Hello and thank you for visiting my blog. For this card I played around with Nuvo Embellishment Mousse, Hero Arts sand embossing powder and layering die cuts to create some texture on this scene card. This card was relatively easy to put together once each of the components was built. For the colored die cuts, I actually colored those over a year ago and pulled them out of my stash for this card. Please read on for how I built each of the card components and put them together for a fun summer thank you card. Some items used to make this card are listed at the end of the post. If you would like to build this card and purchase items through these links, I may receive a small commission. Thank you for your support.

Hero Arts has a great product that came out in November 2018 but I only recently discovered it. The Peek-a-Boo Die works with three different background stamps to cut out an A2 sized card front and score tons of doors where you can stamp or include little messages. This post is about the die and using it with the Mail Jumble background stamp to make a Thank you card. Please continue reading to find out more about this great product.

Altenew, in addition to its stamps, has a line of wonderful inks with matching watercolors and alcohol markers. Altenew sets up its inks into blending groups. By organizing the inks into blending groups this takes care of the guesswork of which inks would work well with other inks. Altenew alcohol artist markers work the same way. The artist markers are available in sets and all the colors within a set work together. In the Altenew academy class Creative Coloring the instructor uses Altenew alcohol artist markers to make some amazing backgrounds and images. I do not own the Altenew artist markers. For this card I’m using my Copic markers but following the techniques illustrated in the Altenew academy class on alcohol markers. For information on my entry into Copics, read a past blog post here. The biggest take away from the class was to practice, practice, practice blending. The first piece the instructor made was a rainbow blended background. I was really intrigued to try this out myself and it gave me an opportunity to use some of the Copic markers that I never use. Please keep reading to see how I made a rainbow background and turned it into a card. Affiliate links are used in this post. If you decide to purchase through these links I may receive a small commission at no cost to you. Thank you for your support.

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.

Today on the blog, I am using Altenew Layered Stencils to create unique looks to cards. I am using different blends of ink, texture paste and DecoFoil Transfer Gel. I love how the layered stencils give such a realistic impression. Please read on for how I accomplished each of these looks and tricks and tips I learned along the way.

For my next Altenew Educator Certification Program submission, we were challenged to make clean and simple cards. Clean and simple can be tough because those embellishments are just screaming to be adhered to your project. The toughest thing with clean and simple is less is more. The Altenew class, Clean and Simple Boutique Cards gave me some great ideas of how to achieve this difficult look. Using metallic elements and lots of white space lends to a great clean and simple card. Using Altenew's great floral sets helps because they come in such intricate and wonderful designs that you don't need much else on the card. Click below to read more about how I made this card.