Northwest Stamper

Tag: lns challenge

  • A Little Watercoloring with On The Grow

    I decided to participate in another challenge with week – again with the Late Night Stamper group.  This week was challenge #133 and you were to create a thinking of you card that has blue on it.  Seemed easy enough and so I grabbed my poor neglected On The Grow stamp set from the summer mini and got to work.

    When I saw this stamp set, it screamed,”Watercolor me!”.  So, I thought I would try to get a little artsy with my card and pulled out the watercoloring paper, my aqua pen, and some inks and got to work.

    A few watercoloring tips:

    • If you are going to use a lot of colors, make sure you use watercolor paper.  Because you will be going over the same area lots of times with a wet pen, most cardstocks and paper like Whisper White will start warping or pilling up on you.  Watercoloring paper is more fiberous and can absorb the water without a problem giving you a really nice image.
    • Use Staz-on ink for best results for your outlined image.  Staz-on won’t bleed as you go over the same area with a wet brush multiple times.  Stampin’ Up’s Basic Black and Basic Grey are water-resistant so they will work too for your watercoloring projects but your best bet would be to use Staz-on
    • If you want a really precise placement of color – grab your blender pen.  It uses an alcohol-base to pick up and place your color and the tip is firmer so you can be exact with placement and you won’t get extra liquid.
    • If you want to be more artsy – grab your aqua pen.  It is a refillable pen that just contains water with a more flexible-brushlike tip.  When you color, you can squeeze a little and make the pen more wet letting you color spread a little more or just get a more damp and traditional watercolor look.

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    Thinking of You Watercolored card recipe:
    Stamps: 
    From the Garden
    Ink:  Stazon Black, Island Indigo, Baja Breeze, Blushing Bride, Perfect Plum, Pear Pizazz, Crumb Cake
    Paper:  Baja Breeze cardstock, Marina Mist cs, Soft Suede cs, Watercolor paper
    Accessories:  BigShot die cutting machine, Lattice embossing folder, Paper piercer, Neutrals 5/8” brads, Aqua Pen, Stampin’ Dimensionalsimage

  • Plane and Simple Father’s Day Card

    I’m on a yahoo group called Late Night Stampers and each week they post a challenge for you to complete that week.  This week the challenge was to create a masculine card.  Well, I often fall back on Lovely as a Tree as a “masculine” set since I don’t have many stamps that are explicitly for the guys.  But then I thought of the Plane and Simple stamp set that just came out in the Occasions Mini. 

    Plane & Simple Stamp Set - by Stampin' Up!

    The style of this set is this cool mix of aged and masculine without the need for overt testosterone (like many of the grilling or motercycle stamps – which are not bad images, just less of my style).  Plus add in that my hubby and I are both pilots and I come from a family of pilots going back to my grandparents – and so you know I’m going to be a sucker for stamp sets that have airplanes in them. 🙂

    Anyway, enough about me…. how about a card? 

    I think my favorite thing about this card is the popped up airplane on the Whisper White cardstock that has been sponged with Baja Breeze ink so that it looks like it is in the clouds.  It was totally worth the cutting it in my opinion. :)  And the cutting wasn’t really as bad as you might think either.  You just want to make sure you have a pair of scissors with smaller blades so it is easy to manuever (some kind of paper snips like this).

     

    Check out this stamp set and the rest of the great sets from the Occasion Mini online here.

     

    Plane and Simple Father’s Day Card Recipe:
    Stamps: 
    Plane and Simple
    Ink:  Crumb Cake, Night of Navy, Baja Breeze, Soft Suede
    Paper:  Baja Breeze CS, Whisper White CS, Soft Suede CS, Night of Navy CS
    Accessories:  Sponge, Stampin’ Dimensionals, Paper Snips

  • Square Card Challenge – LNS challenge #92

    I earned the hostess set Northern Hearts recently and was excited that it matched my Northern Trim letterpress die.  So, its funny that the first card I created with it ended up having nothing to do with the matching die, even though I had finished scraps from the right die lying around.  Oh well, this let me play with my other item I just had to have, but hadn’t used yet – the big buttons from the holiday mini.

    I used markers to color the stamp set and then added one of the biggest buttons in the pack!

    I can’t decide if this is a Christmas/holiday card or not.  What do you think?  Would you send this as a Christmas card?

    Northern Heart Birds Recipe:
    Stamps:
    Northern Hearts
    Ink: Cherry Cobbler marker, Pear Pizzazz marker, Blushing Bride marker
    Paper: Crumb Cake CS, Very Vanilla CS, Greenhouse Gala dsp
    Accessories: Paper piercer, Candy Cane Big Designer Buttons

  • Sponging up a No Layer Card

    Each week, the Late Night Stampers group has some kind of challenge.  This week was particularly intriguing to me as the challenge was to create a single/no layer card.  When I first read this, I thought, “won’t these cards be boring?”  Well, boy was I wrong!  Folks came up with all kinds of cool ways to make a card look interesting without needing lots of layers of paper and embellishments.  So, I took up the challenge and decided to create one myself, no paper layers, no embellishment layers, just paper and ink.

    Here is what I came up with:

    Using scoring lines and sponging, this card turned out much better than I expected.  I scored the outer frame at about 1” in from the top and the bottom of the card and about 1/2” in from the sides of the card.  Then I scored the inner frame about 1/4” in from the outer frame.  I then masked at the inner frame lines and sponged with Pink Pirouette ink and stamped my flowers using Blushing Bride and Rich Razzleberry.  Next I masked the inner part of the score lines so I could sponge the outer areas with Pink Pirouette and finished it off by sponging the edges of the card in Rich Razzleberry.

    Tip:  Did you know that it is easy to score at precise measurements that don’t go to the edge of your paper using a paper cutter and a bone folder?  For a frame like I created above, grab a paper cutter that uses a grooved track for cutting like this one and position your paper to the dimension you want to score.  So, if you were scoring the sides of the frame above, you would put your paper at 3 3/4” so that you are scoring 1/2” in from the side of your 4 1/4” card front.  Then use the bone folder instead of the cutting blade and use the ruler on the cutting track to help you score the length you want – so in this case, from 4 1/2” to 1”.  Keep doing that for each side of your frame, and voila!  You are done!

    Need a bone folder or a grooved paper cutter?  You can order them here!

    No Layer Card Recipe:
    Stamps: 
    Petal Pizazz, Just Believe
    Ink:  Pink Pirouette, Blushing Bride, Rich Razzleberry, Old Olive
    Paper:  Whisper White CS
    Accessories:  Paper cutter, bone folder, sponges