A Page to Share

Paper Wishes is having a mini-contest on Facebook for pet projects. I posted this layout featuring one of my favorite pictures of Nikko. She was laying in the sun in our sunroom and this one of her looking back at me I just fell in love with! I used their Vintage Roses paper pack - the green just highlighted the color of Nikko's eyes!

Love Anna Griffin!

I went a little crazy on HSN's last craft day and bought a bunch of Anna Griffin goodies! I went to a crop this weekend and had a chance to play a little. Here is a picture of my granddaughter, Leyda's new haircut done Anna style. This is the first time I tried making rosettes - took a little time, but not too hard and I think it makes a great look on the page for some texture! I cut out a couple of patterns out of one of the papers to top the rosettes, and used a third next to the journaling block.

Operation Write Home Sketch Challenge

This week two cards I made for the Operation Write Home Sketch Challenge will be featured! To see the sketch and the cards others will make, go to the Operation Write Home Blog. The post will be up on Sunday, January 30. I used mostly Paper Wishes products, including some of the artwork from the creative packs and made two versions to show how you can use different colors and shapes for the same sketch.

I hope you will be inspired to send some cards to Operation Write Home. If you are not familiar with this organization, go to http://operationwritehome.org.

February Like It Love It Gotta Have It Challenge

This month at Paper Wishes for the Like It Love It Gotta Have It Challenge, we're doing spot color. In this technique, you only color part of your image. Here are the step by step instructions:

Stamp the image you plan to use. You want to pick something that is large enoug

h to show off this technique - if you use a small image, you won't be able to color

much of it, or you'll end up coloring the whole thing!

Next, take a piece of scrap cardstock and punch out the shape you want to use - it can be a circle, a square, a star, a heart, pretty much anything.

Tape it over your image where you want to place color and color only within that shape.

Remove your mask, and now you have your spot color! Fun!

Like It: Just color part of your image without using the punched mask.

Love It: Follow the instructions above.

Gotta Have It: Try doing a shape within a shape, like a heart within a circle, using two colorways, or black and white in the center, color in the larger shape.

Post your projects in the challenge area on the Paper Wishes Message Board - let's see what you come up with!

Character Cafe Feature Friday

Christmas is almost here! Anything goes this week as long as it's sparkly! So, I used the snowman from this month's releases and put some Stickles over a flocked title.

Like It Love It Gotta Have it Challenge for January

Well, we had a little time off on the swaps for Paper Wishes, and I'm really glad - I over-committed myself in October and November and didn't know how I was going to get it all done. So welcome to getting ready for a new year! This will be posted on the Paper Wishes site on December 15 but it is for January so put your thinking caps on, but you can wait until January to dig in and create something fabulous!

What I'd like to introduce to you today is a technique I've seen in several magazines, and Gina K had a version of it on her videos - this is my first time trying it. Basically you stamp an image twice - once on one color background and with a complementary ink and embossing powder, then you stamp it again in reverse. Here I'm stamping white on red, and red on white.

The trick to this is being sure your image is exactly placed in the same place on both pieces of cardstock. If you have a stamp positioner, this is the time to use it! Unfortunately, this is one little gadget I have yet to acquire. So, I chose the size of my paper not too much bigger than the image so I could just center the image and hopefully all would come out alright and it did!

Here are my two images stamped on 5" x 5" squares. The first is using a white embossing powder on a dark red cardstock. The second I had some tensil embossing powder and decided to try using a glittered cardstock. I wasn't sure how the image would stamp on this type of paper, but it did great! So the glitter and tensil adds a little sparkle as well!

Then, I cut each image into 1" strips. When applying the strips to your base, you just alternate the pieces - one from the white image and one from the red image. The cool thing about this technique is you end up with two cards!

Like It

I cut mine into 5 pieces, but you can do just 2 - half and half. In fact I have an old card that does just this! Notice how the designer of this card made it extra interesting by using reverse colors on the background, and adding a dark border!

Not a stamper? Try this with two patterned papers - you can often find a single pattern printed in several colorways - see if you can match them up!

Love It

Try the 1" strips like I did

Gotta Have It

You could do more, smaller strips, or even cut them up and do a checkerboard pattern. You could even fussy-cut around the image and replace one side with the other instead of using straight cuts. Try this and see what you can come up with!

Happy New Year Everyone!

Character Cafe Feature Friday

This week we're looking for foil and shiny stuff. I used the new year baby image from this month's releases at The Character Cafe and used one of the great foil papers from Hot Off the Press - I love these papers - they're much thicker than average, so they're good not only for pages and cards, but also for making boxes.