Forest Shaker Card Tutorial

Hi friends! I hope you are well and that you had a good weekend. We got quite a bit of snow and the boys are happy. Today I have a shaker card to share with you.

We have a Shake It Up theme at the Simon Says Stamp Monday Challenge Blog this week. I am looking forward to seeing all the projects. Don't miss the fun shaker project by January guest designer Anita Rao. 

One of the first cards that I made was a shaker card and I still love making them. This  week, I made a forest themed shaker. By changing the colors you can easily change it into a winter scene instead, but I felt like using shades of green today. Shaker cards are such fun and will always bring a smile to the recipient. 

Start by die cutting the Memory Box Small Pine Tree Collage from heavystock paper.

Ink the paper with Distress Inks using an ink-blending tool.

Die cut six pine trees with the Poppy Stamp Evergreen Trio set and ink with Rustic Wilderness and Pine Needles.

Stamp the background with the SSS Old Letter Background stamp and Green Leaf ink. This gives a nice texture to the background.

Create a shaker with two layers of Clearly For Art Modeling film and foam tape and fill it with sequins and some mica flakes. 

The main sentiment is a Theories Quote Chip which was inked with Rustic Wilderness and coated with a layer of Glossy Accents.

The second sentiment was stamped with one of the stamps from Anna's Flowers and the Green Leaf ink.

I also used two butterflies from Tim Holtz Field Notes Snippets.

The shaker was backed with a paper from Tim's Field Notes Ephemera pack, which had wood themed illustrations.

I like the combination of Rustic Wilderness and Pine Tree Distress Ink. Mount two of the trees with foam tape.

Shaker cards are a little hard to photograph because of all the moving and shiny parts. There are a couple of snowflake sequins in the mix, but they might also be flowers.

I like adding mica flakes to shakers and since they are usually smaller than sequins, they mix well together.

I hope you will join us this week in our Shake It Up challenge. You have a chance to win a $25 gift voucher to do some fun shopping at Simon Says Stamp. You have until Monday 8am Ohio time. 1pm UK time, 2 pm CET to join in.

Don't forget to follow Simon Says Stamp on Instagram, they post great stuff daily. 

Do you use Instagram? If so please add #sssmchallenge so we can see your entries there too.

Thank you so much for taking the time to stop by here today! 

Happy crafting!

Anna-Karin

Supplies:

* Please note: the links are affiliate links, for which I receive a small percentage of sales generated by the link, at no extra cost to you.

Celebrate 2021 Tag Tutorial

Hello friends. It is a new year and my first post of 2021. Hopefully it will be a good year!

At the Simon Says Stamp Monday Challenge Blog we are kicking off the new year with a 'Use a new or unused product' theme. Since it is the first Monday of a new month, the team is showcasing products from a specific company/designer and this week it is Brutus Monroe. You can find their great range of products here. You don't have to use Brutus Monroe products to join, but it is always fun if you do. 

We also have a new guest designer and this month Anita Rao, with her beautiful blog Beads, Charms, Wire is joining us. I hope you will stop by her blog to see what she has created for you.

I mad a tag to celebrate the coming of this new year and used a really cool new-to-me embossing powder by Brutus Monroe, both for the background and the die cuts. It is called Blue Frost and it is the only powder I used here, even though you can see various shades of white and blue and metallic. So cool! 

I started by die cutting a tag from White Heavystock paper and inked it heavily with Black Soot and Blueprint Sketch, leaving the top third white.

Apply SSS embossing ink with a mini round ink-blending tool through the Brutus Monroe Sequin Builder Slim Line stencil and sprinkle Blue Frost powder all over. Distress Ink stays wet a long time and I had only dried the tag for a short while, so there is stray powder on the inky part of the tag, which is also what I wanted since it gives a great metallic texture. Be very careful when using a heat tool so that you don't burn yourself.

The melted powder will have a white iridescent look on the white part of the tag and shades of blue metallic on the blue and black part. It is so cool that you can get all these shades with just the one powder.

I inked the top part with Speckled Egg and a little Salty Ocean.

I tested using Distress Paint instead on a tag. You can see the effect here to the left. I liked the inky tag better.

The dots stand out better on the painted tag, but that was mainly since I wanted stray powder on the inky tag, to get even more of the metallic look.

Die cut SSS Celebrate from white and gloss cardstock. Ink the white die cut with Speckled Egg and the gloss one with Blueprint Sketch.

I also die cut two SSS Simple Stems from white cardstock. The branch to the right was inked with Blueprint Sketch. These three die cuts were embossed with three layers of Blue Frost Powder.

I love the finished look of multiple layers of powder and the iridescent nature of the Blue Frost powder is so cool.

Glue the embossed word on top of the gloss word, off-setting it a little. Behind the die cut there are three strips of Tim Holtz Christmas Trim Tape. I also found a circle stamped with the SSS Mix and Match Circles on my desk and added it to the tag. 

At an angle the word looks like this. The year was die cut with the SSS Archie Jr Solid die set from silver glitter paper and the sentiment stamped with the SSS Because of You set.

Here you can see all the shades from that one powder a little better.

The deep metallic blue looks great on the black background.

I tied the tag with a piece of folded over silver tape.

I hope you will join us this week in our Use a New or Unused Product challenge. You have a chance to win a $25 gift voucher to do some fun shopping at Simon Says Stamp. You have until Monday 8am Ohio time. 1pm UK time, 2 pm CET to join in.

Don't forget to follow Simon Says Stamp on Instagram, they post great stuff daily. 

Do you use Instagram? If so please add #sssmchallenge so we can see your entries there too.

Thank you so much for stopping by here today! 

Happy crafting!

Anna-Karin

Supplies:

* Please note: the links are affiliate links, for which I receive a small percentage of sales generated by the link, at no extra cost to you.

Favorite Projects of 2020

Happy New Year! I hope 2021 is going to be a good year, much better than 2020. I meant to post this yesterday, but didn't have time to finish the post. At the end of each year, I look back at all my posts from the year and pick some of my favorite projects. I am not good at picking favorites, since I like almost all projects, for different reasons. 

I enjoy looking back at my projects from the year and it gives a sense of perspective. It is easy to feel that the time has flown by, but when I look at the projects I did at the beginning of the year, it still feels pretty long ago. This year, that is even more the case, because there is very clear line when it became clear that Covid-19 would be a very serious thing.

A big thank you to everyone who takes the time to look at my projects, posts comments here and on my social media channels and click on affiliate links. I really appreciate it and I hope that my projects inspire creativity and art making. 

Click on the photo or the ink to find the tutorial.

I really enjoyed stamping and painting this winter scene. I wish I could go on a holiday to that little house.

I like the dimension and textures of this Rusty Heart Tag.

This Peony Mixed Media 6 x 6 in canvas was one of my projects from February. It's got a fun mix of textures.

As you probably know, I love birds and this stamped Patchwork Bird tag was such fun to make.

We have come to the end of March, and the Covid-pandemic is starting to be visible in some of my projects, such as this mixed media layout, using an older photo of my dad and the boys. 

I have made quite a few sketchbooks and journals this year and I enjoy either giving them away or using them myself. This is a Vintage Nature Journal.

I really enjoyed the techniques on these two tags: Watercolor Floral on Black Background and Flowers on White Background.  

I like the mix of words, embossing powder and mica flakes on this Honeybee Artist Trading Card and I also picked it since I have just finished editing two videos for my sister's honeybee business.

Covid is especially visible in my art journals, such as with this 2 Metres Apart page. And who would have thought I'd make an art journal page about toilet paper. 

I had such fun making this Magical Gnome Forest tag, from the glitter dots in the background, to the mushrooms and the small shrink plastic gnomes.

One of the absolute highlights of this year was designing stamps for Simon Says Stamp and this art journal page was my first project with my first set, Thoughtful Flowers. 

These three Wildflowers No-line Stamping and Coloring cards were made with the same stamp set. I have used my colored pencils a lot this year.

One fun thing this year has been the release of the new Tim Holtz Ranger Distress colors and I have enjoyed making a tag with each new color as it arrived. This is the Speckled Egg tag. I also made tags with Crackling Campfire and Rustic Wilderness.

I really like using scraps and this Distress Ink Blocks card was one of those projects. 

This Happy art journal page is another colored pencil project. Using colored pencils on an inky or watercolor background is a really fun technique.

I also made some video tutorials, even though I would have liked to have done more. This Double Embossing project was lots of fun to do and I really like the look of the background.

And now for some color on this Colorful Floral art journal page, colored with Scribble Sticks.

One of the highlights of my summer was picking lots and lots of blueberries in the forest. We still have a quite a few bags left in the freezer and I often add them to my cereal bowl in the morning. It is like eating a little bit of sunshine. This Blueberries with Ink and Pencil page was inspired by all that blueberry picking.

For these cards I enjoyed revisiting a favorite technique, creating texture with watercolors and cling wrap.

These two cards were also done for my Wax Paper Resist video tutorial, another really fun texture technique with watercolors and embossing folders.

One of my favorite autumn projects this year was my Mushroom Tag, with a lovely glittery dry embossed background.

Another project I really enjoyed doing was this Watercolor Apples art journal page. I love apples and it was fun looking at reference photos and trying to get the colors of each kind of apple right.

I love to do projects with a transparent, yet colorful background, such as this one for my Cardinal tag.

It seems that I have enjoyed using the fabric pages in my Dina Wakley Media Journals a lot this year. This Honeycomb Patchwork is also another project using a lot of scrap papers and many small sentiment stamps.

My December Journal usually makes it onto this list. Now it is filled with memories from December 2020. 

I added too many projects here! As usual. I am really bad at picking favorites - favorite book, favorite movie, favorite color (all of them!).

Thank you so much for all your support and comments through the past year! Now let's head into 2021 with hope for a better year. 

Happy crafting!

Anna-Karin

* Please note: the links are affiliate links, for which I receive a small percentage of sales generated by the link, at no extra cost to you.