Flutterby Rainbow

I love a good rainbow, don't you?  This card was my first proper play with some of the stamps from the Butterfly Gala set, which includes block colour stamps so you can infill the outlines easily.  There is a stamp to infill the top pair of wings, and a separate one for the bottom, so I decided to try very close colours to give a little bit of differentiation.  I'm not sure it's that obvious, but I do like the effect of all the colours together.

Now to try one with the bigger butterfly!

Bloomin' Hugs

I keep going back to Hedgehugs.  It's a great pun, and also a great set.  The critters are cute on their own, but also make for a beautiful pairing: these two are so obviously in love!

Talking of pairing, I've paired Hedgehugs with the new Beauty Abounds set (which has both picture and texture stamps, so an excellent choice if you're just starting to build your collection), and coloured in the flower stems with Blends.

Be the Classic You Are

It's been a while since I shared a more masculine card, so here is a quick one I made a few of for a charity sale. Using both sides of the Classic Garage DSP, a spritz of grungy splatter and a stamp and greeting from the Geared Up Garage set I think this could become a classic in its own right!

I especially love that the back sides of the DSP are textured rather than patterned, which makes them super-versatile.  I'm definitely getting in a couple of spares of this stack!

Another DSP Post

It's another DSP-centric post!  And what a DSP, though - can we all just take a moment to glory in its utter gorgeousness?  For these papers Stampin'Up! commissioned an expert in traditional embroidery to make up panels, which were then photographed in high definition, so they are amazingly detailed and look really 3D - the first thing I had to do when I got my hands on a piece of this at OnStage in November was touch it to make sure it wasn't actually embroidered!

I've used these to make a couple of special cards, including the gift wallet below which contained the Badger-in-law's 70th birthday present - a trip to a yarn show. I couldn't have had a more appropriate DSP, really, and as an added bonus it coordinated beautifully with the publicity materials for the show 😁

Strangely Traditional (for me)

I do like a spot of watercolouring, but this is the first time I had tried the "no line" technique. I actually chose a retired stamp for this because I really wanted my first try to be with something that had quite open spaces and definite lines, but it's something I'm definitely going to be doing again and trying with loads of different stamps. There's certainly improvement to be made with my technique, but as a first go I was happy enough with it to turn it into a birthday card for the Badger-in-law 😀

A Short Departure to the Past

I'm breaking with the rule of only using current Stampin'Up! items on this blog, because I really want to highlight something. I made these albums for both sets of Grandbadgers for Christmas, and I was really pleased with how they turned out.  But that's not why I'm sharing.

Designer Series Paper.  Like most people, I buy more than I need and not as much as I want.  Some packs are "saved" because they are just too pretty, while others are bought and used for a specific project or class.  But very rarely do I use a whole pack, which means that I have several boxes full of part-packs of retired papers, often the ones I wasn't particularly drawn to immediately on opening the pack.

BUT, so often these can be used together!  Stampin'Up!'s colour coordination means that it's really easy to mix, match and still have a beautifully coordinated end product.

Did you know that in every DSP pack each paper has a bold side, patterned to coordinate with the stamps in the suite, but it also has a more generic side, often with a smaller or more subtle pattern?  It's these that often go really well together when using up bits and pieces.

For the monochrome-on-green album below I used DSP from... wait for it... EIGHT different packs!  But they were all monochrome, and I love how they all looked together: although the styles were very different, the black-and-white pulled it all together very satisfyingly.  And the Grandbadgers thought so too.

Presenting... The Doily Biscuit!

I really am getting quite attached to this sentiment... it obviously speaks to me on some kind of deep, primal level 😂 This card takes the sentiment and borders from Amazing Life and pairs it with a cake from Piece of Cake - yum!

Little tip - I made the holes around the larger scalloped circle with the 3.2mm circle punch - I think it makes it look somewhere between a doily and a posh biscuit... either way, pretty appropriate to the card. Yum indeed.