Happy New Year and January CASEplorations

Happy New Year, Everypone! May 2016 bring you lots of joy and crafting time!

Over at STAMPlorations we are kicking the new year off with an invitation to join us in the CASEplorations Playground. This year Shery has given it a proper challenge status, yay! This means the Playground will like in past be open for a whole month, the winner of the best CASE as voted for by the team gets a $15 gift certificate and two Top Picks will each receive a $5 gift certificate, full rules can be found here on the STAMPlorations Blog.

What is the CASE inspiration for this month, you might be asking. Well, it is a card by the fabulous Laura Bassen of Doublestick Heaven which you might recognize as her project when she joined us last January for the STAMPlorations January Release Blog Hop ...

Laura posted a tutorial on how she made her card here on her blog. There is lots of inspiration to take from her card, such as using texture paste, colour scheme of pastel rainbow colours, the Leaf Prints ARTplorations stencil, the Hashtag Authentic stamp set, twine ...

Here is what I picked:

• texture without the paste, I used Fran-tage Powders instead
• ARTplorations Leaf Print stencil
• white embossing on black card, I used my Shabby White Fran-tage Powder
• sentiment in two different banner pieces which I turned into one embossed and one die-cut
• multiple colours seamlessly blending into each other which I emulated using three different colours of Fran-tage powders, Shabby White, Shabby Pink and Aged Gold
• fine strands of twine which I turned into a squiggly die-cut as I am no good at looping twine and fixing it to a card
• subtle sparklies, in my CASE not so subtle

Finally, here it is, my take on Laura's card ...

I rather like the almost Art Deco feel, the leaves look a little bit like the stylized pineapples that were so fashionable at the time; it must be all the gold in the Fran-tage powders ... It was not a look I had in mind when I started off, it came about when the Aged Gold powder turned out to look rather more black than gold. The larger golden bits of the powder didn't attach well to the pigment ink, maybe I hadn't inked well enough through my stencil.

It is actually an easy card to make. I attached a piece of white card to the Leaf Print Stencil and applied clear pigment ink through it before removing the stencil and sprinkling with my powders, one at the time, starting at one end and moving across to the other. Once embossed I added my golden scribble, my embossed sentiment from the Sentiment Builder Christmas & New Year, my die-cut sentiment (layered x 3) and sparklies to finish.

Pop over to the Playground to join the fun and to see what my teamies and Laura herself made as heir CASEs.

Wishing you a

hugs
Monika xxx


here is what I used, links to STAMPlorations Products are in the above text
 

Shabby White, Shabby Pink and Aged Gold Fran-tage Powders - Stampendous
Tim Holtz Scribbles and Splat dies - Sizzix
'happy' word die - Clearly Besotted