October Challenge

Hello everyone! I hope you all had a great week. We have made it to my favorite month, October! I love all things pumpkin, Halloween and the crisp weather. I just love the overall feeling of October.  Here are the rules for this challenge...have fun!

we ask is the you use ONLY SRM Stickers and Products but you can also use SRM in combination with your own stamps, papers, die cuts and so on!

Our rules (to keep this fun and fair):

1.  Only SRM product is permitted but you can combine with any stamps, paper, die cuts, etc. 

2.  Please comment on the project ahead of you and behind you in the link.  Everyone LOVES comments!

3.  You can link to other challenges - there is no limit.

4.  Anything that is offensive or does not follow our guidelines will be removed.  

5.  Have fun!

Prizes:

The winner will receive a Prize Package from the SRM Online Store.  We will also be recognizing some honorable mentions! 

http://thesrmchallenge.blogspot.ca/

For this months challenge I decided to use the theme and inspiration photo. I liked the classic orange and black colors of the inspiration photo. I decided to make my card into a mummy and I think he turned out really cute. I hope you play along with us this month and have a wonderful October!

And dont forget to check out the rest of the design teams creations.

Shelly Kurth

Dannielle Robeson

Tennia Nelson

June Houck

Michelle Giraud

Tessa Buys

Tobi Crawford

Lesley Croghan

~Tori

Seeing stamps in a different way

Hello Everyone! I hope you had a fantastic week so far. Today I wanted to show you how you can use your stamps in a different way. When I am trying to figure out how to use a stamp  in an unexpected way I like to do a couple things, first I use my fingers to mask off different parts of the stamp to see if it starts to look like something else. I also like to turn in upside down or on its side because sometimes this helps me imagine it as something else.

To make the flowers I used the Christmas tree in this stamp set. When I turned it upside down it started to look like a flower to me. Now obviously you cant do this with all your stamps like the bunnies really cant be anything other then bunnies. The other two trees in this set would be fun banners or maybe party hats. I love being able to use my Christmas stamps all year long.

I selectively ink up the parts of the trees I wanted to use but you could mask it off too. I first stamped in a light color and then inked just the bottom of my stamp in a darker color to get a nice ombre affect. The stems of the flowers are from Lawn Fawn's "Love you S'more" set.

To create this card I used my masking method to come up with the idea of the shark fin.

I stamped on watercolor paper and used copics to color the fin in. I stamped the ocean in different distress inks then sprayed with water so i would get soft looking waves.

This card I have shared before but still wanted to show it to you. This idea was not mine to use the flowers as apples but I thought it was brilliant so I had to create my own version of it. The apples I made are actually the base to flowers but if you don't stamp the top piece of the flower they are just blobs that you can use for lots of other projects. I made them into apples but they could also be pears, cookies or stacked to make a snowman.

So I encourage you to pull out your stamps and stretch them a little further to create something unexpected. There is no right or wrong way to do this technique. Just start creating!

Happy Crafting

~Tori

Distress Markers

Hello everyone! Will fall ever come? I am ready for that nice crisp air and wonderful colors that only fall can bring. I recently got some new distress markers and thought I would share a couple cards I created with them.

These markers are so easy to use. If you have a hard time water-coloring images these markers will be your new favorite product. Creating these flowers was so quick and easy. I dont want to tell you to much about these cards right now because I am going to be starting my Feature Friday's again and my next one is on watercolors. So every first Friday of the month I will be featuring a new technique or products I like to use. So I thought this post with the water-colored flowers would be a nice peek into some things I will be showing you.

Happy Crafting!

~Tori

September Reminder

Hello Everyone. i just wanted to remind everyone that there is still time to play along over at the SRM challenge blog

http://thesrmchallenge.blogspot.com/

Click here for all the rules

I made a fun treat bag for my project. The bag is an SRM kraft bag and they are perfect for gifts and little treats. I stamped the "apples" using a set that is supposed to be for building flowers. I didn't have an apple stamp but thought this was pretty close. Real apples are not perfectly round so I think that's why this flower stamp works. I love taking stamps and using them in a different way then they were made for. I also bought this fun new product from ranger, sticky embossing powder. I love glitter but it is so messy I don't use it a lot but with this product I think I will be using glitter a lot more. I will do another post on this sticky embossing powder. Please stop by http://thesrmchallenge.blogspot.com/ and play along! I cant wait to see what you create.

~Tori

Watercolor + Bokeh background

Hello Everyone! Its been to hot here in San Diego that I have spent a lot of time sitting around crafting so I decided to play along with Fusion Card Challenge today.

I love making watercolor backgrounds. They are so quick and easy but it looks like you took a long time making it. I have also been seeing a lot of cards out their with the Bokeh style so I decided to attempt to re-create that look with this card. I must confess that creating the Bokeh effect took me four different times and I finally decided this card was close enough. I made my own stencil using acetate and some circle punches I had. I think you can buy stamps to create this effect but I wanted to use what I had at home. For my first two attempts at this card I used Avery Elle white pigment ink and they still haven't dried and its been a week. I don't know if there is a trick to getting your pigment inks to dry but mine is still smearing after a WEEK! Needless to say I needed a new white ink so I ended up using Memento Luxe pigment ink and it dried in a matter of hours. The big circles I applied less ink to make them appear to be behind the little circles. The smaller the circles got the more ink I applied to make them appear closer.  

I am happy with how this card turned out and hope you enjoyed it too!

Have a great week

~Tori

Distress Inking

Hello everyone! Today i decided to play along with the lawnscaping Challenge blog. I LOVE lawn Fawn stamps and one of my favorites is Penelope's Blossoms. I am really loving all the stamp sets that you can build your own custom designs and this stamp set is perfect for that. You get all these beautiful flowers in all different sizes and some great sentiments. So the theme of this challenge is one layer cards. When I saw this challenge I thought this would be no problem to create a one layer card but it turned out to be much more challenging then I originally thought. I loved playing along this month because I really pushed myself to create a one layer card that still had lots of dimension.

So to create the watercolor look behind the sentiment I used my distress inks and WATERCOLOR paper(the watercolor paper is key), now this took a bit of time to create but I think it was well worth it. I inked up different sections of my sentiment using bright colored distress inks. I ink one color at a time, stamped then cleaned my stamp and repeated the process. If you had the mini distress ink pads you could probably do the whole sentiment at once but I have the big ones so I did one section at a time. After I had my sentiment all stamped I used a mini mister (any sprayer would work) and sprayed my sentiment. The great thing about distress inks are they instantly react with the water and give you a beautiful watercolor look. After it had dried completely I stamped the sentiment again in black so it was nice and bold. Now if you did this technique on regular cardstock it would work but your results would not be as good. The watercolor paper really allows those colors to bleed and still stay vibrant.

Here is another card I did using the same technique just with different stamps by Avery Elle.

Thank you for stopping by and I hope you have a great rest of the weekend!

~Tori

September Challenge

Hello everyone and welcome to another SRM challenge. I love september because I can feel fall start to slowly creep in. Fall is my absolute favorite season. I love the colors and cozy feeling I get. This Months challenge really kicks off fall right with back to school vibe and the Apples/Harvest theme. I hope you play along this month because you can win some awsome prizes and who doesnt want their creation to win stuff? Here are the rules for this challenge.

we ask is the you use ONLY SRM Stickers and Products but you can also use SRM in combination with your own stamps, papers, die cuts and so on!

Our rules (to keep this fun and fair):

1.  Only SRM product is permitted but you can combine with any stamps, paper, die cuts, etc. 

2.  Please comment on the project ahead of you and behind you in the link.  Everyone LOVES comments!

3.  You can link to other challenges - there is no limit.

4.  Anything that is offensive or does not follow our guidelines will be removed.  

5.  Have fun!

Prizes:

The winner will receive a Prize Package from the SRM Online Store.  We will also be recognizing some honorable mentions! 

http://thesrmchallenge.blogspot.ca/

There is a sketch, a color challenge, an inspiration photo and a theme!  Choose one of the challenges or all 4! Create one card for each challenge or create a card that incorporates ALL the challenges! 

I loved the idea of doing a back to school card for this challenge. I think this card would be so fun to give your kids their first day of school as a good luck. The SRM stickers look so great on vellum. I love that it looks like you took a lot of time stamping all those sentiments but you simply used those wonderful SRM stickers. This card is simple so it would be easy to make multiples for all your kids 

If you are interested in the SRM products I used you can find them here:

http://www.srmstore.com/Express-YourselfSchool_p_2603.html

http://www.srmstore.com/Say-It-With-StickersTeacher_p_2824.html

Make sure to check out the rest of the design team and their beautiful projects!

Shelly Kurth

Dannielle Robeson

Tennia Nelson

June Houck

Michelle Giraud

Tessa Buys

Tobi Crawford

Lesley Croghan

I cant wait to see what you guys create!
Happy crafting
~Tori