Let's Have a Cuppa!

Thank goodness it's the weekend, one with beautiful fall weather even :) My scrap space is still packed up - I had to put everything a week for the week since it serve more than one function - and I knew that you wouldn't see me here anytime soon if I don't blog before putting the stuff back into it's regular messy state ;-) So here I am with the non-Christmassy cards I made with the Studio Calico Cuppa kits.

First up, there's a number of cards where I just wanted to play with the beautiful Lindsay Letters stamps in the main card kit. I will be honest, I struggled with the octagon shapes a bit at first. They looked too angular for my taste so I played around with them and decided to stamp a pattern with the back of the stamp and one of the pointed ends up, so the whitespace formed a nice star image.

The neon splatter was made with a Hero Arts paint dauber from the SC shop by literally "punching" it onto the card stock. Such a cool effect! After the ink and paint tried, I stamped and heat embossed the sentiment on top.

You usually get to see these calligraphy style scripts, like in the stamp set, with metallic colors or black and I wanted to do something different for the thank you card below by using a bold Zing color (Cricket) to heat emboss the sentiment onto the patterned paper. Leaving all other colors for the card monochromatic white/grey/black really makes the stamped image pop. 

Meanwhile the octagon shapes had gained a little more popularity with me, so I gave them another try. I cloned the octagon shape from the digital card stamp files and welded the shapes together, then cut the pattern from the Silhouette Printable Cotton Canvas, which is adhesive backed, with the Silhouette, of course, and designated Fabric blade b/c I found my regular one too dull for the job. After I had adhered the canvas die-cut to my cardbase, I stamped it with a rainbow of octagons with the card kit stamps.

You can see in the detail images above, the hello sentiment and arrow were heat embossed with Versamark Ink and black embossing powder onto a piece of transparency film. The card size, if you wonder, is 6,5 x 4 inches for a change and will fit great into long envelopes which accommodate the full width of either A4 or US letter format.

And then, there was this typewriter stamp that Amy Tan designed for add-on Chai. So cute! I heat embossed it onto a 3x4 grid card, this time using Zing Aqua (a favorite!), and colored in the white space on the image with a Copy marker. The hello stamp is also from the Chai add-on stamps; the little envelope stamp as well as all patterned papers are from the Cuppa card kit.  

When I pulled the typewriter stamp from the Chai add-on package, I noticed the pretty die-cuts in this add-on and new I would come back to those :) For this "Hey Girl" card, I used a piece from the die-cut sheet and backed it with the grey numbered pp. It didn't match the way hoped, so punched a few circles from the grey paper and aligned them to the die-cut paper, should anyone wonder. 

A few pieces from the die-cuts pack, a piece of washi tape (main card kit) and a pink ombré dot was all I needed to finish the card off. Well, almost… you know me! Sometimes, I cannot stop to add a little more detail here or there, so I used a bottle of Glossy Accents to retrace the word GIRL just to give it a bit more depth. 

Now for this last card, I usually shy away from black paper but the patterned paper in the card main was just too pretty not to use. After all, who can resist the chalkboard trend, anyway? 

And because I love me some contrast, I paired the dark paper with some bold die-cuts and ombré dots from add-on Chai as well as the small red tag from the Cinnamon Spice card add-on. 

Wheeeww, quite wordy I am today, hm? I hope you made it all the way down without getting bored or confused by my ramblings. As always, you can leave me your questions, if any, I'll be happy to answer them :) See you next time!