Stampin' With Michelle Pepper

A Happy Chinese New Year card, Stampin' Up! style.       Well, actually I made two cards at the end of the creative process :-) It was on a whim that my friend (Artisan Susan Wong) and I decided to challenge ourselves to making a Chinese New Year theme card. For me, this means the card will likely be in the colours red and gold, and has florals and/or lanterns and/or the zodiac animal for the year. It seems peonies are particularly auspicious for Chinese New Year, so that became the starting point for my card/s.      Now, it can be quite daunting when you look at a 12"x12" piece of DSP and wonder how to use it. My tip would be make it small. Cutting it down to 4"x6", (pictured below), I began work by colouring with Stampin' Blends. As I mentioned before, I had already determined to use red so I started colouring the background bits in Real Red. The peonies were then coloured in Light and Dark Calypso as well as Rococo Rose, and the leaves were coloured in Ju

Doesn't this look like a galaxy of berry planets? Click here for the list of supplies used for this card   I saw a tip on #loveitchopit and immediately set out to CASE Cary Buckham. What a wonderful way to get the most out of this paper!   I fussy cut out all the strawberry clusters from this paper for my Sweet Strawberry Blessings Surprise Birthday Card that I posted last week, leaving me with this:   Michelle's Top Tip Today:  Punch or die cut shapes like circles, squares, ovals, etc from your bits of paper left because they will always be used!  Cary's tip to use a marker pen to doodle around was brilliant too!  I hope you are inspired to re-create this fun card with the papers you have or if you want the Berry Delightful Designer Series Paper, then the good news is that you can get it for FREE along with the Berry Blessing Stamp Set with a qualifying order, before the end of February 2021.   As always, if you have any questions, I am happy to help you. Until next post,

Surprise - there's not a strawberry in sight!     Click here for the list of supplies I used But I assure you the image is from the same Sweet Strawberry stamp set.    Michelle's Top Tip Today: there are so many other stamps in this stamp set that you really do not need to pigeon hole it to only make cards with strawberries.    I stamped the leave and flower branch twice in versamark ink and heat embossed with Clear Embossing powder. Using our new-in-the Mini-Catalogue blending brushes, I sponged on the Crumb Cake ink over the images. Because they are embossed, they resist the ink, so the darker the ink, the bigger the contrast, ie the bolder the image became. Hence the name of this technique - Emboss Resist. I wanted to go vintage with this card because I haven't done what was once a favourite thing to do when I first started card making with Stampin' Up! That is, to create the vintage looking flowers.  There are two sizes of flowers in the Sweet Strawberry stamp set.