Sixth Street Sundries

Emily Midgett

Concord and 9th

Guesting with Concord and 9th! 

Hello! I have some extra exciting news to share today. I am lucky enough to be guest designing for one of my favorite companies this month….

I’m pretty over the moon about it. Concord and 9th is such an amazing company, with ridiculously innovative and clever products. They just had a new release over the weekend, and I am lucky enough to get to play with their products all month long! For my post today, I’ve decided to focus on their crazy clever (and seriously popular, since it sold out in the first 24 hours!) Triangle Turnabout background stamp. This stamp is so unique… so many ways to create fun and graphic backgrounds! Let’s get started on my projects today.

I wanted to showcase how great this background is for masculine cards. I know I’m not the only one who struggles with creating masculine cards, and this super graphic and neutral background is perfect for those non-frilly men in your life! To start, I heat embossed the Triangle Turnabout background only once using white embossing powder onto some watercolor card stock that I had taped down to my work surface. (I use a bamboo cutting board that I found for a few dollars at TJ Maxx.) Next, I saturated my watercolor paper with clean water and dropped watered down splotches of Distress Inks that I had tapped onto my block: Salty Ocean, Peacock Feathers, and Cracked Pistachio. This wet-on-wet technique creates some lovely, messy, thoroughly masculine looking blooms on your watercolor paper! I allowed it to dry completely, then spritzed it with some shimmer spray and flicked my clean wet paintbrush at it to get some drips and drops and splatters.

For the greeting, I used one of my all-time favorite Concord and 9th dies: Happy Card Frame and the coordinating stamp set. I die cut the card frame from black card stock and mounted it with dimensional adhesive on my watercolored triangle panel. The Card Frame die set comes with several useful little add-on dies, including the double ended banner die onto which I stamped “birthday” from the coordinating Happy Words stamp set. A smattering of aqua sequins scattered across the card front finished it off and added a bit more shine to it. (Yes, I know, it’s supposed to be masculine. But I can’t give up flowers AND sequins just for a man! Haha!) Simple, but men don’t need or want extra frills, do they? Isn’t that background just perfect for a classy guy’s birthday?

For my next project, I wanted to do something a bit more feminine. I love that, when you use the Triangle Turnabout stamp set to its fullest creative potential, you get this wonderful quilted look. One word of advice: practice. Watch the video. Start with scratch paper. And don’t give up. It took me a few tries to get my paper lined up perfectly to get a properly executed background, but it’s so worth it. To create this peachy project, I stamped the Triangle Turnabout background using several shades of peach and coral ink. (I love that the stamp also leaves completely white spaces. Such a unique, beautiful look!) I trimmed it down a bit and mounted it to a peach card base.

Next, I used the Celebrations stamp and die set to add my greeting and a little gift. I stamped my greeting from the Celebrations stamp set onto a rectangle of vellum. I wanted my full Triangle Turnabout background to be visible, but not overwhelming to the rest of my card front. Some heavyweight vellum would just do the trick! To create my gift, I started with a plain white rectangle of card stock, then stamped the cute polka dots to create my gift box. I trimmed it down, die cut a bow from the Celebrations die set using the same coral colored card stock as the base and adhered it to my vellum. I added adhesive behind my embossed greeting and the die cut gift… adding extra die cuts on top of vellum is a great way to hide the adhesive and prevent it from marring your vellum panel.

Well, that’s all for me today! I could not be more thrilled to be guest designing for Concord and 9th this month. I can’t wait to show you what else I’ve created with this marvelous release! Each piece is just fabulous! Have a fantastic day, friends!

Where Creativity Meets C9: April Edition!

Good morning! Welcome to the eighth challenge for Where Creativity Meets C9! (I can’t believe we’ve been doing this for eight whole months. Time flies when you’re having a blast!) For our challenge this month, the theme is:

That’s right. One Layer. Dun dun dunnnnn….

I’m not going to lie, I struggled a bit with this one, and in the end, I still managed to get a tiny little bit of a layer in there… Soooo it’s technically a 1.25 layer card.  Don’t judge! This card is as flat as a pancake. 🙂

I absolutely adore the beautiful heart floral image from You Are Here. I have heat embossed it before to create my own custom floral pattern (which you can see here), but this time I just kept it simple. I started by stamping it on a piece of Canson Montval watercolor paper with a very pale gray ink to do some no-line watercoloring. I colored it using my Zig markers and a damp paintbrush. In my opinion, the key to no-line watercoloring is to allow drying time. I made sure to avoid painting petals that touched until after one of them had dried already. That way, I didn’t run the risk of the petals blooming into each other and ruining my hard-earned shadowing. It takes a bit of time to keep going back and forth between all of the colors, but it’s worth it in the end, I think.

After my panel had dried, I used the Thinking of You die to die cut directly from the center of my flower. (I may or may not have held my breath until I pulled the die off of the panel. What if I had messed it up??! Aaahhhhh!!!) I wanted quite a bit of contrast between the bright, matte florals and the greeting, so I backed it with some silver mirror foil. I adhered the entire thing to a royal purple card base and forced myself to leave it alone. It took, perhaps not all, but quite a lot of my internal fortitude to step back and not add sequins haha!

Well, that’s all for me today! Now, for the fun part. It’s your turn! Use your Concord and 9th stamps and dies to create a One Layer project, then link it up to the InLinkz tool on our blog post for this month! Concord and 9th has generously donated a $25 gift certificate for the randomly chosen winner! You could also be chosen as a future guest artist for an upcoming Where Creativity Meets C9 challenge. Have fun, and good luck!!

The Daily Marker 30 Day.

Hi there! Have you been playing along with The Daily Marker 30 Day this time around? I have, and I have the goal of participating for the full thirty days… which has not been the easiest this time around, let me tell ya. But one of my favorite results of this challenge, apart from the relaxation I get from allowing myself the time to just sit and color for fun, is that I get to have a bunch of watercolor pieces and panels ready to be easily made into finished cards! Case in point: this fiesta colored watercolor panel. I posted it on Instagram a few days ago with the #thedailymarker30day hashtag, then found a few minutes yesterday morning to turn it into a full card!

To start, I heat embossed portions of the pretty flowers from the new You Are Here set from Concord and 9th. These flowers are so much fun… such a graphic, stylized feel, and so, so pretty. I am not huge on hearts outside of Valentine’s Day, so I decided to simply heat emboss portions of the flowers along the edge of my watercolor card stock panel using Platinum embossing powder. I have some other plans for these pretty blooms, but those are just going to have to wait for another day. 😉 I watercolored them using my Zig markers in shades of shocking pink, light orange, and buttery yellow (my “fiesta” combo!), adding a pale gray wash to the background to really allow those happy colors to pop.

Now, I had just spent all of that time watercoloring my pretty flowers, so I couldn’t bear to cover them up or cut into them… taking as much time as I do to watercolor makes me more pleased with the overall results, but far more difficult to actually use them in a card that might get thrown away… So I simply cut a rectangle of vellum, heat embossed a greeting, again from You Are Here, using Platinum embossing powder.

Once I had sneakily added some liquid adhesive behind some of the thicker areas of embossing, I wrapped some natural jute twine around the watercolor panel a few times and adhered it down with some Multi Medium Matte. This helps keep the vellum from flapping about. I also added a tiny heart die cut that I covered in orange Stickles to accent the vellum and provide another little spot for adhesive to hide. 😉

Well, that’s it for this project! Fairly simple after the marathon watercoloring session. Some things are worth taking the time. 🙂 I hope you’re playing along with the challenge… it’s so relaxing! If you want to follow me on Instagram, I’m @eamidgett. 🙂 Have a marvelous day, friends!