Using Perfect Pearls

I made this card for the Club Scrap PSL - the Pro-Scrapbookers League. This is a contest they hold where you compete in teams of scrapbookers, cardmakers, or digital scrapbookers using mostly Club Scrap products. Each week there is a different challenge to encourage you to use different materials or techniques in our work. This week the challenge is to use an art medium, such as glimmer mists, paint dabbers, Stickles, Perfect Pearls, etc. I decided to play with my Perfect Pearls, as I love the effect I get with them. They are time consuming though. I stamped the stamp for this card on 3 different papers and colored them in. It took a few hours to color them. Perfect Pearls is a powder and you use a water brush to paint them onto paper. You have to have just the right amount of water flow in your brush - too much and the result is soupy and the color isn't vibrant enough, too dry and the powder doesn't stick. Anyway, here is one of my cards.

Postcards

I wanted to send some reminder postcards to the ladies in my Book Club. We're meeting at my house this month. So I played around with some Club Scrap stamps (and one Hero Arts stamp) and my Tim Holtz Distress Inks. I did some collage stamping and masking and inking. Lots of fun! I used a tan/light brown paper from Club Scrap's English Garden kit. It has a really nice feel and finish to it which doesn't show up in this photo.

I like the effect you get from masking a main image. You stamp a focal image first. You also stamp it onto a Post-it note and cut out the image. Then you place the Post-it note over the stamped image as you create the rest of the piece. It keeps you from stamping on top of your focal image. When you're all done stamping everything you want on the card, then take the same color ink that you stamped the focal image with, (it is still covered by the Post-it note) and use a blending foam or sponge tip to lightly dab ink around the entire Post-it note. When you remove the Post-it note, you will see that this highlights your focal image because the background of that stamping will be lighter and brighter than all the stamping around it. It will let the original cardstock show through.

One sheet wonder cards

I was browsing Split Coast Stampers gallery the other day and I ran across something called One Sheet Wonders by Dakotastamper / Laurie D.. She had designed a set of 8 notecards using one sheet of patterned paper, and a bunch of cardstock. I used her template and cut up a sheet of pale River Rock flower paper from Stampin' Up. About 95% of the cards are Stampin' Up materials. The stamps, cardstock, patterned paper and some ribbon are SU. The rest of the ribbon and other embellishments are from my stash. (Two ribbon slides are SU.) The scallop punch is SU and the bird border punch is Martha Stewart.



This was a fun project to play with. I made up all the elements for each card, and then did the stamping after I put the cards together. This is not my usual style of card making, but it worked for this set.

The SU colors I used were: Purely Pomegranate, Groovy Guava,True Thyme and Kiwi Kiss.

Not a card, but a Quilt!

T

I took up quilting a couple of months ago, thanks to two of my sisters who had a great influence on me! I made a lap quilt, but my cat seemed to like it so much that I could never use it because he was always lying on it. So I made him his very own quilt. Buddy seems to like this quilt just as much as the lap quilt, so now we're both happy. And I can just throw this in the wash whenever I need to, and it protects the couch from his fur. I love the bright green and turquoise with the black and white. And I especially love the dancing kitties along the border!