Practical Scrappers Feature - 10 Things to do with Vellum

If you received my newsletter the other day, I hinted that I'd have a project featured on the Practical Scrappers Blog today. I'd love for you to go on over there and check out all the gorgeous cards and layouts my fellow Designer Team members have created. Really truly amazing things can be done with humble vellum!

Here's what I made.

A quick confession before I talk about the Stained Glass Technique ... the large butterfly stamp and the sentiment are NOT Stampin' Up! stamps. I looked for an image I could use with this technique but didn't have anything large enough so I had to dig into my other stash. The butterfly is from an older Martha Stewart (I think) set and the sentiment is Studio AE by Technique Tuesday.

Okay, now that that's out of the way, how do you get this look? It's ridiculously easy (the colouring on the other hand ... let's just say I'm colouring challenged and leave it at that!) First find an image with lot's of white space. Ink it up with Versamark and stamp it onto your vellum. Choose your colour of embossing powder (I chose black to mimic natures own colouring) and heat emboss it. Depending on the quality of your vellum, you may have to be careful at this stage. Stampin' Up! Vellum Paper is really good and did not warp or burn. If your vellum is thinner you may want to use a Staz-On ink instead of embossing it.

Once your embossed image has cooled, flip it over and colour away. To get a more natural gradation in my colours I used the Blender Pen after using my Stampin' Write markers. The Blender Pen is great! Not only can you blend the colours together so you don't get harsh lines, but if you are like me and never learned to colour inside the lines, they even take OFF colour if you need to. Awesome, right? 

I'm not sure if I was able to capture it on film properly, but once your image is coloured and you flip it back over, the embossed lines resemble the lead used in real stained glass windows to separate each individual piece of coloured glass. 

I then mounted my vellum image onto Whisper White card stock and framed it with a piece of Tempting Turquoise patterned paper from the Brights Collection Designer Paper Stacks. The frame was created with the Labels Collection Framelits dies.

As an added embellishment I embossed an image from Papillon Potpourri onto Wisteria Wonder and punched it out with the matching Elegant Butterfly punch. I topped it with a Vintage Faceted Designer Button threaded with some black embroidery floss. I left the tails long to mimic the antennae.

Well, thanks for coming by to see my project today. Hope you liked it. It was a lot of fun to make! Here are your links for today.

Black Stampin' Emboss Powder

Stampin' Write Markers

Brights Collection Designer Paper Stacks

Label Collection Framelits Die

Papillon Potpourri stamp set

Elegant Butterfly punch

Vintage Faceted Designer Buttons

I'm still here!

I may have been MIA from the Blogosphere lately but I've been working hard behind the scenes. Want to see what I've been working on?

(Like you have a choice! LOL!)

First up, my card for my Colourful Impressions group meeting.

Actually, it's only a card front - that's what we were swapping this time not full cards. 

I used the Delightful Decorations stamp set with matching Ornament punch and my new obsession, embossing. The top right ornament is embossed with Cherry Cobbler Stampin' Emboss Powder and the bottom one with White Stampin' Emboss Powder. The left hand ornament is stamped in Cherry Cobbler ink. 

Other items of note: Card stock - Whisper White and Cherry Cobbler; texture plate - Snow Burst Textured Impressions Embossing Folder; Cherry Cobbler Bakers Twine and Whisper White Craft Stampin' Pad.

A few days ago I had the opportunity to showcase my business at a Momcafe event. My sister in law Christine Nielsen owns the Vancouver and North Shore franchise of Momcafe and for my birthday last month she gave me both a membership and a table at October's meeting. It was a really neat opportunity! I hope to be able to do this again sometime. Here's a picture of my set up!

And last but not least ... have you heard yet that I'm having an OPEN HOUSE next Saturday? For all the details visit my web site here. Here's a little sneak peek of what I'm giving away to anyone who books a workshop with me or signs up for one of my upcoming classes or club nights. You know you want one!!

All right, that's all for now. I'll be back this week with more card swaps and the make and takes from my meeting last week. We made this incredibly cute snowman card! Wait til you see it!!

Late night inspiration

I'm participating in a live webinar that Stampin' Up! is putting on as part of their World Wide Week of Workshops (I'll be calling you once the sun comes up again, don't you worry!) They took a break so that those demonstrators in parts where it actually IS daytime can make some booking calls. Since I can't do that (seems like a sure fire way to get shot down - calling at 11:20PM) I thought I'd do up a quick blog post to share another beautiful card I made at the Let's Stamp Out Breast Cancer event last month.

October is National Breast Cancer Awareness Month, so it seems appropriate to be sharing these with you now.

Isn't this gorgeous?! I can say that without any false pride as all I did was follow the instructions Kari laid out. And very carefully too I might add. I'd never embossed before and I gotta tell say ... I'm hooked! Watching the embossing powder melt and give you this ...

... AWESOME! (sing it, it sounds better!)

I went ahead and purchased the official Stampin' Up! Heat Tool and several different embossing powder colours so look for them in upcoming workshops!

All right, I think we are about to get going again so I'd better run. Thanks for checking in! Talk to you soon!