Garden in Bloom Video

Hello, Crafters.

Yesterday I changed my mind about the project I was going to 

make for today's video, which is something I rarely do. I was 

pleased with the card I shared here yesterday morning, and I 

also shared it in my Facebook Group called JanB Happy Crafting. 

A young lady I met when I was running the March class in Peacehaven 

was WOW'd by my card, and asked if it was easy to make. 

Jessica's question made me stop and think! The answer is yes, 

it is easy to make, but only as long as you know how to do 

masking and 2-step stamping. 

 As I know there's a large number of new crafters who 

watch my videos, many who possibly haven't seen how 

these techniques are done, I decided to make that my project 

for today! Many thanks for your question yesterday, Jessica! ☺

I made one change to the card I made for the video, and that is,

 I made a mask for the bee, and made him fly over the centre flower!

 All I did was to stamp the bee first, put his mask on, and then stamp  

and colour the flowers as normal.

 I had a look at the first card I'd done and estimated I needed to stamp 

the bee in the bottom left hand corner, approximately one and a quarter 

inches in, and one and a quarter inches up. 

Then I was able to position the centre flower, which is the flower

 I did first, so it fitted comfortably with the bee. My only real concern 

was that I didn't want his Crushed Curry body colliding with the Daffodil

 Delight pollen in the centre of the flowers. 

As I'm not planning to do any more craft shows, I need to find outlets

 for all the cards I make for my blog and my videos. I spoke to the 

lady at our Church who's responsible for the little shelves of cards

 that are for sale in the Church foyer. As the cards are shop-bought, 

I asked if she'd accept some of my cards as a donation, so the funds

 could go towards the Church Fund. She accepted graciously, 

so we're both happy.

 I still need to find more outlets as I'm making cards faster than my

 Church will be able to sell them! The reason I'm telling you this,

 is because it explains why, going forward, I'm going to be varying 

the sentiments on my cards as much as possible, whereas previously 

I've mainly be using Happy Birthday and Thank You! ☺

 

Stampin' Up! have released the list of Retiring Products that are being offered for sale with up to 50% off. Although it's a fairly short list, if there's something on there that's on your wish list, you can grab yourself a bargain. Please note this is the list for the European market, and if you're in either North America, or Sout Pacifc, you will need to contact your own SU Demonstrator to see the list that's applicable to your area! ☺

There are two more lists you may be interested in checking out. First there's the Spring/Summer Catalogue Retiring Products and the 2017 - 2018 Annual Catalogue Retiring Products. This list will be the same for all three markets, except for the currencies - these lists are in € and £. As Europe don't get Paper Pumpkin, if you're in North America, you'd need to check the NA lists to find out if there are any PP products on the retiring lists.   

That's rather a lot for one day, so until tomorrow, happy crafting.

JanB.

Garden in Bloom

Hello, Crafters.

What a lovely hot and sunny Bank Holiday weekend it's been 

here in the UK! I'd love the weather to stay like this right through

 to October - fat chance of that in the UK but I'm the 

permanent optimist! LOL! 

Today's card showcases the Garden In Bloom Stamp Set that 

will be retiring on 31st May 2018. It's a two-step stamp set, with a 

few of the stamps being three-steps. I already had two Post It Note 

masks in the stamp case which I'd saved from a previous project! I

 stamped the first flower onto a layer of Whisper White Cardstock (CS)

 using Basic Grey Archival Ink. 

I positioned the flower in the bottom left-hand corner allowing the 

tips of two petals to go over the edge. I covered this image with 

one of the masks and stamped two more flowers, one above and one 

by the right-hand side of the first flower. I repeated the process using

 the second step stamp, with soon-to-be-retired Pink Pirouette Ink, and

 then a third time with the third step stamp!

 I would have saved myself a lot of fiddling about if I had done the

 three steps for the first stamp one after the other, and repeated that 

process, but my way allowed me to check at each stage whether I

 wanted to use two- or three-step stamping.

 For the leaves, I covered the two outside flowers with masks, 

and did all three steps of stamping, using Basic Grey Archival

 Ink first, and then Emerald Envy Ink for the second and third steps.

 For the first step in Emerald Envy I stamped off once.

 I remember from using this stamp set previously, that I prefer 

to stamp the bee with Archival Ink, and then colouring the body

 using Marker Pens. For today's card I used Crushed Curry, which

 I also used for the flower centres. 

The sentiment I chose is from the Picture Perfect Birthday Stamp 

Set which isn't retiring, which I'm pleased about because it has some

great sentiments, not least Treat Yourself which is ideal if you're 

giving someone a gift card, money or a cheque! 

Although it's not visible in the photographs, I painted the bees' wings 

using my Clear Wink of Stella Glitter Pen. To decorate the inside of 

my card, I stamped one flower in the bottom right hand corner of

 the top Whisper White CS layer, and then coloured it using the

 same process I'd used for the front of my card.

   My final touch was to add some Pool Party self-adhesive sequins to

 the front of the card, which I finished off by popping a small Basic 

Pearl inside the centre. Although I don't normally like rough drawn

 outline images, I like the way these images look once they've been 

painted according to the way they were designed to be painted 

i.e. by two- or three-step stamping!

I hope you like today's very summery card! That's it from me, until 

tomorrow, happy crafting.

JanB.

Garden in Bloom Video

Hello, Crafters.

What a beautiful Spring weekend this has turned out to be! 

I think that the card made in today's video epitomises everything about Spring!

Normally, I'm not really into yellow, but I chose So Saffron and Crushed Curry as my colours for today's video because there's so much yellow in the garden at the moment!

I'm really pleased with how my card turned out and have made up my mind to use yellow more often!

The last shot in the video is like my garden, i.e. a riot of colour!

The four colour combos I've used for this card are Sweet Sugarplum with Rich Razzleberry, Marina Mist with Dapper Denim, Wisteria Wonder with Perfect Plum, and Crushed Curry with So Saffron.

I really don't have a favourite - I love them all!

As I said yesterday, I've started to make my Colour Coach again, but neatly this time! I'm also thinking about adding something extra - I'll keep you posted if I do!

And, oh dear! What a bloomer I made with the Wisteria Wonder card - it was a first, and hopefully the last!

I obviously wasn't concentrating on what I was doing because I adhered the Whisper White layer on the wrong side, inside the card!

It was easy enough to correct because I adhered another piece in the correct place, but do you think it looks odd - see photograph 7?


When I added the first bees, I stamped their bodies with the appropriate stamp using Daffodil Delight.

I then added a little sparkle by colouring over the Daffodil Delight using my Gold Wink of Stella Glitter Pen, and I painted the wings with the Clear Wink of Stella Glitter Pen. 

The Gold Wink of Stella Glitter Pen is definitely a deep enough colour which  makes the stamping with Daffodil Delight on the body redundant!

I love how discreet the sparkle is with Wink of Stella.
 
I've been using the gold pen more and more since I used it on my Christmas cards that featured Father Christmas; it looks great on the buckle of his belt.

There must be several other examples where the gold pen really comes into its own. Are there any times I've not mentioned that you feel that it does? I'd love to hear your suggestions!

That's about it for today. I wish you a happy Sunday and until tomorrow, happy crafting.

JanB.
 

My Colour Coach!

Hello, Crafters.

Yesterday I had an amazingly busy day, mainly because it was the last day of Sale-a-bration.
 
By late afternoon I was preparing to make Sunday's video, which will feature the card I shared yesterday.

The colour scheme for that card was Sweet Sugarplum and Rich Razzleberry.

I decided to change the colour scheme for the video. 

Also, I always make another card immediately before commencing video as it acts as a reminder to me for the order in which each step should be made.

It also serves as reminder of any special points and tips I want to share.
 
I decided I wanted to make one card in blue and one card in purple.

I struggled to decide on what two inks went together for this design.

Normally I choose my colours by holding the two ink pads side by side. 

My theory is, if the colours on the ink pads go together, so will the ink inside.

I didn't realise how many different blues we have, so I decided to do test stamps of each of the blues and make my decision from there. 

As it's quite a large flower, I only managed to get five on a page, because I was stamping off the second stamp, and there were nine of them.

I cut the stamped flowers with their names into oblongs, approximately the size of business cards, and was able to pair them together very easily.

My final decision was Dapper Denim and Marina Mist. 

I was able to choose the purple combination using my regular system i.e. pairing up ink pads, but I still did three colour coach cards! 

I haven't tried these two colours together as a card yet, so I'll let you know tomorrow how I get on with it.

No doubt lots of you have your own system for your colour coach, but I found these cards so amazingly helpful that I'm going to re-do them - neatly this time - and then do the other colour groups, so I can keep them for future use. 

I'll keep all the colour groups together in individual small cello bags i.e. one for blue, one for green, one for purple, etc.

Please see photographs 1 and two for the purple flowers and photogrphs 3 to 6 for the blue collection.

Once I'd sorted out my colour choices, I moved on to working out the sensible way to put my card together, rather than the back to front way yesterday's card evolved! 

I also had a couple more ideas to try out - one worked, one didn't! 

The idea that didn't work was to create a tone on tone background on the two strips of coloured cardstock that are visible either side of the white strip of flowers in the middle of the card. 

It made the card look far too crowded and I gave up on that idea!

The second idea I had was to add a bumble bee which was also in the Garden in Bloom Stamp Set. 

This added that extra little detail that I think always finishes off a card! 

Using a scrap of Whisper White CS, I stamped the bee in Basic Black Archival Ink, then used the second stamp to colour his body in Daffodil Delight Ink. 

I felt my card could take a bit of sparkle, so I added Gold Wink of Stella Glitter on top of the Daffodil Delight body, and Clear Wink of Stella Glitter on the wings. 

The normal rule is odd numbers, but one bee looked lost and three looked like a swarm; alright, that's a slight exaggeration, but definitely crowded!

In this instance, I decided this was the exception to the rule and two was right number.
Yesterday, hubby and I decided to add an extra day on our visit to Amsterdam next week, so the changes have been made.
 
For me this means I have four videos to make this weekend. 

Fortunately, hubby's working all weekend so it should be reasonably easy to do as I have four possible projects in mind anyway! 

I hope you have a great weekend.

Until tomorrow, happy crafting. 

JanB.

Prototype Garden in Bloom

Hello, Crafters.

I'm making excellent progress with my swaps - I've now made 113! 

I probably won't have a chance to make any more today, but I'm confident I'll make enough by next Tuesday - so I'll have 120 for Amsterdam plus one for each of my March customers!

I had a design in my mind's eye for today's card and the finished card is quite close to that image!

However, I've called it a protoype because there are two or three things I want to add or change. 

I've also decided I'm going to make a video to show how I made it. 

The idea was to stamp some flowers down the right hand side of a Whisper White Cardstock (CS) but in a slightly crooked line, and then cut out the right hand side of the flowers to give the card a very uneven edge. 

Then I was going to adhere a strip of Sweet Sugarplum CS down the left hand side on the front of the card and another strip on the right hand side of the inside of the card. 

This would give a background that would help to accentuate the flowers. 

I stamped four flowers from the Garden in Bloom Stamp Set, two in Sweet Sugarplum Ink and two in Rich Razzleberry Ink. 

This is a two-step stamp, so I stamped the inside of the flowers using the same colour ink but stamping off once. 

I used Olive Green Ink to stamp some leaves on the left hand side of the flowers.

Like the flowers, this is a two step stamp, so I stamped the solid stamp off once before going onto my cardstock. 

Then I stamped four more flowers in the same way on scraps of Whisper White CS, and cut them out by hand. 

I painted the centres of these four flowers with the Gold Wink of Stella Glitter Pen. 

I curled the petals gently and then adhered the flowers to match the position and colour of the flowers on the card front.
 
However, I didn't like the reverse side of the flowers, so I adhered a complete sheet of Sweet Sugarplum CS on the back of the Whisper White card front, and then the strip on the left hand side.

I chose the sentiment from the Birthday Blooms Stamp set and stamped it in Rich Razzleberry ink onto some Whisper White CS. 

I die cut it using the third largest Stitched Shapes Framelits Dies. I adhered this to the card front using Dimensionals.

The final touch was to adhere a layer of Sweet Sugarplum CS inside the card, and then a layer of Whisper White CS on top.  

I stamped  a Rich Razzleberry flower in the bottom left hand side. I also stamped the leaves. 

Unfortnately, I forgot to stamp off once so I used my Olive Green Marker Pen, the thin end, and I drew some veins on the leaves! 

I'm really pleased with the outcome of this card but I can see areas for "enhancements!" LOL! 

I'll have another play with this card over the weekend to include the enhancements and then I'll make a video!

That's about it for today! Until tomorrow, happy crafting.

 JanB.