Time to go to the beach...

Just not in New Zealand at the moment, we seem to have a polar blast hitting us at the moment but it was lovely to colour along and play with beachy things and think of Summer.

AAA Cards has a beachy inspiration board for their current challenge which looks amazing and the water looks so warm (sniff). I have been inspired by the red bucket with yellow and green accessories lower LHS to finally colour up my beach girl from At the Beach  stamp from CTMH. This is a fab stamp set but their stamps are a bit on the big size to me. I guess so they can make ephemera for scrapbook pages but when your best friend is a CTMH consultant sometimes you just have to support them and buy really cool stamps and dies.

My card has a lot of stuff, hopefully it's clean and simple enough but I have wanted to colour the girl in her sarong up for ages, so I sea-zed this opportunity to do so.

My background panel was created through a Watercolor Wash stencil from MFT. I used Gina K masking magic to make the mid-way border. The sea is all distress oxides: Cracked Pistachio, Salvaged Patina, Peacock Feathers. Spritzed with water, wait a few minutes, blot off. Then I made a wee wash with the Peacock Feathers ink and splattered with a no. 4 paintbrush. When dryish, time to blend in the sand with Antique Linen distress oxide and then splattered with Tea Dye distress ink wash.

I did all my blending on Lavinia Multifarious Smooth and Supreme paper it's great for blending and is WHITE and quite a heavy weight. I then used the deckled rectangle in the Mix and Match Frames from Altenew.

I stamped the girl from At the Beach using Memento Tuxedo Black to XPress IT blending card stock and coloured in with my Copics. Colours listed below (darkest >>lightest).

Straw Hat: YR31/30

Hair: E44/43/41/40

Skin: E11/00/000

Red: R29/35

Green: G09/05/02/00

Yellow: Y08/06/02/00

I have stamped the sentiment from another CTMH set Voice of the Sea and the wee shells are from Lawn Fawn On the Beach using Gathered Twigs ink from Pinkfresh Studios. 

Anyhow this is a fun challenge as either it is summer where you live or you're like me wishing it was ;)

✿ Karen ✿

Craft Roulette #167

After discovering what Craft Roulette was all about I wasn't going to let a really and I mean really busy weekend get in the way of taking part this week.

Again I couldn't watch it live as I was doing my Create with Us Live class with Lawn Fawn which was the identical time (1130am on Saturday morning in NZ), so I had to watch in review late Saturday night about 11pm as falling asleep. It was lovely seeing Mary Gunn FUNN highlight "your card" as it was a first submission. It was even more fun to hear Laura Bassan yes "laurafadora" go WOW at my bag-a-lope I fell asleep very happily after hearing that.

This week seemed really easy parameters; a thank you card, Farmers' Market colours (???GOK what that really means as everything seems to be Farmers' Markets colours), something that rhymes with "bee" and some punctuation.

So late last night about 11pm again start thinking what can I KReate today. My first thought I must have a thanks die with an exclamation mark >>> NO I don't, maybe on a sentiment >>> not that I could find, thinking oh no this is not as easy as it seems. Then I spied an old set from Stampin' Up! Just Saying' which was just perfect (punctuation and gee rhymes with bee). My table was covered by this time with bee stamps, tree stamps, things to do with the sea.

I had recently grabbed a bargain at my local crafting store (Krafters Cart) a set of Mama Elephant die cuts called Let's Chat. I think they're sized to work with the small sayings for the small wee animal stamp sets and they were in the clearance rack; so they were too good a bargain to not pick up and I'm really happy I did as they worked so well with the larger sentiment from my SU! set.  This idea came from something I saw on a challenge site a few weeks ago which I thought was so clever, which you can view HERE. Of course for this challenge I couldn't find my pin but 48 hours later I have it was a wee way down (I do like to Pin) so editing my post to show where to find my "inspiration".

 Hopefully, I used Farmer's Market colours though my blue is maybe a tad bright but I felt like I needed a pop of colour on the card, I also had to throw in some brown for the mud on the ground and on the potatoes and probably the carrots.

Just sharing the difference between Versamark and a white pigment ink when white embossing.

The LHS is the Versamark one, ignore I haven't heat set it properly but looking at the sentiment its a lot thicker emboss with my white pigment ink. I'm in the middle of a Virtual Art Retreat and we are doing a lot of white embossing in it. I've been a good student and copying the teacher and using my white pigment ink but today I reached for my Versamark without thinking and then thought oh that's not that nice an image for my "highlight/centrepiece" and tried again with the white ink.

Supply List:
Stamps: Just Sayin' (SU!)

Ink: Unicorn white pigment (HA)

Paper : Neenah White, Shaded Spruce (SU!), Sweet Sorbet (SU!), Daffodil Delight (SU!), Pumpkin Pie (SU!), Soft Suede (SU!), Tahitian Tide (SU!)

Dies: Just Sayin' (SU!), Let's Chat (Mama Elephant), Folk Edge rectangles (PFS)

Other: Alabaster white EP (BM)

Challenge: Craft Roulette #167

I'm loving KReating something that I wouldn't normally make, I'm actually quite chuffed how amazing well that stamp set worked for the challenge and made it a doddle to whip up today. Roll on next Saturday and the next spin of the wheel.....

✿ Karen ✿

Just Plane Awesome

Was the title of the latest FREE Lawn Fawn Class with Kelly Marie and Jenn and it was awesome!! My friend Sarah came and created live with me too which is a lot of fun as well.

 I absolutely love these classes as it's a great way to create a few cards and hear some banter and some gossip of what's coming (unfortunately the goss is it's dogs  for the next release in a few weeks time- which does not make my heart sing but maybe my bank balance will be happy). Even if you don't have the stamp sets the blending could be used with other small images.

Apart from the inks which I have used my own everything else is pretty well on the supply list which you can download as a PDF from the website  Create with Us. The PDF also has the Copic colouring guide too.

Both the cards we made:

Card one uses Lemon Whip, Mint, Ocean Breeze and Soft Liliac inks from Pinkfresh Studios. My cloud stencils come from MFT stamps (I have cloud, rolling cloud and mini clouds).

Card 2 got a wee bit changed  for multiple reasons. I've used Distress Oxides for blending: Scattered Straw (all over the card stock) then clouds added with Shaded Lilac. As we were doing it Sarah and I were saying maybe we could miss step one and have just used So Saffron card. Funnily enough we thought we knew what we were doing so we also die cut out our blended sky piece with the Inside Out Stitched rectangle die; we blame Pete as he called us for lunch as we told him we were ready but he was too efficient and too fast, he must have been hungry. We had to tweak it a bit and my panels are now on a So Saffron card from Stampin' Up! so So Saffron did end up being used for the card. So our card looks different than class example theirs's shows more Spiffy Speckles DSP but ours is still AWESOME too.  

I can't wait for next week's Live class with Jenn Shurkus from Creative Chick Classes where we are doing Summer Loving, funnily enough today is our first real frost here in the Waikato but the sun is shining!.

✿ Karen ✿