Valentines for any time

This year after I finished all of my cute, punny, flowery valentines for Meals on Wheels, I wanted to do something a little nontraditional for my own valentines. Then one day while I was on Instagram, I saw a few posts featuring cut-paper collage artwork, and that gave me the inspiration I needed. So I pulled out the gel prints I didn’t use for making calendars, as well as the scratch paper from cleaning off my brayer while gel printing and some paper I painted to make a postcard last summer, and got to work. I did use hearts and some love-themed sentiments, but they're really cards that you could use any time.

Side note: Lately I've been doing my blog posts partly on the computer and partly on my phone or tablet. I've been taking pictures with my phone, and while they seem okay on the phone, they don't look great when I'm on the computer. I wish I were a great photographer, but I haven't had the time to focus on composing and editing photos. So I apologize for the less-than-stellar photos. Now, back to the valentines.

These card bases, which are about 5" x 7", are from two packs of pre-cut and -scored card bases that I've had forever. Since I was making non-traditional valentines, I decided to go with non-traditional colors, too.

For the punched hearts, I used my brayer clean-off paper. Basically it's the scratch paper I roll my brayer on when I want to switch paint colors while gel printing. I'll have to come up with a snazzier name for it. I glued six hearts onto each card base, and in the center of each heart I added a word that I stamped on white card stock and trimmed by hand. I doodled a border around each card abse and added accents around some of the hearts. (On the yellow card, I also added splatters of metallic watercolor paint before I glued on the hearts.)

Here is a peek inside the cards:

I stamped a quote from Helen Keller for the sentiment and added a mini punched heart for a touch of color.

Here are a couple more large (5"x 7") cards. I discovered that I really liked the larger format for this collage-style artwork. I am less of a fan of all the extra space inside the card, however, because I often don't have that much to write.

These hearts are punched from painted paper I originally made to create a postcard in honor of Eric Carle for a project last summer. For the card on the left, the background is a gel print, and I added three short sentiments on strips of white card stock. For the card on the right, I used a layout similar to the previous cards, but adjusted the spacing between the hearts so I could stamp and emboss a sentiment on the card base. I added more doodling on that card, too.

These two cards are smaller, I think about 4" x 5". (They were also from a pack of pre-cut card bases. I'm really trying to use some of these supplies that have been just sitting around.) Both of these backgrounds were gel prints. The left card has a painted-paper heart and embossed sentiment, and the right card has a brayer-sheet heart and a stamped sentiment cut into strips.

This batch of eight cards was probably my favorite. I used several "reject" gel prints to hand cut all the squares (approximately 2" x 2") and hearts, and it's so interesting how a print that doesn't look great as a whole sheet looks so much better when you have just a little piece of it.

I knew I wanted to use the sentiment "Do small things with great love," but I didn't have one in my stash that was the right style. So I got out an old set of small alphabet stamps and stamped them out myself. Then I cut out the individual words and glued one word over each heart. I wanted to bring in a little more white, so I used a white paint pen to draw a border around each square.

These cards inspired me to make another batch of gel prints, and I'm working on turning those into cards. Hopefully I'll be back to share some of those cards soon. I've also added a new "gel printing" category under the "Labels" section of my blog, so you can just click on that if you ever want to see gel press ideas. Thanks for stopping by!

2022 Meals on Wheels valentines

Happy Valentine's Day! Again this year I made valentines for the organization that runs the Meals on Wheels program in my neighborhood. I made 115 cards this year in about a dozen different designs. I try to keep some of the designs more masculine or gender neutral (or at least not too pink and frilly), so there is a good variety of styles. (If you're new here, check out the Meals on Wheels valentines I've made in years past. There are a lot of easy, quick, and cute ideas.)

I didn't take a picture of all the cards together, but here are photos of all the different designs.

These cards were from an old card kit. I changed out the sentiments to make them into valentines and made one additional card to use up the extra felt flowers I had left.

For these cards I used a few coordinating sheets of patterned paper with square and heart punches and added matching sequins. On the heart cards, I splattered metallic watercolor paint on the background.

I used some pretty floral and succulent prints from old calendar pages to make these cards. I kept them pretty simple because I didn't want to cover up too much of the flowers.

These cards use the cutest washi tape. The tape looks like a roll of stamps, perforations and everything, so I cut them apart and added two "stamps" to each of these collage-style cards. I think this was my favorite card design.

Another postage-themed set of cards. I've had these faux stamps punched apart and colored for simply ages (like years, seriously), and I decided to finally put them to use.

I didn't want to spend a lot of time coloring, so the images on these cards were perfect. On the dog card, I only had to color the bird and the scooter, and for the other design, I colored only the scale (the bowl, hearts/cherries, and arrow were all stamped). I didn't do any shading, either, so they were pretty quick.

I love the two-tone heart-shaped boxwood wreath on these cards. I combined them with some punched sprigs and wood-patterned paper for nature-inspired cards.

This is a really easy layout for pretty papers. I cut up a 12" x 12" piece of patterned paper into (I think) 3" x 4" pieces, then layered each one on a coordinating card stock mat and adhered it to a card base. I used a coordinating tone-on-tone printed paper for the sentiment banner and added a few white hearts.

These two designs aren't really related; I just already had a lot of pictures, so I put them together. :) So here is a clean and simple stamped rainbow and one more faux postage-stamp design.

And there you have it! I do enjoy making these valentines every year, and I would definitely recommend looking for an organization in your area if you're interested. If Meals on Wheels isn't available, try a community center or senior care facility/nursing home.

I'll be back soon to share my personal valentines from this year. Teaser: I used gel prints to make some collage-style "artsy" cards, and I loved it!

I hope you had a special day, and thanks for stopping by!

January Christmas cards: Believe

We've had plenty of snow and cold weather in my neck of the woods over the last few weeks, so it wasn't too hard to get in the mood for making this month's Christmas cards, And, to be honest, we still had up all our Christmas decorations when I was making these cards. We're finally getting everything put away this weekend. We like to decorate for Christmas around the middle of December and then leave everything up for a good chunk of January to bring a little light and joy to the dark winter.

But, back to the cards. Earlier in the month, I came across a card maker on Instagram who created a monthly Christmas card challenge. Each month has a specific theme (e.g., snowflakes, stars), technique (e.g., one layer, watercolor), or type of product (e.g., background stamp, stencil) to focus on for that month's card(s). For January, the theme was Santa, and here is my design:

I don't have a Santa image that I wanted to use, so I decided to focus on Santa's hat instead. The hat and brim are punched from glossy card stock, and I glued a tiny white pom pom on the end for texture. I loved the shiny red (which doesn't really come through in the picture), so I also used metallic striped vellum for a background layer and a few red sequins for embellishment.

To contrast the shine I used Crumb Cake card stock for the layer behind the hat and for the card base. (These are note card size, 3-1/2" x 5", so they are smaller than the usual A2 size.) I embossed "believe" with white embossing powder.

I made 11 of this card design, so I'm off to a good start for this year's Christmas cards. I don't know that I'll use the challenge every month, but it's nice to have a starting point if I need some inspiration.

Thanks for stopping by!

Pandemic postcard exchange

Hello! I know a month ago I said I was going to take a break from my blog. And it’s been nice to just create over the past few weeks without worrying about supplies or pictures or whether something was good enough to post.

But I think, more specifically, that I needed to get away from believing I had to post certain things in a certain way at certain times. One of the reasons I started my blog was because I’ve always wanted to be on a design team, and a blog was a way to get my work “out there.” So I tried to post regularly and have thorough supply lists, etc. As time went on, though, design teams seemed less and less likely (for a variety of reasons), so my blog just came to be a chore.

As it turns out, though, I do have things I want to share, just in a less “formal” way. So for now that’s what I’m going to do: I’ll post when and if I have something to share, whenever that may be, and we’ll see how it goes.

Today I wanted to share a few postcards I created this morning. Last week I signed up for a postcard exchange (through a local letterpress studio) to just reach out to other people during the pandemic. I decided to make my own postcards, so this morning I cut some heavyweight white card stock into 4” x 6” pieces and tested out my Micron pens and alcohol markers. The markers didn’t smear the ink, and as long as I used a light hand and didn’t do much blending, the markers didn’t leak through the paper. Perfect!

Now I do not have great drawing skills (one of the reasons I enjoy stamping), so I settled on a few simple, doodle-y designs and just went for it. I started each postcard with a border, then drew the images/sentiments, and finally colored the designs in a scribble style using a bright, cheery color palette. On the back of each card I wrote my note on the left side and added lines for the recipient’s address on the right.

This was a fun Sunday morning project, and I may just make some more to send on my own. Thanks for stopping by!

Andrea

2022 desk calendars

Happy new year! I'm getting in just under the wire to post the desk calendars I made before the new year. This year I made two different styles: gel press prints and die cuts on patterned card stock. I didn't keep track of any supplies (I kept changing my mind and was in a time crunch at the end), so I just have the pictures. If you want to know the product or company name for anything, leave me a comment and I'll do my best to figure it out.

I'll start with the gel press print calendars. I made four of these, and each one is unique, so I'm going to share all four.

I've tried gel press printing before, but only a couple times, and I wasn't crazy about the results so I hadn't used my gel press in quite a while. I've been following a few gel press creators on Instagram, and when Taylored Expressions came out with a gel press printing kit a few months ago, I decided to go for it. (The kit comes with a gel press and tin to store it, paper, paint, a brayer, and a little bottle of hand sanitizer to clean the gel press.)

After my kit arrived, I set aside a couple of afternoons to just make prints. Before starting I gathered everything I needed. I pulled out a bunch of my stencils and found some additional texture tools -- bubble wrap, sponges, mesh bags, the plastic discs from inside rolls of tape, basically anything that could make an interesting shape or texture. I also set up a little cleaning station made up of a plastic bin half filled with warm soapy water and a couple of towels laid out. After I used a stencil I tossed it in the water, and once there were several stencils in the bin I rubbed off any remaining paint and set them on the towels to dry. I changed the water in the bin when it got too dirty.

Over the course of my two gel printing sessions, I went through all of the paper that came in the kit as well as the extra pack I purchased separately! I found it was a lot easier to create the more I did. I definitely didn't love every print -- there were a few where I just went one step too far -- but overall I was really pleased with how they came out. One of my biggest challenges was having enough space on my table to lay out the pages to dry. :)

Quick side note: When I purchased the kit, I also got a link to a special YouTube video created by Lydia Fiedler that walked through the items in the kit and had lots of tips and tricks. If you haven't checked out Lydia's creations before, I highly recommend it. She is an amazing artist and has so many ideas and videos on her blog and YouTube channel. (I took a class with Lydia at a stamping event a couple of years ago, and it was so much fun.)

The gel press printing kit comes with five large tubes of paint -- I don't remember all the official color names, but there is a pink, yellow, blue, white, and pearlescent -- and all of these calendar pages were made with only those colors. That's kind of mind boggling to me, but it goes to show you that you don't need a ton of supplies to have fun and create.

Once I had used up all my paper, I had the difficult task of deciding which pages to use for the calendars. I changed my mind and rearranged pages so many times! I tried to avoid including more than one page within a calendar that used the same stencil. I also wanted a variety of color combinations, and I tried to pick seasonal images or colors for each month. (I set aside all the gel prints I didn't use for calendar pages, and I might try cutting them up for card backgrounds or use them for die cuts.)

I cut a 4" x 6" mat of black card stock for each calendar page and then trimmed the gel prints to slightly smaller than that so the mat created a narrow black frame. You might notice that for two of the calendars I also matted the monthly calendar pieces with black card stock. I did that for two of the calendars and then decided it looked fine without that layer. (I was also getting tired of cutting black card stock.)

One of the challenges for me with these calendars is that I didn't do any kind of focal image. I thought about adding sentiments or some kind of embellishment, but eventually I decided that I wanted to prints to stand by themselves, so I left them as is. And I'm really glad with that decision!

 

For the last five calendars I needed to make, I wanted to go with something quick and easy. (Ha! That never seems to work out for me.) I started with a pack of 12" x 12" printed card stock and went from there. Here are the finished pages:

 

(Sorry the colors are a little washed out in this photo. As it turns out, I hadn't taken any pictures of these calendars before I gifted them. Oops. Luckily I had given this calendar to my sister, so I was able to snap a quick photo of her pages.)

My first step was to choose twelve pages from the card stock pack and cut them into 4" x 6" pieces for the calendar page backgrounds. The pages themselves are definitely on the simpler side, but again, I kept changing my mind about the order of the pages and the die cuts I wanted to use, so it seemed like it took forever to make them. But looking at them now, I think they turned out pretty well.

I did add a few sparkling clear sequins to each page, although it's hard to see them in the photo. And a few of the pages are printed with glitter, so they have a little extra shine. My favorite pages are probably June and September because I really like the multi-color backgrounds.

Well, that's it for 2021! All in all, I can't say I'm sorry to see the year end; it's definitely been another tough one. Here's hoping for a more peaceful, less stressful 2022. Whatever the year holds for you, I wish you love, joy, and strength. Thanks for stopping by, and I hope to "see" you again!