Hello and thank you for joining me on this blog hop to celebrate The Altenew Educator Program and Love & Friendship. If you are following along on the hop, you have come from the talented Nandini Karmarkar of Paint, Paper, Scissors. Your next stop on the blog is the amazing Christine Pennington. If you get lost along the way, see the full list on the Altenew Card Blog.
I am excited and honored to be a part of a very selective group of such talented people. The Altenew Educator Program really helped me to gain confidence in my card making and helped set me on a path to teach others about the joy in making and sending cards. Each amazing Altenew Academy class taught me how to improve my skills and introduced me to new ways of looking at my crafting supplies. The support from the Altenew Educator Program Coordinators really helps boost your confidence, improve your card designs, as well as your photography and blogging skills. Watercoloring is a medium I struggled with but the Altenew Academy has three great watercolor classes that helped me to improve my skills: Watercolor Basics and Beyond, Watercolor Creative Media and Stunningly Simple Watercolor Techniques. I took all three of these classes and they were wonderful. 

Today I will be featuring the Altenew watercolor pan set which is a 36 half pan watercolor set that coordinates perfectly with the Altenew Inks. I made three cards for this blog hop that feature three ways to watercolor: with black pigment ink, white heat embossing and no line. Thank you for joining me on this hop to celebrate the Altenew Educator Program.

Here it is....the final challenge of level 2. So far I have taken 20 Altenew Academy classes and made 37 cards. This has been a really great experience to improve my card presentation and to learn different techniques. For this challenge I had to make a home decor project using inspiration from some of the 20 classes I have taken. I decided to make some prints in the spirit of John Audubon’s nature prints. I had been planning on purchasing some Audubon original book plates but these are really expensive. The book plates have really simple images and have just a flower or birds with the species name in typeface. Altenew stamp sets have beautiful detailed images that I thought would work great for this project. Read on for how I put together these home decor pieces. If you have questions on the Altenew Educator Program, please let me know as I would be happy to talk about my experiences so far. I’ve included affiliate links in this post for the items I used to make these pieces. If you use these links to purchase the items, I may get a small commission at no cost to you. Thank you for your support.

Valentines day tomorrow? Need a really simple and quick idea? Don’t have any thing besides your own stuff on hand? Read on for how I made the kids’ class valentines using what I had on hand and two small sticker packs from the craft store. Supplies: sheets of 8 1/2x 11 red cardstock, Hero Arts heart infinity die set, die cutting machine, Versa Mark Ink, Recollections White Embossing Powder and some valentines and critter stamps. Read on for how I put together these valentines for my kids.

Heat embossing is such a cool technique and one way to add such a big impact with very little effort. In the Altenew Academy's class: Impressive Heat Embossing, the instructor demonstrated quite a few ways to up the embossing game. One of the techniques she showed was using different colors of heat embossing on one image. For today's card, I used this idea along with Altenew's Happy Days stamp set and die to make two cards. The Altenew Happy Days stamp set is a smaller set but has great sentiments for Anniversary and Wedding events. Please read along for how I put together these cards.

My latest post is exploring the use of embossing powder with watercoloring flowers as well as using ink sprays as watercolor. To showcase some of the watercoloring, I’m using the Altenew Adore You stamp set because the flowers are large, open images perfect for coloring. This post was inspired by the Altenew Academy class, Creative Watercolor Media. In the class, the instructors used different ink types as watercoloring mediums. When I watercolor, I typically use my Distress Inks so I wanted to try Gansai Tambi watercolors. I also have some metallic ink sprays and wanted to see how they worked as watercolor inks. I also stamp the image in archival ink before painting but this time I wanted to see the difference in the image if I emboss the image in gold versus clear powder. Please read on for how my cards turned out.

Making shaker cards can be time consuming but the result is really worth it. For today's card, I was inspired by the Altenew course: With a twist, which focuses on some different takes on tried and true card making standards. Within the course, the instructor focused on using different color combinations, cutting out different parts of the card front to reveal images inside and making shaker elements on cards. For this card, I would like to show you how I put together a double shaker. A double shaker means that the shaker can be seen from both the front and inside of the card. Please read on for some tips on how to make this card.

So it begins...moving onto level 2 of the Altenew Educator Certification Program. I’m really enjoying how these classes are providing such interesting challenges that are pushing me to rethink how I use my current supplies. The class, Beyond Basic Backgrounds, had a lot of different ideas in building backgrounds using stamps, foil, inks, bleaching and dies that I was inspired to try a few ideas. In this card, I built a background using the Altenew warped speed stencil and gold transfer foil. Read along for the process of making this card.