Lotsa Birthday cards

We had a family get together where 4 of our family members have January birthdays... luckily two of them are my parents, so I know they don't mind if I give them a combined card, hence you see 3 cards :)

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This first card was for my niece, and at first I made it using the watercolor technique I had used in the past but without the right watercolor paper, it was annoying me how it curled up and didn't blend that great... ok so scrapped that and just used your typical dry technique - using a Tim Holtz inker with blending foam. It was nice to use the butterfly misting masks while I inked so it left those spots blank, then later embossed some butterfly stamps there.

HOW-TO:

• Used regular drawing paper to ink on, so it would blend well
• Tim Holtz inks: peeled paint, broken china and faded jeans with blending foam
• Studio Calico butterfly misting masks, butterfly stamps and sentiment stamps
• Embossing powder by American Crafts in: Aqua, Wave and Leaf

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For the second card, I wanted to make it look like a book because we were giving my stepsister a gift card for Amazon for her Kindle. I loved how it turned out and I used my Zig embossing pen to write her name in cursive and emboss it with gold powder.

HOW-TO:

• The reddish-orange paper for the "binding" was by DCWV, which I cut to 2 inch width, then wrapped around the edge of the Kraft paper, so the back side had some showing too and looked like binding rather than a cut strip of paper
• The middle embellishment was cut on my Cricut Imagine using the Reminisce Accents cartridge by Creative Memories and Provo Craft
• The letter stickers are by My Mind's Eye
• I used the Zig embossing pen to write her name and embossed with gold embossing powder from Martha Stewart Crafts

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The last card was for my parents, and basically just did the easy way of making this flower embellishment again.

HOW-TO:

• The hard and easy tutorial for making the large embellishment is in this earlier blog entry of mine
• I embossed around the embellishment with the Zig embossing pen and the sentiment stamp from Recollections with Copper embossing powder from Martha Stewart Crafts
• The button is from the Lost & Found collection by My Mind's Eye
• The twine is from Jillibean Soup

Watercolor-like

Someone in our family is pregnant! And someone in our family needed to make a card to congratulate that someone, even though they found out about it like a couple weeks ago, but was too sick to leave the house or make a card for that time! I am better and I got to utilize a new technique I saw from this blog post!

I've owned those Tim Holtz distress inks for awhile, but so far have only ventured as far as using them with a dry applicator to "chalk" or blend light backgrounds. Def never tried adding water or using my fingers to do some finger painting!

Um, I have 4 different color fingertips now - dusty concord, peeled paint, faded jeans, and vintage photo. Of course AFTER I showed off my newly colored fingers to my husband did he tell me he had some latex gloves in the basement. OK next time I will see how those work out so I don't look like a crazy person!

HOW-TO:
The cool thing about this technique is I actually stamped the image first, embossed it, and then finger-painted over the whole thing! It was cool to see it come to life since it was white on white paper. The video in that blog post shows how to do it, theirs came out much cooler, but this is my first project doing this so hopefully I will get better. Plus I didn't have watercolor paper (just used white Bazzill cardstock) and I didn't have the "pearlized water" she mentioned, I just used good ole free tap water!