Thinking of Charlotte

Hi again everyone! This time I'm back with a card that I made *deep breath* just because I wanted to. 😂Something I'm working on is the unreasonable expectations I put on myself. Every craft project I make has to have a "reason" besides just doing it for the dang fun of it, or my Type A side is like "WHY. ARE. YOU. WASTING. TIME." 😂 So I spent a few slow days just putting a card together that I made just because I felt like it, and for no particular reason! I know, novel concept, right? 😜

I call this card "Thinking of Charlotte" because of the sentiment, and because I painted the amazingly adorable cat to look like my baby kitten Charlotte. Well... I guess she's not a kitten anymore. 😢She just recently turned 1 year old. 😭

My cats are both not the easiest to color (the other being a calico), so I like to try to paint pretty much only their coat colors when I color cats, and to get more and more accurate with their coloring every time. [It was at this point she thought to herself, "what was wrong with the simple orange tabby kitten she could have picked out? One color. Some wiggly lines. That's it."] 😂BIG jokes though; Amelia (the calico, not pictured) chose me. She's one of my best friends and my sweet baby!

Here's little Charlotte, the superstar of this post. Of course I had to include her! You can compare the coloring on the card to her coloring. On the left is the first day we got her, at 8 weeks old. On the right is her sassy face at right around her first birthday, a few days ago! Same little gremlin face almost a year later!

 

And so, on to the card! I just picked up this Waffle Flower stamp and die set, "Smiling" at the beginning of this month. I had been wanting a few more WF sets after loving their "Color Swatches" set, so I got this and another I have yet to debut. 😜

I didn't really know where I wanted to go with the card at all, so I started by stamping the large cat-and-flowers image in VersaFine Onyx Black ink on watercolor card stock, because I did know I wanted to watercolor it. 

I started with Charlotte first. I'm so experimental when I watercolor. (That's my way of calling myself "inconsistent" nicely. 😂) I used my Mijello Mission Gold watercolors, and I did very little mixing. I like to try to use up leftover paints from my mixing palette, so that mostly determined the colors for this card. I had some purple leftover, and I knew I wanted Charlotte to have a pink ribbon, of course. She is her mother's baby, after all. 😁💖

After stamping all the additional flowers in the set, I watercolored those as well. At this point I had the idea that I wanted the flowers to be "exploding" from behind the main cat image. I just felt the card needed a little something more. I had mixed a lot of pinks and purples for coloring the flowers, and I wanted to use more of them to tie the colors all together.

I used one of my Sizzix Scalloped Circle dies to cut a piece of watercolor card stock. Then I completely saturated the watercolor paper and went to town! I just dripped in puddles of pink and purple with a large-ish (want to say maybe an 8?) fairly saturated round brush. I kind of moved it around, let it do its thing, and then let it dry in the sun. I think it came out pretty cute!

I used a piece of watercolor paper I had previously washed with a sort of mint color as the base, to bring everything together. I wanted some sparkle, so I gave it a wash with my Gansai Tambi White Gold watercolor. It gave it a really subtle, silver shimmer. I then cut the face down with my Kat-Scrappiness wavy stitched border die and adhered it to a pre-cut card base that I'm almost positive came from a Simon Says Stamp monthly kit, because I never pre-make card bases in colored paper. 😂I don't know why the mint and purple just sang to me, but it did!

Then it was time to get things poppin'... up with foam tape. 😜I put two pieces of really wide foam tape behind the purple scalloped piece, and I made sure to leave room along the edges. I adhered the cat die cut to somewhere around the bottom of the circle, in order to leave room for the sentiment. After placing the cat and circle piece on the card face, I arranged some of the flowers around the top, to look like they were bursting out. 

Lastly, I embossed "thinking of you" from the Smiling set, and went into a my Hero Arts stash for a sentiment from "Everyday Sayings." In the picture above you can see a bit of that subtle shimmer! I had so much fun making this card. I really took my time and just did what I wanted!

Thank you so much for reading, and if you'd like to be notified when there's a new post on my blog, use the subscribe feature on the right. Happy crafting!

Golden Roses Engagement Card

Hi everyone! Today is going to be a really quick blog post because I was hoping to have a video of it up on my BRAND NEW YOUTUBE CHANNEL woo! Don't get too excited; there's only one video at the moment. However, I will have the video for this card up hopefully sometime this week. I hope you don't mind the sparse content in this post! This card is an entry for the Simon Says Stamp Wednesday Challenge, the theme of which is "pop it up!" This is also an entry for the MFT Sketch Challenge 402. Below is the given sketch:

I needed an engagement card because my younger cuz just got engaged! 😁 I'm so happy for her! Luckily I had recently bought my first few wedding-related stamp sets, because I needed to make a wedding card for the first time recently. Lots of first occasions when you've been crafting less than a year! 😂I used Lawn Fawn "Happy Wedding" stamp and die set for everything but the background.

For the longest time, I've been wanting to use my Simon Says Stamp "Modern Rose Blooms" background stamp and emboss it in something metallic. As you can see, I did just that with some Versamark, and Ranger Fine Gold embossing powder. Using my Kat Scrappiness "Wonky Wavy Stitched Border" die, I cut down a piece of card stock that I would use to stamp on. I made a background pattern using a few images from the Lawn Fawn set. I also used the coordinating die to cut out an engagement ring to use as the center piece. While I was die cutting the engagement ring, I also cut two pieces of craft foam which I used glued together along with the stamped image of the ring to give it quite a bit of dimension. I used Copic markers to color everything.

To bring in the gold from the background and make the card feel more cohesive, I used my Ranger embossing pen to color a few of the hearts in, then embossed them in the same gold as the background. The sentiment was two combined: "congratulations" and "you're engaged." I also used the included exclamation point at the end of each to give it a little more "oomph." 😁 I stamped all of the sentiment in Versafine, then heat embossed it all with Ranger clear embossing powder. 

Finally, I assembled the card by adhering the stamped piece to the embossed rose background with some thick foam tape. I then placed the dimensional ring in the center of that. I used my ATG on half of the sentiment that would go onto the stamped piece, and supported the part on the background piece with two 1/4" foam squares.

That's it for this quick post! Thank you for stopping by, and make sure to subscribe using the feature to the right if you're interested in knowing when my blog updates. Have a great day!

MFT Sketch Challenge 400

Hello again! Welcome to the first post on my blog for the month of September! I'm back with another entry for a My Favorite Things challenge, this time sketch instead of color. This is my entry for the MFT Sketch Challenge 400 as well as the current Simon Says Stamp Monday challenge. The sketch provided for this week's card was the following:

Image courtesy of MFT Challenge Blog

Very sadly, I only have two MFT stamps sets (need to rectify ASAP!), and since I just used one of them, "Bubble Over With Joy," for the last challenge, I thought I should use my other one, "I Knead You" for this challenge. I've already made at least one card where the focal point was the repetition of the small images from this set. They're just so cute, and they're classic cat icons! So I thought I would like to make vertical lines out of repeating those small stamps.

I also thought of a few other decorative ways I could add vertical stripes. Washi one of the frontrunners, but I decided to use my favorite medium lately, watercolors! Using my Mijello Mission Gold watercolors, I made a five-color rainbow using just a swipe or two from a small-medium flat brush.

I then picked the stamps I wanted to stamp over the watercolor stripes. I surprised myself by picking one of the kitties, but he was so vertical (well, horizontal at the time lol) and cute I just had to. So, once the watercolors were thoroughly dry, I stamped one of the mice, the sleeping cat, the fish, the fishbone, and the other mouse respectively from right to left.

I knew from the start I didn't want to color the stamped images; I wanted the watercolor stripes to be the main focus, but I felt it could use a little more dimension, so I used one Polychromos colored pencil per image (the one that I felt most closely matched a "shaded" version of the watercolor stripe behind it) to give some areas just a little bit of shadow and dimension.

For the sentiments, I decided to combine "I love mew" with "You left a paw print on my heart. I stamped "you left a paw print..." with Versafine black ink and heat embossed with with Ranger clear embossing powder. For "I love mew," I simply white heat embossed in on a black piece of card stock, cut the inside edge into the little banner shape inspired by the original sketch, then adhered it below my previously embossed sentiment.

That's it for the relatively simple card. It was almost one layer if it hadn't been for that pesky black card stock sentiment I just can't NOT use for some reason. 😂 Have you played along with this week's challenge? I'm cutting it closer to the deadline than I normally like, so I'm sure I'll be one of the last ones playing. Happy crafting everyone!