Winter Thanks

Sorry it's been so long since I've posted! With the crush of helping to close the shop in the late fall, then all of the Holiday flurry, I thought I would pull back a bit and do something that I have not had time to do for a while. I have read more books in the last month and a half than I have in a couple of years! It's been fun, but I have also been doing a little art and some cards. These Thanks cards were done with Oxide inks and die cut inlays.

I really needed to do a few Thank You cards, and I still have some great winter stamps and dies I haven't used. I also was also really wanting to just play with my Distress Oxide inks. (I have since gotten some of the new colors, so there will be a future post using some of those. In the meantime, I made a number of background panels using Oxide inks in different ways. Here are some of them:

The panels on the left were made by blending colors onto Neenah Solar White 80# cardstock and then flicking water onto them. The top right panel is the one I used for the two cards I'm posting today, and is also a piece of Neenah Solar White 80# and the bottom one is Tim Holtz watercolor cardstock. 

These two were made by putting the ink onto my craft sheet, spritzing with water and dragging the cardstock through the ink. I dried the panel and dragged it through again, repeating this several times.  I used these three colors (Broken China, Peacock Feathers, Cracked Pistachio), plus some Wilted Violet.

This is how it looks as you are swiping the cardstock through the colors. You just dry this and swipe it through again. With these inks, wet on wet blends and wet on dry layers.

For these two cards, I did a die cut inlay technique. Since there are so many little pieces in these snowflakes (Simon Says Stamp SSS D111503 Snowflake Border die), I used a trick that I learned from Jennifer McGuire. Her husband invented Press 'n Seal, and this is one of many kitchen items to make it into my craft room. After cutting each snowflake border, I turned the die out onto a piece of Press 'n Seal. The slight stickiness of this product kept the die-cut intact with all of it's little pieces. 

I carefully pulled the cardstock away from the die-cut, and then carefully pulled the snowflake borders away from the little pieces that you would normally just pop out. The white pieces went into the blue snowflake border, and the blue ones went into the white snowflake border. Since the pieces were still in their places on the Press 'n Seal, it was not hard to just pop them into the borders where they belonged.

Here's the second card I made with the snowflake border that was cut out of the Oxide panel. I put the snowflake border into the white cardstock that was left from the white snowflake order and mounted it onto a piece of So Silk Passion Purple. The sentiment is from a beautiful Impression Obsession set IO CL616 Thank You, and was stamped in Versafine Imperial Purple.

I'll be back soon with more, and I am also planning to do either a Christmas card or tag each month. I'm hoping to have all of my cards and tags done early this year!

Products Used:

Simon Says Stamp D111503 Snowflake Border die

Impression Obsession CL616 Thank You stamp set

Die-Namics MFT 463 Blueprints 13

Distress Oxide colors:

Broken China, Peacock Feathers, Cracked Pistachio, Wilted Violet

Versafine Imperial Purple

Neenah Solar White 110# & 80# cardstock

So Silk Passion Purple cardstock

Crystal Stickles

Lucy's Little Things Jewels Ice Cube Mix