Stamp Paper Ink

Sketches are great inspiration or wonderful springboards when your crafty mojo is low.  So occasionally a sketch will give me multiple ideas.  I love that, when sketches can inspire different ideas.  Here's my second card using the MFT Sketch Challenge #440 . I love the versatility of the Stitched Flowers dienamics from MFT.  I've used them in a couple of other cards and always love how they look.  Plus, this card ended up with very little stamping using mostly die cuts and one stamped sentiment. This time I used the flowers for the circles and the stems as the lines to the circles by rotating the sketch 180 degrees to put the sentiment strip at the top.  Here's another look at the sketch. Recently I purchased the tiny check paper pack from MFT and I just love the look of gingham!  So I was eager to use the paper for this card.  I thought it would make a nice background without being too busy.  Another recent addition to my stash was the Stitched Rectangle S

For those of you that use Instagram, have you ever heard of the 30 day coloring challenge?  It's a challenge run by The Daily Marker aka Kathy Rac.  You can find her on Instagram here: @kathyrac . The goal of the challenge is to color each day for 30 days, even if you just spend a small amount of time, like 15 to 30 minutes.  You don't have to complete any specific project.  Just color.  The purpose is to find time for yourself, to relax and unwind, to feel free.  Coloring has been equated to meditating and meditating has great benefits for the mind, the body, and the soul.  In the past I kept missing out on the challenge, seeing everyone's posts on instagram.  So this time I got the heads up as a follower of The Daily Marker.  I knew I wanted to color stamped images during the majority of the challenge, but I didn't want to spend time each day stamping and cutting out images to color.  So I decided to do a little prep work.  Please keep in mind, the challenge

So while I was prepping for the next 30 day coloring challenge, I had an idea for a Christmas card with one of the stamps I choose.  Well, I couldn't let the idea slip away so I got started.  Here's the finished card.  Keep reading to see how she came to life! This is an older stamp set, now retired, by MFT called Warmest Wishes.  I was lucky enough to find someone selling it on eBay for a reasonable price.  The girl looks like she is trying to catch snowflakes so my thought was to make it a 'nighttime' scene.  I had two options for a nighttime scene: use Copic markers to color her on white paper with a distress ink background or stamp directly on colored paper to use Prismacolor pencils to color her.  I decided to use colored paper so I could work on my no-line coloring.  Pencils just seem to lend themselves better to no-line coloring than Copics do.  Perhaps it's just me that finds it easier. I stamped the image on a pretty blue color of cardstock using ve

Hi Everyone!  Time for another sketch challenge from MFT.  Here's my card for the sketch: This is what the sketch looks like.  You can also view the challenge here . Originally I thought the sketch would make a cute Christmas card.  I could easily see the circles as ornaments hanging down.  But I saw someone else had a similar idea so I wanted to do something different.  So I rotated the design 90 degrees to the left and then flipped it so the sentiment strip would be a banner hanging down. I decided to use the MFT stamp set Meant to Bee .  I thought the lines to the circles could be the dotted lines of the bee's flight and the circles could be the bees.  I ended up only using two of the bees so I used the dotted heart as the middle circle. For the background, I decided to make it look like the honeycomb inside a beehive.  I grabbed my custom made honeycomb stencil and two distress oxide inks: squeezed lemonade and mustard seed.  To make it look like a h

The other night I had a flash of inspiration.  I was thinking about the current MFT Birthday Project challenge in conjuction with the current MFT Sketch Challenge .  For those that aren't familiar with the MFT Birthday Project challenge, it is a challenge to create a birthday card with a specific element added.  The current Birthday Project requires adding rainbow colors to the card and I have seen some beautiful entries so far!  So I thought, why not combine the two? I thought some of the flowers in the MFT Stitched Flowers dienamics could be colored with distress inks for a faded out look and have one in each rainbow color.  To start, I inked some circles on a piece of white cardstock in the following distress inks: Festive Berries, Spiced Marmalade, Mowed Lawn, Salty Ocean, and Seedless Preserves.  The only color I didn't have was a light yellow so I used Mama Elephant's Sunshine ink pad.  Their ink has a nice powdery finish and would compliment the distress in

Welcome back!  It's time for another weekly sketch challenge from MFT Stamps.  For those that don't know about MFT Stamps or their challenges, head on over to their blog .  This week brought some changes for MFT.  The challenges used to be hosted on a separate site, but they are now on the main blog.  To find the challenges, I recommend using the search feature.  There are three challenges: a weekly sketch challenge, a color challenge, and a birthday challenge.  The sketch challenge is posted every wednesday at noon EDT.  The color challenge is posted every second and fourth thursday of every month.  The birthday project challenge is posted once a month.  For this sketch challenge, you can find the details here . Now on to my card entry!  Here it is, all finished. This is the actual sketch for this challenge.  Looks a little different than my card.  All I did was rotate the sketch 180 degrees to put the rectangle element on the opposite side and put the banner at t