Let love grow in your Midnight garden - AALL&CREATE

Today I am sharing a card I have made with wonderful products from AALL & Create. The base is a one layer mixed media card and I've started off on a piece of cardboard where I already had some left over paints on & a light residue of modeling paste through Kassa's stencils. 

You can see the subtle texture which I have highlighted with some Finnabair Opal Magic paints. This was basically a piece of cardboard that I rolled on left over paints decided to see what I could do with it now that it developed that "patina" of paints :) 

I stamped some texture on it with Staz-ON Royal Purple and stamp set 109 from Tracy Evans. It is a giant A4 set but you can quite easily cut those 2 images apart and have a bit more flexible use that way. I created a border of texture and then went to work with flowers from another set. 

These are flowers from Katy's set 127 and the stamp positioner is a great tool to have to create crisp images in patterns all over your card. These are stamped with Staz-ON Midnight Blue. 

I wanted the images to be blurred around the edges so I took a baby wipe and dabbed a bit of staz-on cleaning solution on it and lightly rubbed the edges to move the color & blur the hard lines. 

The blurred edges gives it a nice dreamy effect. In the middle I left room for a large flower from Tracy's stamp 120.

I've stamped that in with staz on midnight blue and rubbed along the edges of the flower to make the petals look lighter. For highlights I have used a white gel pen. 

I've matted it and added the sentiment "love grows here" from stamp set 123 by Tracy. The sentiment is heat embossed with white embossing powder on black cardstock. 

It's a card to send to someone to remind them of the importance of self care. Let love grow in your midnight garden so it can bloom during day time too. 

AALL & CREATE products used 

 

Hope you liked seeing this project with gorgeous AALL & Create stamps. Please visit their boutique to shop online or to see where you can get these stamps from their many stockists world wide. 

Thanks for stopping by and have an awesome weekend!

Art Journal: Thoughts and Dreams with AALL&CREATE

Today I am sharing a project for AALL&CREATE as part of their guest design team for the coming months. I'm super excited & honored to be part of the amazing team and to be creating with their wonderful stamps designs. You'll see weekly projects from me on the weekend and to kick it off I'm sharing an art journal page in my moleskine pocket water color sketchook. 

After a long day I like to relax with my sketchbook and watercolors. Having stamps that inspire me to color is very valuable to me because I don't need to worry about a sketch that I need to make myself & get right to the coloring.

When I saw the designs of Tracy Evans and Katy Paltridge I knew they would go well together! In this project I have stamped a female figure of set #129 in combination with the flower of #123 in my Moleskine watercolor sketchbook. A few work in progress pictures: 

I am using Jane Davenport Glitz Sea  mixed with some of the Neutrals set. 

I like using stamps in different ways than designed, so I used the flower petals as Faerie wings & the stems as water waves.

I did color the  petal wings with a flower color because I love the contrast of the warm red pink with the blues and lime greens. 

It's very fun to see how the stem is quite effective as water waves! And I love the many blues in the glitz sea palette to give the body of water some color nuances. 

Looking at her serene face, I think she is enjoying the stillness in nature, lost in her thoughts and dreams. So I decided to stamp those words in the scene. 

I also used the grungy flower to create a bit more texture in the background by partially stamping it randomly over the page with lighter colored stamp pads. Some more close up shots of the finished piece. 

I have used a sakura While Gelly roll to add the highlights for finishing touches.

The stamps sets I used are the following:

123 by Tracy Evans and 129 by Katy Paltridge

Hope you liked seeing this project with watercolors & gorgeous AALL & Create stamps. Please visit their boutique to shop online or to see where you can get these stamps from their many stockists world wide. 

Thanks for stopping by and have an awesome weekend!

Happy 300th SDC!

If you have been following the SDC blog and entering our challenges, you must have noticed the HUGE celebration that has been going on in the past weeks. The Stampotique Designer Challenge is celebrating the 300th challenge! Can you believe it, already 300 challenges?! It's amazing! And we all of the DT have made a special project to share with you and today it is my turn to show you the project I have made :) 

I have made this card with my fave stamp from Stampotique Originals (and believe me it was hard to choose the one fave because there are so many wonderful ones!) which is the Unicorn by Magda. It is such a beautiful fun and whimsical design and really feels like she can make magic happen! On this card I also emphasized the whimsy as I have her "farting hearts",  LOL! These are Daniel's hearts which I have colored and cut out individually. The many Heads on the background are all the SDC friends celebrating with us, wishing the Stampotique family a happy 300th celebration. 

By the way, a little about the technique: the background is embossed with pear violet interference and water colored over it with Purple Pazzazz Diamine Shimmertastic inks. The unicorn is water colored on a separate piece of paper using Daniel Smith and Designs by Rachel watercolors. the number 300 is stenciled in using Stencil1 stencils from his book. And lastly Terri's Alphabet is used to form the sentiment. 

So head on over to the blog and make sure to comment on all the posts to be entered in the prizes that are being given away. Make sure to stay with us until the 20th when we will draw 2 people from the comments at random for the 30.00 gift certificates!!

Thanks so much for stopping by and have a wonderful day!

Little ray of pitch black (Stampotique Originals new release)

A quickie today to show you a little card made with one of the new releases by Daniel Torrente this month over at Stampotique Originals. She is stamped on a watercolor card on which I stamped off excess ink from Kassa's flower frenzy stamps and colored her with watercolors and enhanced with colored pencil. The phrases by Terri always make me laugh and I just thought this one would go well on the card. 

Over at our Challenge blog you will find a very special post about the 300th challenge at SDC!! That is right, there have been 300SDC posts so far and there will be 2 weeks of celebrations going! Each of the DT members will have their own day on the blog to post their project and there will be prizes given away too! So head on over to the challenge blog today to find out more on how you can enter!

Thanks for stopping by and have an awesome day!

SDC298 - Black and White with a pop of colour

Today at Stampotique Originals DC blog is the second week of a fun challenge: a pop of color with the black and white. This is what I made. I just LOVE that poodle stamp and yeah I did a lot of masking for this! LOL! I really love how this one turned out and hope you will join our challenge this week. Stamps I used are all from Terri Richardson and I used Poodle Doodle, Ewe and the sentiment I made from various words from the Valentine's Day sentiments. 

Thanks for stopping by and have an awesome day!

Art Journal: Floral Queen Bee

Continuing with playing in my art journal with the new release from Stampotique Originals and this time it's Flower Frenzy designed by Kassa Hayselden. I just absolutely LOVE the flower designs she does and this is no exception! The image is embossed on watercolor paper and colored in with Jane davenport Mermaid markers. Love how the white part which is embossed resists all the color.  Bees are by Jo Capper Sandon and I've cut parts of the sentiment of Be your Own Queen to make Queen Bee. The beauty of text stamps really, is you can just rearrange stuff to your liking to form phrases you want ;)

Sharing this art journal page to the following challenges:

Art Journal Journey - Flora and Fauna

Moo Mania - Flowers 

Simon Says Stamp Wednesday Challenge - Animal Magic 

WWC168 Feminine - Anything goes challenge  

Everybody art - 424 - Flower 

Mix it up CB #13 - Anything goes + emboss resist  

Sunny Day Crafting# 18 - Butterflies & Other Garden Critters 

HLS - Watercolor May 2018

Thanks so much for stopping by and have an awesome day!

Art Journal: So Knotty About You (New Release Stampotique Originals)

So this post should have gone up yesterday, but things didn't work out that way... but I am here now to show an art journal page made with some NEWLY released stamps from Stampotique Originals this month. Starring on this page is Mr. And Mrs. Knotty whom are So Knotty about each other. They are designed by Arwen McCullen. Aren't they just fun?  The back is made with a brick stencil, modeling paste, black gesso and deco arts metallic luster. The figures are colored with alcohol markers. 

Go check out more of the new release project on your Facebook page from my fellow DT mates and I'll be showing some more later this week. 

Thanks for stopping by and have an awesome day!

SDC297 - only Purple

It's already time for a new challenge over at Stampotique Designer's challenge. And this fortnight the challenge is to use 'only purple' and I've made the above postcard for some inspiration. I did have a bit of a difficult time as purple is not exactly my color, but the PC did turn OK in the end. 

The base is a piece of gelli printed paper on which I stamped Sara with Staz-On jet black.  The acrylic paint acted as a bit of a resist in her dress so I made that a part of the design. In the background I stamped Kate's Texture Cube and France's Mash Up for some texture and added the quote from quote stamp block 2 I added some highlights with a white gel pen and  a lighter color purple in the back ground and around the quote. 

Hope you got inspired to play along with us. Add your projects to the Inlinks page or to the album in the facebook group. Do read all the rules before linking your project. 

Thanks for stopping by and have a great day!

SDC295 - Little Monsters

Hi all it's wednesday and it's time for some challenge inspiration for this weeks Stampotique Originals Designer's challenge. It's the second week of "little monsters" and I made this card using the following stamps: 

Whookie with little whookie 

Saying from EWE cube 

Donald which I flipped so it looks like he is picking up the little whookies. 

I also used some gelli printed paper and the back ground is made with fountain pen ink and a brick stencil to emulate a wall. 

Hope this will inspire you to play along with us this week. You can link up your projects for this theme HERE or on our facebook page in the designated album. 

Thanks so much for stopping by and have a wonderful day!

Mail Art Monday - Thinking of you (SCD293 Mail Art)

It's been a while, but finally felt some inspiration again to make some mail art to share with you on this monday. Created a little set of mail art envie and notecard to share with you and they are all made with Stampotqiue Original Stamps. I used Spongul, the Filmstrip as an address section and Happy Mail from Terri's Salutations 2. Colored with Tombow markers and splatter effect with Distress Oxides. Also stamped the Texture Stamp from Kate for more more interest in the background.

I have made this notecard to match the envie, using the same stamps and color scheme. The background was done with stencils and DecoArtMedia spray paint in Cyan and Lindy's shimmer sprays. 

We have a new challenge running this fortnight, which is the theme of Mail Art! Next week I'll have more inspiration posted for that as well. Come and join us with the challenge and link up your mail art related posts either on the blog or on our facebook page in the designated album. We pick our top 3 fave every week and you'll also be in the running to win a 30$ gift certificate which goes to 2 people every month! So we'll hope you'll join the fun :) 

Thanks so much for stopping by and have a wonderful day!

SDC292 - Bookmarks

It's Stampotique challenge time again and it's the second week of Bookmarks. I've created this fun bookmark with Queenie, parts of a quote from Quotes 2 and the wonderful textures cube from Kate Crane. We would love it if you would join the fun and link your project on the Blog HERE OR on Facebook HERE. Every week we choose our top 3 and at the end of the month 2 from the top picks are chosen as winners of a gift certificate to the Stampotique online store. Make sure you do read all the rules before entering, one of them is that you enter no more than 4 other challenges (5 including Stampotique) and sadly this rule is often overlooked. So do keep that in mind when linking up :)
ETA: you can use ANY stamp to participate in the challenge, it doesn't have to be from Stampotique Originals exclusively :) 

On the topic of bookmarks I do have a question for you: are you a paper book reader or e-reader kind of person? I'm more of an hybrid reader myself as I love both. I have an e-reader as it's so handy to take with you on travels abroad, but I just love the feel of a "real" book in my hands and leaf through the pages. I prefer to have hard back bound copies of my fave books from my fave writers, esp. from Haruki Murakami and books on mindfulness and compassion (which this book is about). I often leave the book on my desk and read a few pages with my morning cuppa coffee. 

Sharing this desk shot with all the lovely desker's at Julia's WOYWW#455 and I thank everyone for their visit last week! I'm sorry I wasn't able to return a few visits later in the week. It was a bit hectic as the father of a dear friend of mine passed away suddenly. The service was on friday which was beautiful and heartbreaking at the same time. I'm proud of my friend that she was able to stand up and recite the beautiful eulogy she had written. And I'm grateful I was able to support her when she needed me. Anyhow, I will do my best to catch up with you all this week. 

Thanks for stopping by! Hope everyone and all your loved ones are doing well.