A little Christmas in July

I am very excited to tell you that my grayscale coloring that I did last month won me a prize. I received another Conie Fong image.

This month the challenge in the Conie Fong Art & Design Group is Christmas in July. Looking at the two images I have of Bella, namely Bella sending you smiles and Bella with Gift, I could just see how they could represent Christmas and July respectively.

Recently while at my local craft store, I bought a sheet of Sand colored Canson Mi-Teintes. I printed the images on this kraft colored paper and colored them accordingly. I had printed them out through my Silhouette Studio software and when I came to cut them out, I made an interesting discovery. The Silhouette cannot read the registration marks on non-white paper.

So what now? Fortunately hubby came to the rescue. He suggested printing the page out again on white paper, placing this page over the dark sheet and allowing the machine to read those registration marks. Then pause the machine after registration mark reading, but before cutting and remove the white page. It worked! Needs a bit more refinement in technique, but it worked. I will work on this some more because pencil works so well on kraft colored paper and I definitely will be using it some more.

I drew patterned paper shapes to mat the cutout bears on and sponged the edges with Memento ink. The sentiment was cut out of black cardstock on my Silhouette machine. I discovered Honey Script font and love it for sentiments. The red heart is popped up on a foam strip to give it some dimension.

All the elements were mounted on a 5x7 white glitter cardstock panel which was in turn added to a white card base.

General supplies:
Sand colored Canson Mi-Teintes
Reflections 110lb heavyweight carstock for card base
Black cardstock for the sentiment
White glitter cardstock
Patterned paper
Bella sending you smiles digital stamp
Bella with Gift digital stamp
Prismacolor pencils

A Tie Dye Rose...

It is time for the Power Poppy Challenge again and this month the challenge is to CASE one of the design team members. CASE stands for Copy And Share Everything. But this challenge was to copy only some things and to change some things too. So I visited the various blogs and where do you even start? There are so many beautiful creations. But one just jumped up and screamed ME!

Allison Cope had created a card with a peony that she had colored in tie dye colors on her blog post entitled POWER POPPY: TIE-DYE BLOOMS.

Since I love roses I opted to use the Rose and Chamomile for my project. I created a sentiment above the rose and printed the whole panel out.

I researched the Distress Oxide inks she had used and matched the colors with my Prismacolor colored pencils. This was part of the copy of this challenge.

The card I created was to be for a congregation member moving to a new job out of state and so I made the card 5x7 to allow a large enough space inside for numerous well wishes and autographs. But I like how she had backed hers with kraft paper and so added a kraft panel between the colored panel and the card base.

I love how this turned out - the color combination gives the rose an almost ethereal quality.

General supplies:
Strathmore Paint Pad watercolor paper
Reflections 110lb heavyweight cardstock for card base
Kraft cardstock for middle panel
Power Poppy Rose and Chamomile digital stamp
Prismacolor pencils