Create with Connie and Mary--Fall Essentials!

Welcome friends! It is officially FALL and the most gorgeous season of all. While I LOVE summer, the sunshine and heat, bbq’s and all the fun stuff, I do truly love the beauty of fall. The changing colors of the leaves, the crispy touch to the air, pumpkins and sweater weather! And I find fall one of the greatest themes to design and stamp with. There are so many techniques to creating leaves and so many fantastic products to create amazing projects like this fall sampler!

Our blog hop theme this week is Fall Essentials—so creating a sampler was a great way to include many of my favourite fall things on one project!

Have you ever tried to create a sampler? There are so many possibilities! However, the easiest way to begin is to just use 3x3 squares and decorate them as you desire. It is like creating mini card fronts.

I started with a 12x12 base of Early Espresso and layered a piece of Whisper White over top. I used DSP from the Poinsettia …..and In Good Taste and then squares in many of our neutrals—Crumb Cake, Sahara Sand, Soft Suede, Early Espresso and some regals—Pumpkin Pie and Cajun Craze.

I leaned into two of my favourite fall stamp sets Love of Leaves and Gather Together. I stole the world ‘Autumn’ from the Autumn Greetings stamp set along with the cute little leaf clusters under the word FALL.

Here is a fun tip to try with the leaf dies from the Gathered Leaves dies. This dies cut and emboss at the same time so if you take the die and press it into your ink pad before placing it on your paper and running it through the Stamp Cut and Emboss Machine it will also transfer the ink onto the paper giving you leaf a really cool two tone effect!

I love how Stampin’ Up! has so many embellishments to choose from to help bring our projects to life. The Gold Hoops Embellishments are perfect to add a little flair. I loved adding a little gold bow onto the leaf above using the thread from the Forever Greenery Trim Combo Pack.

The Elegant Faceted Gems are the perfect touch to the square below with the pumpkins.

I really encourage you to give creating a Sampler a try. Its a wonderful way to showcase a lot of products and I love having one for every season to display in my craft room. They also make amazing gifts for those who love a handmade project.

I know the other girls have some amazing things to share with you! I can’t wait to see what their ‘autumn essentials’ are! You can visit Mellisa by going BACK and check out Connie by going NEXT.

Have a wonderful Saturday!

Christmas Coffee Explosion Box

This project is definitely in my top ten favourite things I have EVER made! I just couldn’t love it any more and definitely know its the gift I am making for my kids teachers this Christmas!

If you haven’t tried making an explosion box, don’t be intimated, its actually quite simple. You can look at each panel as a mini card and let your design inspiration go from there! This overhead shot shows you what it looks like once you take off the top and the sides ‘explode’ down.

There are tons of tutorials out there and almost all of them start with a 12x12 piece of card stock which is what I used here. I scored it at 4 inches on all sides and then cut some of the panels at a diagonal to create the two ‘pocket’s. I wanted a couple spots to add in some gift cards (one for coffee, one for booze!).

I used the two stamp sets Warm Hugs and Wrapped in Christmas from the Heartwarming Hugs Suite to decorate and embellish this project. These two sets work so well together!

This is the top of the box. I just love this mini coffee cup that fits inside the For You… it gives a little hint of what might be inside.

You can also use the Glitter Star Ornaments as a stationary embellishment by cutting the string and tucking the hook behind something.

I used the Heartwarming Hugs DSP and used the same pattern on the lid and on the inside panels and decorated the box with colors that coordinate with the DSP. I love the options of using Mossy Meadow, Old Olive, Crumb Cake, and Soft Suede. I used white embossing powder on many of the sentiments to help them ‘pop’.

The pull out pockets also have some stamping and you easily have enough to add a gift card.

I sacrificed one of the cups by carefully taking it apart to trace it onto the DSP so that the shape would be perfect to wrap around the cup. I used Tombow adhesive so it would stay adhered until the end of time! I decided to hot glue the cup to the base of the box. This way you can add some little treats inside the cup too and won’t move around in the explosion box.

I love how the Warm Wraps dies have such great layering options. The top of the coffee cup illustrates this perfectly and I used this layering option on all of the panels.

I would love to share this project with you! I will be offering it as a class on October 21st at 12:30 and October 23rd at 7pm. If you are in the Edmonton area please feel free to reach out if you would like to come stamp with me, or order any of the supplies by following the link to my store. Click on the button below to contact me to sign up for this class!

Bountiful Blessings--Create with Connie and Mary!

Welcome to another Saturday edition of Create with Connie and Mary! This week our theme is Bountiful Blessings so I reached for a ‘tried and true’ stamp set from my collection, Country Home. Sometimes it is easy to get caught up in the ‘new’ stamp sets we have because they are fresh and feel exciting, but we still have fabulous returning favorites in our annual catalogue!

You can make these sets feel ‘fresh and new’ by pairing them up with new colors, embellishments and designer series papers like I have done here.

And sharing items from both of our catalogue publications is key to making sure people know about all of the fabulous products we offer!

I love to color and this set totally fills that need! I used a color palette of Cinnamon Cider, Mint Macaron, Pumpkin Pie, Mango Melody and Old Olive to color and develop this card.

The Mint Macaron layer has the tile image from the stamp set stamped in the coordinating ink color so you just get a glimpse. The main layer of the card is from the In Good Taste DSP collection. LOVE IT!

I wanted to fill out the milk jug a bit with extra foliage so I reached for the Forever Flourishing Dies (pg 110) to add in the little sprigs, they are the perfect itty bitty size to keep in scale with the stamped image!

I wanted to add some gold accents to this card, as gold feels like a fall color to me. I used the Gilded Gems and some Gold Foil paper that I cut with a border die from the Autumn Essentials Die set. I really love die sets that have border options as I find I use them a lot to help highlight a sentiment or photo. And borders with a unique shape can be a great way to add in a subtle pop of color too!

A little Linen Thread bow finishes off the milk jug perfectly!

I really love the color palette of this card so you might see it in an upcoming scrapbook page too!

I hope everyone is soaking up the last few days of September! It went by so fast and now we are into a new month with my favorite holiday! Unless my own birthday can count as a holiday! hahaha!

Make sure you either hop forward to Connie’s blog (NEXT) or backwards to Melissa’s blog (BACK) to see what amazing creations they are sharing with us this week! And if this is your first time joining us, feel free to go back through my blog and see what we have been creating!

Coffee Carriers--not just for coffee!

The very first suite I ordered from the Handmade for You catalogue was the Heartwarming Hugs suite. Once I saw those mini coffee cups and that carrier I was SOLD! Hahaha! I have been crafting with them all month long in preparation for a display I was putting together and let me tell you, they are for so much more than coffee!

This cute little project is home to a little coffee bean plant! Isn’t that fun? I went to a local greenhouse and they told me it would maybe grow a bean in like a decade! hahaha! Keeping it alive for that long is actually more of a challenge!

To create the DSP wrap I sacrificed one of the cups by gently dismantling it. I then traced it onto the Heartwarming Hugs DSP so that the shape would be exactly the same to wrap around a cup. I used Tombow to keep things glued down. I love the color palette of this DSP as it allows you to bring in several brown and green tones and the patterns are so versatile and easy to mix together! I wrapped this carrier in DSP. I want to mention that you cannot wrap one strip of 12x12 around the carrier. It isn’t long enough so you need to cut individual pieces for the 4 sides. I wrapped it with the Real Red Braided Trim which is also a part of this suite.

I decided to add in a couple mini cards alongside my mini plant. I cut them to 2 1/2 inches wide so they could slip in the other side.

The Heartwarming Hugs Suite includes two stamp sets, Warm Hugs and Wrapped in Christmas. I used the Wrapped in Christmas set to make these mini cards and accented them with images from the Warm Hugs set.

The suite also includes two slim embossing folders which are great for adding in some texture like in this card shown.

Don’t all these patterns look awesome together? I love the Mossy Meadow Diagonal Stripe ribbon and the Glitter Star Ornaments in this suite. They help make the perfect tag! You can also see on this tag how fabulous the Warm Wraps Dies are as they have shapes that layer on top of each other! I always love when that is a component of a die set.

I actually ended up giving away both of these carriers as gifts so I wish the recipients luck in keeping these little coffee bean plants alive! hahaha! I also hope they are able to put the mini cards to good use and find themselves inspired.

I will be posting more coffee carrier projects so keep checking back so you don’t miss out! And if you need any supplies to make these projects, please shop my online store!

Hot Pink House!

Who would not love to live in a hot pink house? I mean its just beyond cute! I bet if I searched there are people on the east coast of Canada living in a hot pink house as it seems to be an east coast thing! Sadly on the prairies we are pretty boring! When I was a kid I would see images like this and imagine the life I would be living inside, did you ever do that? I can safely say I didn’t see myself designing cards as a living but I am so blessed to be doing so!

This is a card I shared with my Christmas Card group the other night and I couldn’t keep it to myself. It uses the Trimming the Town Suite from the Handmade for You catalogue. This suite is extra special because proceeds of the stamp set or bundle go towards charities devoted to adoption, infertility and foster care. Three things that I have a connection too so this suite has a bit of extra meaning to me.

I am not exactly sure what inspired this unique color combo but it is Magenta Madness, Granny Apple Green and Seaside Spray! And I could not love it more. I stamped the ‘Be Merry’ in Seaside Spray across the background and flicked it with the coordinating Stampin’ Write marker. The sentiment is from the Banner Year stamp set in the catalogue. It is a perfect set to recommend to new stampers because it has imagery and sentiments for fall, halloween, Christmas, and Valentine’s Day so they can get quite a bit of mileage out of it.

I cut the snow bank using the Home Together dies and used Shimmery White card stock so it was one or two tones different than the background. The hot pink house (sounds so fun) and the trees are all coloured with our Stampin’ Blends.

This is a card you can recreate in a million different color combos! I hope you are inspired and if you need any of the supplies, please feel free to order from my online store!