Sonoran Starfish Designs

Hello crafty friends! Thanks for joining me today. The Brutus Monroe Inspiration Team is creating ATCs this week! For those of you who are unfamiliar, ATC stands for Artist Trading Cards. Crafters and artists make these small pieces to trade and share with other artists. Many people collect them and put them in plastic page protectors. I have seen very cool examples of these online, but I've never made any! I was excited to try to make something in a smaller size. ATCs are typically 2.5 inches by 3.5 inches, and people often make them in groups of 3 or 5. I cut 3 panels of aqua pigment paper slightly larger, so I could tape them down around the edges. I came across a Jennifer McGuire video recently (although the video itself is actually 2 years old!) where she used a watercolor "lifting" technique with heat embossing, and decided to try it.  I first used the new metallic aqua pigments on the three panels. My color combos are: cactus/periwinkle, sunflower/marigold,...

Hey crafty friends! Thanks for hoping over to my blog today! The Brutus Monroe inspiration team is gearing up for Christmas and finishing up our holiday cards this week. I had a lot of backgrounds already made with the Freshly Cut background stamp and I've been needing to turn them into cards! For this one, I had heat embossed the background stamp in gold onto aqua pigment paper, and I did a wash of aqua pigments over the top in the colors green and yellow. I heat embossed the Festive Deer stamp onto a piece of heat resistant vellum, and trimmed it down on the sides. Then I die cut a rectangular window from the center of a piece of Alabaster cardstock, and adhered the vellum strip to the back of the window. I put foam tape all around the back of the frame, and stuck it to a larger Alabaster cardstock mat. This gave it a floating effect. I finished the card with some acrylic bubbles and gold sequins.   Have you finished your holiday cards yet? Share your creation...

Hi friends! All the cards in this post use  This Floral Background stamp  , made by the Stamp Market. I bought it from Auntie Dayna's Cards and Things. Dayna operates out of Hawaii, and offers classes and products to her customers that are harder to get in the islands. You can find her group on Facebook. Background stamps are so much fun! I couldn't wait to use this one! For my first project, I heat embossed the background with white embossing powder on watercolor paper. I wet the paper thoroughly and then dropped color bursts onto the background. I used a spray bottle to break up some of the larger chunks, and the embossing acts as a resist. I heat embossed the sentiment from the Altenew set "Heartfelt Sentiments" (also purchased from Auntie Dayna) onto black cardstock and cut each individual word out. I positioned them on the background and popped them up with foam tape. To finish it off, I used a black Copic multiliner pen to add some random lines around th...