When a card I made was selected as a winning project for a Hero Arts challenge in July, my prize was $50 in Hero Arts products of my choosing. My card used the company’s Make Your Own stamp:
I loved using a vintage-inspired image in a humorous, modern way.
So when I saw the Sew Stylish collection by Hero Arts, how could I not get it?
What would I make with these? How about a Halloween card?
What would I do without glitter? It’s sparkly, fun to use (as in, it makes a mess), it adds texture, it glows in the dark …
It must be one of my Halloween creations if it glows in the dark. Case in point: this glow-in-the-dark ghost.
This is the time of year when, after I turn out the lights in my craft space, there’s a glowing orb on the craft table. It’s the bottle of glitter, which always is easy to find!
Indeed, the cardstock city below is under attack by a Purple People Eater sugarcoated in glow-in-the-dark goodness. But this card also displays another fun technique I hadn’t yet tried with my trusty Slice Elite: using a marker tip instead of a blade. Die-cut machines are able to do this with a special tip that replaces the blade, so that the shapes are drawn instead of cut. I used a green tip to make the background of spooky words. It was easy to do, and I really like the result.
I also added one of my Halloween paper designs to the background for more dimension.
Halloween is one of my favorite holidays. I love the challenge of putting together my costume (I’ve already started this year’s), and though my neighborhood rarely has trick-or-treaters, I’ll have glitter-covered decorations on display.
By August, I’m already brewing ideas for Halloween cards. Last month, I designed a set of patterned papers for Halloween, including the transparency for the card below. I bought the spider stamp around the time I created the spider-web design, which makes a great backdrop for the apathetic arachnid. It’s just hanging out, with a look that seems to say, “Eek. Did I scare you? No? Whatever.”
This summer, I’d been looking for a stamp of a soda bottle. Vintage-inspired products are popular, and when I saw five-and-dime themes, I thought I’d be able to find such a stamp. I didn’t have any luck, though, and I put it in the back of my mind until I saw the color challenge Two Peas in a Bucket cooked up for its online event that celebrated the Craft & Hobby Association‘s summer show. The colors were this:
This combo, from The Perfect Palette, asks, “(W)hat’s not to love about how these shades of yellow are playing off these shades of teal and gray?” Indeed. I thought of glass-bottle green, and again of having a soda-bottle stamp. Well, if I couldn’t find a stamp (digital or otherwise), I was certain to find clip art.
And so I did. It was solid black, and I wanted gray with a dark-gray outline on a bottle-green background. A bit of time in Adobe Illustrator, and I had the soda bottle the way I wanted it.
The shades of yellow made me think of lemons. My trusty Slice helped me with that. I added glitter cardstock, sparkly embellishments and a touch of white pen to my creation. I threw in a toothpick with a pennant, and my sweet concept was complete. This card didn’t win, but I really enjoyed crafting it for my first color-combo challenge.
While planning this card, I had the perfect patterned paper in mind. It features a design of concentric circles in multiple colors. My plan was to cut a square piece of it so that the circles look like arches, acting as a sky (in sunrise or sunset, if you will) for a hot-air-balloon cutout. I thought the paper, which I’ve had for at least four years, would have been partially used but that I’d have enough for my creation.
I reached into my accordion paper storage, found the paper … and discovered a whole, pristine piece.
It’s common for me to have pieces of unused paper that are several years old. Unfortunately, the company that produced it, Scrapworks, may no longer be in business. Its last blog post was in 2008 and its website no longer exists in cyberspace. A rare, untouched piece of patterned paper? Not for long! Time for this paper to serve its crafting purpose.
