Hello to my regulars and welcome to those who are stopping by as part of the final edition of the Collected Crafty Collab Hop! If you're following the hop, you should have gotten here from the incredibly talented Donna. At the end of this post, I'll link to the next stop!
If this is your first time checking out this hop, let me share a little background with you. Chatting with Karen, Anna, and Marie, we discovered a few things:
- We all love squirrels, but can also be just as easily distracted as the fuzzy little friends. Hence the squirrel in the logo and our affectionate name for our group, The Squirrel Girls.
- That we wanted to create a hop series to help us use the supplies we've been "squirreling" away.
- We wanted to bring more attention to blogs, still a vital part of the crafting community.
As it turns out, there are other bloggers out there just like us, giving us the chance to create a great monthly hop series! Each month, we will focus on a theme and supply type. We can decide whether we wish to use one or both. This month we could focus on snow people, shiny things, or both. As always, I went for it and used both!
This challenge showed me something surprising: I have exactly 2 snow people in my stamp collection. WHAAAAAAAAT? They came from the same set and I have already used them, so I wanted to go with something I haven't used (at least in a while). But what would it be? As it turns out, the silhouette of a tree against a clear starry night sparked this card. I scanned through all the cartridge booklets and found this perfect silhouette (the "blackout" silhouette from the Doodle Charms Cricut Cartridge. Thank you, Karen!). I also finally used one of my oldest craft supplies: a piece of navy handmade paper with silver paint spatters. This piece of paper has moved with me everywhere and somehow I never felt like I had the right project to warrant cutting it up. Until now!
With all that sorted out, I got to work putting it together. The card base is your basic 4.25" x 5.5". I trimmed down a navy piece of paper to be an 1/8" smaller. Then I trimmed up a white piece of paper to be 1/8" smaller than the blue so I could have a thin mat. I grabbed a Waffle Flower Circle Nesting Die and die cut a circle. I then trimmed off a square of the handmade paper to be just a smidge larger than the circle. As I trimmed it with my paper cutter, I found it to be very fibrous, so I decided to trace the square onto the navy so I could apply the tape runner to the cardstock instead of the handmade paper (I worried it might shred or just make the glue "hairy"). I then glued the bottom of the snowman onto the inside bottom of the circle. Finally, I covered the back for the card front and the snowman with foam tape for a little careful dimension.
The "Winter Wishes": Sentiment from the 2019 Gina K Stamptember collaboration has certainly gotten its workout this year. I pressed it into service one more time with some navy ink from Hero Arts.
This card feels like the essence of my exuberance and awe every time I step out on a clear snowy evening and feel the cold crispness of the air!
Don't forget to keep hopping to see how everyone else answered this theme! I'm actually the last stop on the hop, so head to where it all starts this month: my amazing squirrel sister Anna!
And hey, if you like what you're seeing on the hop, please leave a comment for the participants and even consider subscribing! We all put a lot of thought and effort into this hop, so it's nice to know when it's inspiring someone!