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Sixth Street Sundries

Emily Midgett

hot foil

Video: Adding Tons of Sparkle to your Holiday Cards!

Hi there! Today, I am over on the Pinkfresh Studio YouTube channel with this holiday card that has so much sparkle, you might need some sunglasses to look at it! Sparkle is one of my favorite ways to differentiate my holiday cards from the cards that I make the rest of the year. If you can’t add sparkle on Christmas cards, when can you add sparkle? It just makes them so terribly festive!! Here’s the video:

Or you can click HERE to watch it on YouTube in HD.

This entire card began when I was experimenting with the new-ish Snowflakes Hot Foil Plate. I love the look of hot foiling on vellum, but I get mixed results, and I read somewhere that you could heat emboss on Hero Arts’s acetate. I thought to myself “if you can heat emboss on it, can you hot foil on it?” I feared that it would melt and ruin my plate, but it was a risk I was willing to take… and just look at the result!! I am so in love with this new-to-me technique, and I can’t wait to apply it to other projects. I hot foiled the Snowflakes Hot Foil Plate on some acetate using Speckled Prism hot foil from Spellbinders, which creates a beautiful, iridescent effect, which is particularly striking on the clear acetate!

Once I had my snowflake acetate panel, I knew that I wanted to create a snowy scene with snowflakes in various sizes, so I heat embossed the Snowflakes Background stamp on some watercolor paper using White Satin Pearl embossing powder. I taped the panel down to my watercolor board, spritzed the entire panel with some clean water using a fingertip sprayer, then used Sennelier watercolors to add some diagonal color. I started with a few stripes of blue, blended that into some minty turquoise, then created a custom purple by mixing the same blue with some bright magenta. The already-damp watercolor paper helped the colors to meld together beautifully and seamlessly. I hit the very wet panel with my heat gun and added some Winsor & Newton Iridescent Medium along the blue areas to create a sparkly, wintry, almost Aurora Borealis effect on my background. Once that had dried, I added some Payne’s Grey around the edges, pulling the color out to a nice fade using a clean damp brush, which created a halo effect around my sparkly AB background.

While my panel was drying, I created a frame using some pure white glitter cardstock and the Stitched Rectangles Essentials Dies. I used some super strong tape to adhere my clear snowflake panel to the sparkling frame. Once my watercolor panel had dried, I used some thin foam squares to adhere the framed acetate panel to my watercolored piece. I love how the foiled snowflakes look as though they’re floating on the watercolored background!

For the greeting, I heat embossed two different sentiments from the Ornaments Stamp set onto some Spellbinders Waterfall cardstock using white embossing powder. I used the Ornaments Dies to die cut the cursive greeting, which I think makes it look so incredibly clean and polished. I die cut the solid halo piece from the Jeff Alpha dies from some more Waterfall cardstock, then die cut the detail layer using the same white glitter cardstock, adhering them together with liquid adhesive. I added them to the clear snowflake panel with small dots of liquid adhesive to keep everything nice and clean, orienting them in the bottom right corner to allow the hot foiled snowflakes and watercoloring to take center stage!

Well, that’s all for this project and video! I can’t wait to try this hot foil-on-acetate technique out on more projects, and I hope you’ll try it out too. Thanks so much for stopping by today, and have a marvelous day!

Monochromatic Sympathy Card Using Pinkfresh Studio November Release + Instagram Hop!

Hi there! Today, Pinkfresh Studio is continuing the celebration of their new November Release with an Instagram Hop. I have this soft monochromatic project up as my stop on the hop, so be sure to check out my post over on Instagram as @eamidgett. I have found that with sympathy cards, less is more, and so keeping the color palette super simple while still muted helps to be respectful to the seriousness of the purpose of the card while also keeping things a little lighter for the eye. The new With Sympathy Stamps, Dies, Stencils, and Hot Foil Plate are, in my opinion, one of the best product suites in the release, as it contains a beautiful variety of products that work seamlessly together while also containing poignant and, sadly, incredibly useful sentiments for sympathy cards. Let’s get started with the details on my project!

I began by hot foiling the new With Sympathy Hot Foil Plate a couple of times on a panel of icy blue Glacier cardstock from Spellbinders using Skybright foil, a lovely light aqua that works beautifully with the Glacier cardstock. If you haven’t tried tone-on-tone hot foiling yet, I highly encourage you to take a look at your colored foils and colored cardstock stash and try it out! (Enabling hint: the Spellbinders cardstock is all marvelously smooth and perfect for hot foiling!) It’s one of my favorite ways to use hot foil; it provides such incredibly elegant results!

Next, I used a blending brush to lightly blend some Ocean Breeze ink using the With Sympathy Stencils over the foiled images. This simple stenciling helps subtly emphasize the beautiful details in the floral image without overpowering the monochromatic color scheme! I arranged a Blanket Stitched Rectangle Die over my hot foiled panel so that the foiled flowers were nestled in the corners.

Next, I die cut the Elongated Lattice Cover Plate die from some more Glacier cardstock, then layered it on a matching solid A2 panel of Glacier cardstock. I love the super subtle texture that this provides the background!

To continue the monochromatic continuity of my card, I heat embossed the greeting from the With Sympathy Stamps onto a scrap of Glacier cardstock using some sparkling aqua glitter embossing powder, then die cut the sentiment with the coordinating sentiment die. Those sentiment dies create such a clean, polished effect on your finished card! I arranged the hot foiled rectangle on my card front using some thin foam tape so that it had just a touch of extra height from the textured background, then added the greeting with a double layer of foam tape to make it pop better from the card front. The final touch was to add a few Aqua Glitter Drops for a bit more sparkle.

Well, that’s all for today’s project. I hope you’ll check out the Instagram Hop; Pinkfresh Studio is giving away the entire release, and there are masses of $25 gift cards up for grabs! Thanks so much for stopping by today, and have a marvelous day!

Pinkfresh Studio November 2022 Stamp and Die Release Blog Hop + Giveaway!

Hi there! Today, Pinkfresh Studio is releasing their latest round of stamps, dies, hot foil plates, and stencils for the November 2022 Release, and let me tell you, it’s yet another stunner! So many gorgeous new products that all work fluidly with each other or can easily stand alone as individual products! I love that these product suites work so interchangeably with each other. It creates such versatility and gives you really great bang for your buck. I have focused on several new products today, particularly the beautiful new Dreamy Florals Stamps and Dies. So many of these new images this month set my watercolor-loving heart a-flutter with excitement, but I think this one was most exciting of all for me. Let’s get started with the details on my project!

I began by stamping the images from Dreamy Florals onto some Arches Cold Press Watercolor Paper using Hero Arts Contour Ink. I wanted to do some no-line watercoloring with these beautiful florals, so I pulled out my Holbein watercolor palette and added some soft, springy pinks and lavender, finishing the images off with some lovely intense green. These images are a lovely size, not too small to be super fiddly for watercoloring, but not too large that they take a long time to watercolor. As Goldilocks said, they’re just right! I die cut the images with the coordinating one piece die.

For the background, I wanted to utilize one of the super fun and graphic new hot foil plates and coordinating stencils, but at this point I had already put my hot foiling machine away, so I decided to dry emboss the new Modern Design Blocks Hot Foil Plate using my Spellbinders Platinum 6 with the rubber embossing mat that comes with the new Universal Plate System. This dry embossing creates a beautifully subtle pattern that looks great alone or with the coordinating stencils, as I’ve done here! I used the Modern Design Blocks Layering Stencils to very softly blend Soft Lilac, Ballet Slipper, and Coral Reef inks, pulling in all of the colors of my watercolored images without overpowering them. I also splattered some handmade metallic watercolors over the blended background to add a little extra shine!

For the greeting, I used the new Phrase Builder Happy Hot Foil , which coordinates with the previously-released Phrase Builder Happy Dies. I love the clean, unbelievably shiny look that this adds to the card front! I hot foiled the “happy birthday” on some Hammermill cardstock using Champagne foil from Spellbinders, then cut the foiled words out with the coordinating outline dies. To ground the greeting, I die cut a Braided Oval die from some heavyweight vellum, then arranged all of my floral die cuts and foiled die cut greeting around the edge, allowing some pieces to be tucked behind while others were overlapping the oval. Overlapping on the front allowed me a spot to hide my adhesive foam tape!

Well, that’s all for my project today! Now, to celebrate this release, Pinkfresh is hosting some awesome giveaways!

Pinkfresh Studio will be giving away the full release on the Pinkfresh blog & YouTube channel, so be sure to check those out! They’re linked on the Pinkfresh Blog down below. They will also be giving away a total of TEN $25  gift cards along the hop. The winners will be selected from the comments and announced on November 29, 2022 on our GIVEAWAY PAGE. Winners must check that page & claim your prize within 2 weeks.

The full hop list is below! Thanks so much for stopping by today, and happy hopping!

You are invited to the Inlinkz link party!

Click here to enter

Metallic Hot Foils with Crisp White!

Hi there! I have been playing with my Glimmer Hot Foil machine from Spellbinders, along with some of the new hot foil products from Spellbinders. I truly can’t decide which I love more: intense, vibrant color or bright, crisp white. I seem to go from one extreme to the other! Today’s projects feature plenty of clean white space, with lots of texture and shining, sparkling metallic accents.

When working with white on white, I like to create tons of layers of cardstock, with lots of different types of texture and several layers of foam tape. Limited color palettes can be very interesting and super elegant, as long as you are intentional with your layers and accents!

My first project features the Glimmering Swag Hot Foil Plate. I began by hot foiling this beautiful pattern on a crisp white panel of white cardstock using gold foil. This pattern is super elegant and works with so many different occasions!

While I had my hot foil machine out and hot, I hot foiled the Geo Foliage Hot Foil Plate set, creating an elegant thin hexagonal frame. I backed the frame with some heavyweight vellum to help mute the foiled pattern, to create a softer area for my sentiment. One of my favorite things about hot foil is that you can mix and match different products and make them all feel cohesive by using the same shade of metallic foil! The foliage from the Geo Foliage set looks like it was meant to go with the Glimmering Swag Hot Foil Plate because I used the same gold foil for both.

I paired the foiled foliage with some Holiday Blooms die cuts, cut from both white cardstock and some gold glitter foam to add another element of texture. Adding different textures in the same color help to add even more interest to the limited color palette. I arranged the white poinsettia and foliage in a swag at the top of my hot foiled vellum hexagon, then popped the entire piece up on the hot foiled card front using foam adhesive for extra height.

For the greeting, I die cut Christmas Mix & Match Sentiments dies from some more gold glitter foam. I adhered it to the center of my hot foiled hexagon using liquid adhesive. The gold and white color combination is so luxurious and elegant with multiple types of metallic gold. Definitely one of my favorite holiday cards that I’ve made this year!

My next card features the Sealed Swag Hot Foil set from the new Sealed By Spellbinders collection. As soon as I saw this wreath image, I knew that it would be a perfect ground for some pretty die cut blooms. I hot foiled the swag and greeting on some white cardstock using Rose Gold Foil from Spellbinders. I die cut the greeting using the included coordinating die, then used my scissors to fussy cut the hot foiled swag.

To keep the color palette simple and elegant as I did with the first card, I die cut some white flowers using the Be Bold Blooms die set, cutting some from crisp white cardstock and some from some coordinating rose gold glitter cardstock. I created a little arrangement using the die cut flowers and the hot foiled wreath, adhering the different die cuts using both liquid and foam adhesive for extra height.

To create some more texture on this project, I ran a panel of white cardstock through my Platinum 6 machine using the Geo Screen Embossing Folder. This classy pattern adds such beautiful texture to the background of my card front! I trimmed it down slightly and adhered it in the center of an A2 card base, allowing the plain edges to peek out on either side of the textured panel. I adhered the floral swag and hot foiled greeting on the card front using foam adhesive.

Well, that’s all for this project! I love challenging myself with these limited color palette projects. It’s such fun to see how I can incorporate multiple elements of texture, height, and dimension without adding any other colors to the card! Thanks so much for reading, and have a marvelous day!

November 2022 Trailblazing Inks Release + Giveaway ($300 in Total Prizes!) | Dye inks with a brand new look and adjusted formula

Hi there! Today, I am thrilled to be part of the new Trailblazing Inks Release Blog Hop introducing these beautiful new inks from Altenew! You should have arrived here from Mindy Eggen, and your next stop is Nathalie DeSousa. You can also start back at the beginning of the hop at the Altenew Blog in case you get lost! These new Trailblazing dye inks feature a brand new shape, screw on tops, and a brand new ink formulation, and they come in three color families, each containing four shades that layer beautifully together: Frosted Foliage, Woodland Escape, and Blue Mountains. Here’s a peek at all of the colors:

Aren’t they just the most beautiful subtle shades? I particularly adore the greens in Frosted Foliage; they are a charming, muted silvery green that is a gorgeous addition to the Altenew color family.

I’ve used all three new sets of ink for these two cards using two different techniques to showcase how beautifully the colors work together! I kept the colors simple to allow the beautiful new colors from the Trailblazing inks to be the stars of the show. Let’s get started with the details!

My first card highlights the stunning greens from the Frosted Foliage quartet. I used blending brushes to blend the Frosted Foliage inks with the Meadow Burst layering stencil on a mini slimline card front. This stencil has lots of foliage, which makes it a perfect companion for the silvery green Frosted Foliage inks. Don’t they layer beautifully? Such gorgeous shades of green that will surely be staples at my desk with all of Altenew’s floral layering sets! I also added some charming blue flowers using the new Water Hyacinth and adding touches of Crystal Violet ink to add some color variation for the flowers.

I also created some custom colored cardstock (say that three times fast!) for my greeting using the Indigo Skies ink, which is the darkest shade of the Blue Mountains ink quartet. I simply die cut both the detail and background layers of the “for you” sentiment from the Sweet Sentiments die set, reserving the negative outline. I placed my sentiment detail layer back inside the negative space, then used a blending brush to blend Indigo Skies on the entire die cut. Placing this intricate die cut back inside of the negative space helps to keep it stable when you’re ink blending! I adhered them together and added them to my stenciled card front using some foam adhesive, adding some simple accents with some shiny sequins.

My second card features the Woodland Escape inks, this time blended onto each layer of a layering flower die cut! This is a great way to create your different layers if you don’t keep a ton of colored cardstock around. I simply die cut each of the layers from the small peony from the Peony Dream layering dies, then used a blending brush to blend each of the four inks from Woodland Escape on the four die cut pieces. Because these inks are designed to layer together, they work beautifully for the layers on layering dies, as well! I used the same technique on the foliage, using the lightest two shades of the Frosted Foliage quartet and adhering all of the die cut pieces together using liquid adhesive.

To create a simple background for my colorful peach peony, I hot foiled the frame from Adorned Frame Hot Foil Plate + Die set using some metallic gunmetal hot foil. I adhered it to a white card front using some thin foam tape squares. I added my peony and foliage with some thicker foam adhesive to add some extra height, then added a foiled greeting from the Sweet Sentiments Hot Foil and Die set, foiled using the same gunmetal foil as the frame. A simple card, but I love how that peach peony just pops from the simple background!

Well, that’s all for my projects today! Now for some fun giveaway information:

$300 in total prizes! To celebrate this release, Altenew is giving away a $50 gift certificate to 2 lucky winners and a $25 gift certificate to 8 winners! Please leave a comment on the Altenew Card Blog and/or each designer’s blog post on the blog hop list below by 11/19/2022 for a chance to win. Altenew will draw 10 random winners from the comments left on each stop of this blog hop and announce the winners on the Altenew Winners Page on 11/21/2022.

Your next stop is Nathalie DeSousa. Thanks so much for stopping by today, and happy hopping!