Papertrey Ink’s Stamp-A-Faire 2017! 

Hi there! I feel like I haven’t blogged just for fun in ages… This past weekend was Papertrey Ink’s Stamp A Faire 2017, and I had one of my only real-life stamping friends over to play all afternoon on Sunday. What a treat! I have SO many stamps that I don’t (have the time to) play with, so I took the opportunity on Sunday to pull out some of my unloved sets and play along with the challenges. I have four cards total! We were busy! That said, this is a super long and super photo-heavy post, so bear with me. 🙂

The very first challenge was the Take Ten Challenge. We had to accomplish all of the steps to create a project in ten minute increments, and I think I was able to do that! I chose to work from this beautiful inspiration photo:

I don’t often work with yellow, so I was a bit surprised at how much I was drawn to this inspiration photo. But aren’t the colors just divine? So fresh and happy. Here’s my take:

Quickly heat embossed a small-ish rectangle of watercolor paper with the lovely sentiment from Start Again, then did some emboss resist watercoloring in shades of yellow and teal over the top. I layered that with some foam tape over a Soft Stone Stitched Cover Plate die cut and layered that on top of an A2 sized Bright Buttercup card stock panel. The finishing touch was a bit of indigo colored twine wrapped around and tied in a bow. Easy peasy!

For my next project, I chose to create a project based on Laura Bassen’s work with the layered vellum die cuts for the Paper Anniversary Challenge. I ended up in a very different direction than Laura’s project,  using the Flower Mandala 1 dies, but I still layered the die cuts with vellum. I started by die cutting the different layers of the Flower Mandala 1 dies in shades of purple cardstock and vellum, then covering all of the vellum pieces with Versamark and holographic embossing powder to add some sparkle to the card. I layered them on top of each other with both liquid adhesive and foam adhesive.

For the card base, I wanted to keep things simple, so I die cut the Center Style Masculine from some shimmery silver card stock and adhered it to the center of my card, then added the sparkling vellum mandala over the top. Finally, I die cut and stamped the “with love” from Swoosh and added it over the top.

For the next project, I skipped several challenges and decided to work with Yana Smakula’s Iron Challenge. I dug out my sadly-unloved Lovely Lace kit from a few months ago and die cut the beautiful lacy focal point die from some heavyweight watercolor card stock. I then layered it with 3 layers of embossing powder, melting each one in between applying the next layer of embossing powder. The silver EP from PTI melts SO perfectly… it looks like molten silver. #givemeallthehearteyes

For the greeting, I used the dies from the Especially You set cut from Ocean Tides card stock. I used one of the stencils from the Lovely Lace kit along with my Clarity Stencil brushes and some Ocean Tides ink to create a subtle background, then added my greeting. I popped the banner onto which I adhered my die cut greeting using some foam adhesive.

For my last project, I chose to be inspired by my AMAZING friend Jessica Frost-Ballas from All the Sparkle. She was asked to create a tutorial for this year’s Stamp A Faire, and I am so beyond thrilled for her and proud of her! Her Bronze project was stunning, so I just HAD to try the technique myself.

My favorite tip from her video was to use the Versamark reinker and a brush to add some little gilded accents to your die cuts. So clever!! I die cut a bunch of Spruce and Sprigs pieces and stamped them with their coordinating ink color, then went back and used a paintbrush and some Versamark reinker to add some gilded details to each die cut piece with some Bronze embossing powder. A little messier (or maybe we can call it “artsy” haha!) than my normal look, but I really love the results.

On my A2 card base, I used the gorgeous new Quatrefoil background stamp and the same Bronze embossing powder to heat emboss the pretty pattern in the background. I arranged my foliage and berries on the card front, then adhered it with dimensional and tape adhesive. For the greeting, I decided to die cut the Holiday from Christmas Cheer and the coordinating dies from white card stock and heat emboss the coordinating greeting on strips of white card stock.

The final touch was a few sparkly sequins to fill out the bouquet.

Phew, I’m finally done! There are still a few days left before the challenges close, so I encourage you to watch the tutorials and try your hand at making something new, if you haven’t already! It’s so fun to think outside the box! Hope you’re having a marvelous week!