my first set of Copic Markers, there were a total of 78 colors available. Now there's 358 or some such. As you can see by the image of my Hex Chart, I only have maybe 150 colors or so. I definitely don't think you need to have all 358 colors. So in the past year or so, I've been adding a few more colors here and there. I was really missing quite a few colors in the Earth Tones which is what you use for hair and skin, so I felt that I had added enough of those to have enough to work with. In all honesty, after I colored these, I did add a few more colors as I had no markers to make blonde or light brown hair. Like me, my daughter has dark hair but her friend is a blonde, and I didn't have the colors I needed at that time to make blonde hair. She won't care at all and will just enjoy having the mermaid card.

For the second card, I used the watercolor seashell background but left it in a square size format so it will fit in an 8 x 10 envelope for mailing both cards in. It's less expensive to mail an 8 x 10 envelope than to mail a square card, especially if I'm including a few for my daughter to use to send to her friends. For some reason, my daughter really loved the colors in this one so I wanted to keep it large enough to put into a frame if she wanted. It would be really easy to get an 8 x 8 ready-made frame and have a 2.25-inch mat cut to frame the card and frame it.

I think these are such fun cards! I am pretty much a novice at watercolor as well, so that is why I chose the wet on wet technique. I love the way that by dabbing in the color to the wet shell shapes, it kind of separated into the various shapes. If I would have tried to paint them in that well, I wouldn't have been able to pull it off.

For the coloring, I grabbed colors from the Violet, Red Violet, and Red families. The hair was done again with Earth tones. I really enjoyed making these two cards as it gave me a chance to practice my coloring. I don't use much yellow, even in stamping so I didn't have enough colors to make "Goldie" with a golden tail.

I know this post is getting long, but I have a couple more projects to share with you. I really enjoyed the coloring of these, so I got a few more stamps after my initial order for this post. But I have a couple more projects for you here. I used these two stamps: Sweetie and Mistletoe Fairy.

I love the Wee Stamps Line over at Whimsy Stamps and made a few more cards to share with you. This little girl is called "Sweetie". Then I found out that my Epson 3750 Printer will print digital images without the ink smearing. I am very careful to let the ink dry completely before coloring. In fact, usually, I plan ahead and print one day and then color the next. This is really cool for me in case I want to make the image larger for a 5 x 7 card. In my case, I am using

Express it Blending Card which is bright white. You can also use Neenah Solar White #80. I am definitely going to have to get some more since I've been using it, but I want to see which I prefer before purchasing. I got my Copic Ciao Markers in 2007 or 2008 and at that time, there was only something like 72 colors. I couldn't quite get the hang of them and especially the skin tones, so they sat for years unused. One of my New Years' resolutions this year was to actually use more of my supplies, including Copics. I bought a few from a friend who was selling hers off, and I have purchased several additions. I can buy 10-20 at a time and I like to replace the brush tips on the older ones as I see that is needed. I still have about 80 colors on my wish list, but I can't spend that much in one shot! As my Copic Ciao markers dry up, I am replacing them with Copic Sketch markers.

I made this cute card for one of my daughters that sent me a gorgeous Early Blue Hydrangea forStepmother's Day which is the Sunday after Mother's Day. It was quite a surprise when it got delivered this week and we potted it on Friday. This card is for her. While my style is usually ultra-elegant, I love these super cute images.

In fact, I love them so much, that over Memorial Day Weekend, I purchased all of the ones on my wishlist in Digital Format. Space is at a premium in my studio but I have an enormous hard drive and a 4 TB Server, so Digital is way cool now that I know and see myself buying many more digital images. You can make the image larger or small, rotate the image, etc.

Just because I loved the image so much, I also decided to color in the "Mistletoe Fairy" Image. This is where I realized I was seriously missing most Greens in my copies so I ordered about 15 of those plus some additional Super-Brush Nibs for some of the older markers I have that were very dried out - My original 72 Ciao Markers that sat for so long are in really bad shape. Even though I store them horizontally after this many years, they aren't in great shape. I tried something to give them kind of a last-life while I wait on the replacements that I ordered. If you add a bit of colorless blender to them. Don't fill them completely, just put enough colorless blender solution inside to get them moist again. Give it 5 or 10 minutes to get the ink flowing just a bit, and it will most likely get you through while you wait on replacements.

My daughter and I both love little fairies and I also love butterflies, so anything with wings is okay in my book! For the berries on the mistletoe, I used Floral White, E0000. I made a very light shadow using Toner 1 and then everything except her skin gets a layer of Tonic Nuvo Shimmer Pen. I have several different brands of shimmer pens including Spectrum Noir and Wink of Stella. It usually comes down to what I have on my desk at the time. I seem to reach for the Tonic most often.

I don't tend to track numbers as I color unless I am doing a different technique. Especially since I have some Ciao Markers and some Sketch Markers. Ciao Markers don't have the number on the caps, only on the barrel. I'm not yet experienced enough to know automatically which colors I want so I keep a scrap of white cardstock next to me so I can see how colors work together before I use them on my actual project. I hope you enjoyed my cards today!

Thanks so very much for visiting. The products I used are linked below to make shopping easy for you. Whimsy has a really nice line of Red Rubber Cling, some Photopolymer, and a ton of Digital Stamps. I have some of each!

Affiliate links may be used - Thank you for your support!