Papertrey Ink November Blog Hop Challenge

I had a busy week and pretty much forgot about participating in the Papertrey Blog Hop, but realized I still had a few more hours to enter. The inspiration was this:

The red and white stripes caught my eye, and I remembered that I had a Bold Borders: Diagonal die. The project started out pretty well, with white stripes on Poppy cardstock.

It went downhill from there. I cut the Say It Simply: You & Yours sentiment from sticky-back paper, and applied gold Perfect Pearls. That turned out uneven and lighter than I had in mind, so I decided to heat emboss over it in gold. One product over the other gave it a rather odd texture. Charging ahead, I glued that down before I remembered I'd used sticky-back paper and should have peeled it off and stuck it down. Now I'm hoping it doesn't separate by itself.

Is that all? Oh, no. I added die cuts from Sending Joy and thought the holly leaves needed a few berries with Nuvo drops. I managed to smear one a little before it was dry, so decided to touch up the pink spots with white pen, and add a gold thread bow. The strands wouldn't loop, so I cut one side apart for a poof -- which poofed right over the ampersand in the sentiment.

Some days there's just no fixing all the mistakes and I doubt that I'll send this to anyone, but at first glance it came out OK and I'm submitting it.

Make It Monday, Masking and Sponging

There is a fun project this week at Papertrey Ink, layering die cuts and sponging a design layer by layer. The best tip was to mask with scraps of material such as Cricut vinyl which has an adhesive backing. I actually have some Cricut stencil vinyl, which was perfect. Best of all, I saved the shapes as I peeled them off and stored them with the stamp/die set for future use. Bonus!

My first attempt used the Palm Prints set, Wet Paint sentiment, and the very fun new Skinny Mini Banners which I can see I'm going to be using a lot.

I had so much fun, I ended up making another card. The finished product was kind of dark, so I used the Pinked A2 Vertical die to cut it down and also create a card base. Sentiment is Say It Simply: Lovely Birthday.