Welcome back everyone! Whether you're a longtime reader or coming here for the first time from marvelous Marie, I'm excited to see you!
It's a new year, but guess what: we all still have supplies we've been squirreling away so we've decided to keep hopping for another year! As a reminder, this is our hop where we make a project using a theme and technique or supply that we've randomly chosen. Who knows: we might experiment with that some this year.... The challenge is fun, but the best part is getting to use some of those supplies we've had squirreled away for who knows how long!
This month, we were excited to show love for our friends and family! To allow us a pretty liberal use of other supplies, we decided to focus on incorporating ink blending. This is one of my favorite techniques and I was thrilled to pair it with some unused supplies!
I got a little carried away with three very different styles of card!
The first card was my original plan. When working on my cards for last month, I'd noted another Hero Arts Fancy Confetti Die (Hearts), that I didn't recall ever using.
I decided to start with a light pink cardstock. That color would show through in the center as I blended two darker shades out from it (Hero Arts Taffy and Distress ink Festive Berries). This gave me a great vignette effect!
I then ran that through the die cutting machine with the Hearts panel! I was really excited until I realized all of a sudden that I wasn't sure what color I'd wanted the paper showing through the hearts would be. Plain white didn't look right and neither did other pinks and reds I pulled. That's when I got the fairly nifty idea to use the pink cardstock again and reverse the ink blend! This time I started with Festive Berries in the center and blended out until the cardstock color was only along the edges!
I wanted to also use the My Monthly Hero Kit from January 2022. As is often the case, I was so enamored with all the possibilities of the kit, but then life got busy, or I felt like I wasn't having any good ideas that others hadn't already had, so I let it languish. Sometimes there is a benefit in not using something immediately if it allows you to think about the individual parts more and find ways to pair them with other items already in your stash. I decide the single key would be the perfect touch for the center of the card as well as the sentiment. The key was cut out of a couple of pieces of gold paper and stacked together for a little thickness. The sentiment was stamped in gold on white cardstock. I used a Sizzix Thinlits from Tim Holtz (Labels) to cut out a shape that was far too big. I trimmed off all the extra frills and got a perfect sentiment label! I edged it with gold ink and accented it with the leftover gold heart from the center of the key head and felt unreasonably proud of my ingenuity!
I do have a bad habit in cardmaking where I often neglect the inside of the card, but this time, I finished my work! I stamped another sentiment from the set onto white cardstock and blended more Taffy around the edges. This card is ready to go!
Now I'm going to admit something here that will come as a shock to everyone: I have a very stubborn streak. When I get an idea, I get really determined to try it. This time, it was an idea that hadn't come to fruition from last month. I'd wanted to use the confetti that came from the die to make a shaker card. The kit gave me the perfect opportunity for that!
This time I cut the Keyhole cover die out of the same matte gold paper. I cut a second one from fun foam. I traced the keyhole and used the same ink colors to create another vignette around the shape of the keyhole. I glued down the fun foam, added the confetti, topped with acetate, then added the gold keyhole on top!
I really liked how it looked, but ultimately decided I wanted to cut out another gold key to glue to the center of the acetate. I toyed with adding a sentiment, but I really like the intricate design of the cover and didn't want to obscure any of it.
The last card was a little bit of an unexpected one. I'd stumbled across one of Kristina Werner's videos from her first Capsule Crafting experiment. But I wanted to do my own riff on it. She ink blended onto a separate piece of aper and cut it into strips. I decided I wanted to ink blend right onto the card. This led to me layering washi tape strategically over the front, first to create a clean white border, and then to mask each area I didn't want to be blending in at the moment. It looked like this:
In her video. she stamped another stamp over the ink blending for more texture. She spent a lot of time applying the ink as a rainbow and it looked really fantastic! It also looked more ambitious than I was feeling, so I left the edges masked and stamped the card with embossing ink. I used the Simon Says Stamp Lattice Grid as my texture. I then just covered it in clear embossing powder for a glossy finish.
Since the texture was very geometric, I decided I wanted to use a hexagon as the frame for my sentiment. The sentiment came from the My Monthly Hero Kit of September 2019. For the record, I have used elements from this set before, but it's been a while. The hexagon is an individual craft punch, which is certainly underutilized. Much like Kristina, I wanted to tie in the black of the sentiment, so I added a few enamel dots in black. This one was a lot of work, but I really love it!
I always love this hop! It makes me think AND makes me use my supplies But you know what I love even more? Seeing how the Squirrel Squad interpreted this theme! You're going to love it too, so be sure to keep hopping! The Squirrel Squad is a small group so the hop won't take you long, but will leave you feeling totally inspired! Next up: the amazing Anna!! If you love what we're doing, please leave a comment! We love it even more when you subscribe!