CAS Boutique Cards

Good Morning! I'm having a lazy day today, the heat is just too much to get busy!

My post today is all about Clean and Simple Boutique Cards - the third course in my Altenew Educator Certification Program. I have made 3 cards that are all CAS:

My first card was from lesson one simple styling, I've covered this by doing a single rose in the center of my card and a very simple sentiment:

I used Altenew's Painted Rose stamp set, stamping the layers of the rose with Rose Quartz, Puffy Heart and Purple Wine inks from the Rose Petal Mini Cube Set. I stamped the leaves with Frayed Leaf and then loosely drew the outline of them with a Faber Castell Pitt pen. Lastly I used a sentiment from Altenew Heartfelt Sentiments and stamped it with jet black ink.

 For my next card I used lesson 2 - Stamped backgrounds:

For this card I used one of the stamps from Wild Fern Stamp Set and stamped it multiple times on my card in  Just Green Ink. I then mixed some watercolor marker ink with water and, using a paint brush, made splatters cover the card front.

The sentiment, again from the Wild fern Stamp Set, was stamped in versamark ink and I heat embossed this with white embossing powder onto a strip of black card. This was then adhered on to my card.

My last card was my favorite technique and one I wasn't aware of. I added foiling:

This is a great technique if you don't have alternate ways of foiling. I do have a foil press but can't use that with my stamps! 

I used Altenew's Dahlia Blossoms, picked one of the layers of both the smaller and large flower and stamped this in Buttercream Ink. Then came the magic. I used my antistatic bag across my card and stamped the outline of the flowers with Stayzon ink. I heat embossed this with clear embossing powder. I had to repeat this step 3 times to get a thick enough outline for the foil to stick to. Following the embossing I laid Minc foil over the images and sent it through a laminator which had been heating up for a while. Once my card had cooled I removed the foil sheet and was left with a gorgeous rose pink foiled outline on my dahlias.

I went on to stamp the leaves from the Dahlia stamp set and some more from Altenew's beautiful Day stamp set. 

As I loved the foiling so much I had to do more! I chose a sentiment die from my stash. I die cut this in both black and white. I covered the white version in Stayzon ink and dipped it into my embossing ink. Again I repeated this 2 more times then covered it with foil and ran it through my laminator and it worked! I adhered this to the black diecut, slightly offsetting it so I had a black shadow to my foiled sentiment. This was then glued to my card.

This was my favorite lesson from the whole Clean and Simple Boutique Card course and I will be using frequently!!

Thanks for checking out my post - I hope it gave you some inspiration and if you like what you see please leave me some love in the comment section

Bicycle congratulations

Good afternoon from a hot and humid Michigan - we had storms last night and the humidity is so unbearable that its nice to stay inside. So riding my bike is out of the question today!

I'm posting a congratulations card today and this goes out to all the kids at Mollie's school who achieved perfect attendance this year - they were all presented with bicycles!

Prickley Pear Rubber stamps have the perfect stamps for this occasion and their bicycle stamp is almost identical to my bike so have colored it in the same colors:

I used alcohol markers to color the bike, adding silver gel pen to the chrome components.

I then used a fancy edge die to cut the bottom of the image and a pink card to go under this. I stamped the Congratulations stamp, again a Prickley Pear one, and matted this on pink card. I chose to use a ready made scalloped edged card base and matted this with the same pink card and some dotty coordinating paper. a few silver nail head gems just balanced the image.

Thank you for stopping by, you can find more inspiration from me and my teamies on the Prickley Pear blog and our Facebook page.

Gone fishing

Good morning and welcome to the first of many posts from me today.

 

There is some exciting news happening in blog land today. Firstly it's new stamp release day over at So Suzy Stamps! Yep check out her website for some gorgeousness!!! And there is even more if you order today you get free shipping - INTERNATIONAL INCLUDED!!! Yes my friends from across the pond you can have free shipping too!!!!

I'm not finished yet - The new challenge starts today too the theme this month is celebration. All you have to do to enter is make a card with her delicious stamps and added it either via the linky on the blog or on the Facebook group page!

 

On to my make for the release:

 

 

This adorable little fisherman is sitting in his boat hoping to catch the fish! The sun is shining and looks so happy! Both of these are from the new release - aren't they gorgeous!

I have colored the stamps with my Spectrum Noir Markers and used the SVG (that you can get free) to cut the boy out.

On white piece of card I used die cut cloud shapes to ink around to make the sky. I then used a scalloped edge die - keeping the negative part of the die cut - to make the waves with card from my stock. I then used a curved edge die for the grass on the river bank!

 

 

The easel was made using a square card blank with the front folded in half again to which I attached the fishing scene. The little fish is a freebie clipart which I shrank and fussy cut for my stopper. The sentiment is a stamp that I have had forever!!!

 

There are other adorable stamps in the same theme under the new release tab on the So Suzy Stamp website some of which will also be shown by my colleagues on the new release blog post!

 

Thanks for stopping by and before you leave hit the June tab on the top right of the So Suzy blog and enter our challenge. If you don't have a blog - don't worry you can enter over at our Facebook group

 

For more inspiration why not check So Suzy out on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and Pinterest

New this month So Suzy has also ventured out to Flickr so check that out too!!