Saturday, July 24, 2010

OLW - Christmas in July

The challenge this week from Susan Railhala at Simplicity was to make a one layer Christmas card. When I saw this, I thought...WOW! I can DO this!! Little did I know that I'd once again struggle to get my stamping in just the right place and Lord only knows, I ALWAYS smear the ink after I've stamped! I' m praying that my stamping skills will improve as I continue to accept these challenges. Without further ado...here's my cards...yes cards. I ended up with 3 finished cards that I "kinda" liked.

This holly card was stamped with an Inkadinkado stamp. I colored it with my Copics and added the PTI sentiment on the bottom of the card. In an effort to pull the images together for a finished look, I added double lines about 1/2 inch inside the edges of the card, stopping an starting without drawing through the stamped images.

The sentiment on this card is also from PTI. The three wise men are an Inkadinkado stamp, (I think). Once again I added the black line 1/2 inch inside the edges of the card. The star was an afterthought, and I probably should have left it off. I believe it's a Stampin Up stamp. I added a little color to my three wise men with my copic markers.

This last card was my original idea when I was thinking about what I'd do. Let's see, I believe I re-did this about 5 times before I got a decent one done. I wanted to use gold embossing powder and just use the outline with the sentiment. Stamping it went just fine (after the first couple of times when I got it all off center...and YES I'm using a block with grids! I just can't stamp straight! LOL). Then I finally figured out that I needed to use a pigment ink or Stazon to use the embossing powder. Then...I thought I had it...only to find out that I didn't heat the embossing powder long enough and it fell off the card! GAAH! FINALLY, I got it heated and melted...and "almost" perfect! I still think this one was a great idea...just WAY to difficult to execute! (at least for me!)

Thanks so much for stopping by! Until next time....

Hugs!



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7 comments:

snapdragon said...

NICE. I especially like how the borders give definition to the design. I guess if I started making Christmas cards now, I would be all set by December!
Thanks!

Erin (Homemade Cards by Erin) said...

Those are lovely, I'm glad you like my non-traditional card... you're right it doesn't have to hit you over the head....

G Peplow said...

Beautiful classic cards, love the framing it finishes perfectly:)

Anonymous said...

I love your cards Susan, and can really relate to the problems stamping. I ruined so much product completing my entry this week, I've decided I'm never buying another poly stamp. BLINDFOLDED I could do better with the wood block stamps. I'm sooooo tired of the thin acrylic blocks making a mess of the stamping process, and by the way, I use embossing powder on ALL inks. It's just that you have to work really fast when using VersaFine. I very seldom stamp anything WITHOUT embossing, mainly because I've found that ink sometimes bleeds and/or fades with age, if it's not embossed or at least heat-set, and heat-setting fades many inks.

You might like stenciling with wet embossing paste (dreamweaver.com). The results with that are so much more predictable, and dramatic, than stamping.

By the way, again, gold heat embossing is really different. I have about 6 different brands of EP, because no brand of gold ink gave enough detail. It's hard to get fine detail with any of them. I use clear Versamark and then EP. PSX had a fabulous gold EP, but they went out of business.

Don't you sometimes wonder why we think this is fun?

Cheers. ;-0

Dwita said...

Hi Susan.. love all your cards. Stunning. Most of it, I love the third one. The stamp of a mother and child is so perfect. I never saw one like that. And the story behind that card made me smile. It happened to me, too, in using embossing powder. Once, I poured the powder, I realized that the heat gun hadn't been plugged and couldn't find where to plug.. LOL.

Vel said...

I absolutely love all your cards...I think you do such a wonderful job with them. Love that last one with the embossing and I really like the design of the first ones. I kept meaning to do something similar but keep forgetting.

Susan Raihala said...

I love all three. The first for the double lines which go so perfectly with the stamp. The second for the way the swirl behind the wise men mimics the swirls of the cursive words in the sentiment. The third for the brilliant combination of the SU image and PTI sentiment (I have both and will be CASE-ing!).

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