Quilted Canvas

I am totally in love with this project, and I hope you are too!



This week Lauren gave us all this graphic as our inspiration piece.



Although she pulled out the colours, it is not a requirement that you use these colours. The point is that you take some kind of inspiration from the image. It can be the pattern, texture, shape, colours, anything!

I decided to paint a canvas, inspired partly by the canvases Erika Martin has been promoting lately, that copied the photo as close as I could with the stamps I had on hand. Here's a side by side comparison.



I taped off the different sections and painted them with acrylic paint. I have *really* been loving my paints recently, but I also wanted to make sure I had good coverage on the canvas. All of the stamping was also done with paints.



The sections on the left used Shapes by Design from PTI, and the section on the right uses 3 step Hearts and Roses from Kitchen Sink Stamps. I *love* how easily it is to get roses that have interesting colours and shading with just stamps.

The pink paint is pearlecent, and has a nice shimmer to it. The green centre section has stickles around the circles, and the blue lines on the bottom section are covered in fun flock.



After the canvas was painted, and dried for a night I added the text. The "Sister" was cut out using the Sunset sizzlits alphabet. (it doesn't show up on the Sizzix website, so it may be discontinued)



The rest of the text was stamped with cheap dollar alphabet sets from Michael's and reads, "My Sister a special part of our family fabric"

I know that it is somewhat difficult to read the rest of the text, but I wanted to make sure the background was still really visible.



I will be giving this to my sister before she moves to New Zealand in September with her new husband. She has been living in England for the past year, and is coming back to Canada for a month, primarily to get married, then moving with her husband to set up a life in New Zealand. I want her to have this to know that even though she will be half a world away, we will be thinking of her, and she will know that we value her as a member of our family, and that doesn't change with distance.

I know that when she looks at this Heather will think of me, and our family and that makes me feel great.

Now that I have talked for WAY too long, I hope still have energy to visit the rest of the design team and see their take on the inspiration. The peeks below look AMAZING, and I can't wait to see how everyone else was inspired.





Lauren
Dawn
MacKenzie
Maria
Kendra
Kristin
Tracey
Pam
Jennifer
Odette
Lisa
Dana
Alicia

Thoughts of you

Beate is one of the all time superstars in the papercrafting industry, and after a summer hiatus she is back with a weekly sketch challenge. I combined Beate's sketch with Kristina's colour challenge to come up with this card.



Unfortunately the photo isn't very good because it is raining and overcast here so I couldn't get a good natural light shot.

Here is the sketch I worked with.



And here is Kristina's colour inspiration.



She said we could use any colour of our choice as the accent, but I took the stool as my cue and used Purely Pomegranate. I may have used too much colour, but I tried and tried to stamp a rose in grey and black but it didn't turn out.



I still think that the black and grey are the focus, but the Pomegranate rose and ribbon add a nice pop. The rose is stamped using Maria's fabulous multi-step Kitchen Sink Stamps. I have no idea how she gets them to look so realistic, but they are GREAT!

Mother's Day for Grandma

I have been waiting for a couple of weeks for this stamp set from Kitchen Sink Stamps. I have no idea how Maria does it, but the detail of the layering of her stamps is unbelievable. They look so real once they are stamped.


This is the card I am going to send to my grandma for mother's day.

I played with the stamps immediately once they arrived. I stamped this rose using only Purely Pomegranate ink, stamped off twice, then once, then at full strength.

The sentiment "Grandmother" is from Women of Life from PTI. One of my favourite things about acrylic stamps is that they are flexible. I was able to create the curve in the word to follow the oval I cut using my coluzzle.

The Certainly Celery oval was cut with the coluzzle one size larger than the designer paper, then trimmed with some of my very old, and sadly neglected, scalloped scissors.

The card base is 4 1/2 by 4 1/2 Not Quite Navy. The photo makes it look more purple, but it really is blue in real life.