Flower Soft & 12 Days of Christmas Blog Hop

The Flower Soft team is hopping today...! Today we're showing off our Flower Soft stamps with the theme"Winter Chill"! Flower Soft is also sponsoring The Daily Dare’s 12 Days of Christmas. So from here, go check out today's challenge for another chance to win a fabulous Flower Soft prize!!! There are 12 days of challenges lined up with some wonderful sponsors.

If you arrived here from Cibele's blog, you're on the right track. If you just happened to stop by, you may want to start from the Flower Soft Blog to make sure you don't miss a thing... because prizes are involved!! I used the "I Love You" stamp set on my card, and watercolored the image using reinkers. I used Crystal Lacquer on the windows, and lightly sprinkled Polar White while the Crystal Lacquer was still wet. The Sage Ultrafine Flower Soft was my attempt at a cozy shag carpet... not sure if we accomplished that or not, but that was the idea!

I used a marker to ink just the heart for the inside of the card, then aligned the sentiment in the opening. Such a cute everyday saying!If you'd like to join in on our challenge, pull out the Flower Soft ---------- we'd love to have you join us, and you might even win a prize! This week we’ll be giving away TWO prize packages! One prize package will be given away on the blog hop and another will be chosen among people who make a Winter Chill card using Flower Soft and post it in the Splitcoast Gallery using the keyword FSC18. Both prize winners will be chosen and announced on the Flower Soft blog. The winner of the Splitcoast Gallery challenge will have their card featured on the Flower Soft Blog. Deb will be giving away an additional Flower Soft prize at the Daily Dare! This is the prize package:

I'm glad you stopped by... hope you enjoyed the hop! Remember to visit The Daily Dare’s 12 Days of Christmas, too, after you leave a comment here!

On the 2nd day of Christmas......

Welcome to Day 2 of the Daily Dare's 12 Days of Christmas challenge! You can visit this post on the challenge blog to find out more about the meaning and inspiration behind this series of challenges.

It's my turn to host, which means I get to give out a challenge and give away a gift to the winner! The prize package for this challenge comes from my good friend Sue at Heart & Soul Rubber Stamp Co.! Heart and Soul believes that it’s possible to make a difference in someone’s life by sharing your time and talents with those around you - maybe even an eternal difference by sharing God’s Word with them! They have a wide selection of rubber stamps, including some of my favorite encouraging sentiments and verses (a few designs by me too, if you look around!).

Well, if you visit the Heart & Soul website, it will be no surprise to you that Sue's favorite color is purple! Purple is also known as a color of royalty, and a beautifully appropriate color for Epiphany, the celebration of the visit of the Magi to the infant Jesus. Soooooooo, our challenge to you is to create a Christmas card incorporating the color purple. You will receive a bonus entry if you use the same colors I did: purple/eggplant, olive green, and grey! (The color names noted below are the specific pencils I used - yours don't have to be the same!)

My card uses the Amaryllis stamp from Heart and Soul - the amaryllis is a beautiful bulb flower that blooms at Christmas time. I used colored pencils to color in the image.If you'd like to play along with this challenge, we'd love to have you join us! You have until January 9th to participate in any of the 12 challenges - or all of them! You can upload your card to the Splitcoast Gallery and tag it with the keyword: DD12days02
Thanks for stopping by!!

P.S. Prize package stamps will be unmounted.

12 Days of Christmas

Just a little "heads up" to let you know that my friend Deb is hosting a 12 Days of Christmas Celebration over at the Daily Dare -- click over there to find out more about Deb's inspiration and how you can play along.....the first challenge is posted already! For each day there will be a challenge and also a "gift." Each challenge will have its own individual keyword to be used for uploading your project to the gallery at SCS. Your entry makes you eligible for the prize of the day, and you can play any or all of the challenges you want. The deadline for submissions is midnight on Sunday, January 9th. Winners will be chosen (one for each challenge) and announced on Monday, January 10.

I even get to host a challenge, so stay tuned for that!

Hark! The herald angels sing, “Glory to the newborn King;

Peace on earth, and mercy mild, God and sinners reconciled!”

Joyful, all ye nations rise, Join the triumph of the skies;

With th’angelic host proclaim, “Christ is born in Bethlehem!”
Hark! the herald angels sing, “Glory to the newborn King!”

From my corner of the world to yours, have a very merry Christmas!

Stamp credit: Heartfelt Creations

Angel ornament

Still have a few more Christmas cards tucked away to share... this was one of my CHA cards last winter featuring Angel Ornament by Gary Robertson. I colored the image using Prismacolor pencils. I used Cover-a-Card Music on the card base.

These are the Prismacolor pencils that I used: This is my favorite angel ornament - it was a gift from some sweet ladies in my Bible study group back home!I still have a little more baking and cooking to do... but I'm determined not to stress over it! I have given myself grace to enjoy food this week and next week (Jan. 1 is my birthday...), so although I can feel the effects of the extra sugar in my system, I am loving the peanut butter fudge, snowballs, ginger snaps, and peanut butter cups. In moderation of course!

Be encouraged,

Happy Holidays from Flower Soft!

This week's Flower Soft Sprinkle challenge over at SCS (FSC17) is to use Flower Soft products on your project with any holiday theme. We'd love to have you join us, wherever that theme takes your imagination......

I got this stamp too late last year to use it for Christmas cards, so this is the first time I've inked it up. This is one of my own designs available through Our Daily Bread designs, in a set called His Gift. I watercolored the background using reinkers, then filled in the poinsettia with Inktense pencils - WOW, I am really loving these! I used Gold Flower Soft in the flower center, and Gold Peel-Offs around the edge of the focal panel. I used another of my ODBD stamps, Brocade Background, on the card base - it's stamped in chalk ink and then lightly buffed. 'Blessings' is from another of my sets called Cross of Christ.

We'd love to have you join us for the challenge over at SCS if you have some Flower Soft products to play with! There is always a prize up for grabs! Be sure to take a peek at the other team members' blogs and see what inspiration you can find! On behalf of the Flower Soft team, Merry Christmas, everyone!!

P.S. I'm entering the ODBD challenge as well - it was a recipe challenge and I chose red, gold, and ODBD stamps as my ingredients.

Life stuff....

Sunday was my daughter's birthday and she's 8! We made CD case calendars for a quick and simple craft - here's my birthday girl with hers! (Here's a link to the little printable calendar... very handy, and you can change the size and fonts.) We left our Christmas shopping off until this week... so town is super crowded with all the people coming down from the mountain villages to shop... most of them are not 'used to' town, which makes things even more hectic... not to mention that the traffic flow has been changed in town (still not sure why) so all the streets in town are one-way. Crazy.

But we made it in, and got everything we were looking for, and even made it home before we expected! There is finally a McDonalds in town (24 service + a drive-through), so we ate lunch there for the experience of it... They don't have a full menu, and were already sold out of BigMacs when we got there (which was before lunch time, hello...), so we settled for double cheeseburgers instead. Funny thing - I went to the 'pumps' to get hot sauce and ketchup for our fries........ both hot sauce. So I went to the counter to ask for ketchup packets. I'm just so used to a handful of packets being tossed on the tray without a thought that it completely threw me off guard when he asked me "how many?" I stared at him like a complete idiot. I finally said, "...5?" Duh.
So the menu they do have is a little different than what you'd be used to... one of the combo meals was fried chicken, scrambled eggs, and rice... (the rice comes in a cute little white wrapper, just like a little fat cheeseburger...) and kids can order a spaghetti Happy Meal... but it was McDonalds nonetheless, and we enjoyed the Americanness of it just the same. The restaurant is right on the waterfront, with a view of the main snorkeling islands off the coast. That was nice. Incidentally, right next to McDonalds stands the largest Christmas Tree in Indonesia... I trust it's more impressive at night, but here it is....
I finally picked up this set of Lyra Polycolor pencils - this was the only set at the store, and Ihave been hiding it for months in the stack of watercolor pencils (bwahaha)!! These pencils are oil based rather than wax based - so I'm looking forward to learning how to use them! The most common pencil brand here is Faber-Castell, since they are produced in-country for export, so it was cool to see something of this quality.Tomorrow is a cooking and baking day, and we are having guests for dinner... then a few more days to rest, wrap presents, and celebrate together. Hope you are having a great week!

Joy of Christmas

Here's another card for this week's Flower Soft Sprinkle challenge over at SCS (FSC16), "Think Snow"....

One fun use for Flower Soft is as filler for a shaker card. I colored this little snowman from QKR Stampede with colored pencils, and set him in a Shake-It shaker pouch with some Polar White Flower Soft.

The easel card format allowed me to put the sentiment on the inside - which I think is perfect for this image! The sentiment comes from Heart & Soul Rubber Stamp Co. I heated the ribbon a little with my heat gun to make it twist and curl a bit... **note to self... be careful around the shaker pouch! Warped it just a little bit. Oops!

These are the pencils I used to color the image:
Thanks for stopping by!

Basket of flowers

For weeks I've been searching for this Flower Soft bicycle stamp which I had tucked away "somewhere"... finally found it this week and inked it up. I love this image, but it's rather large for a standard card (seriously, how do you lose a stamp that big?!), so I decided to use just a part of the image this time...

I started off with the image stamped in Sepia ink, and colored and blended using Inktense pencils - this was the first time I had really used them, and - WOW - the colors really pop when they are blended with water! I only have 14 colors, so I had to do some creative blending in some areas to achieve the colors I wanted... but I think it worked out ok!

The cool thing about Inktense is that the pigment dries as permanent ink after it's blended, so when the bicycle was dry I was able to use a Distress ink pad 'direct to paper' right over the colored image without it going anywhere. If I'd used watercolor pencils or any other waterbased medium, that red would have been all over the place.

I sponged Dark Brown around the edges.. just can't help myself with that one! Scraps are from my stash and the sentiment is from JustRite Stampers.

On to the Flower Soft - there are several layers going on here in the basket!

I started with Sage Ultrafine, then added Ivory to the background, next Russet Red and Strawberry Ultrafine, and finally, the Heather Mix. **NOTE** I'm not always patient enough to do this, but it's best to wait for each layer to dry before adding another color! Maybe next time I'll take pictures of my creative process when I use this stamp, if anyone is interested? Let me know....

Impression Obsession DT Challenge: Metallics

The Impression Obsession team's challenge this week is to create a project using metallics. This is our last challenge for the year, but we'll be back in January with more challenges and some sneak peeks of the stamps that will be revealed at CHA! The team has been working with those stamp images already and we're looking forward to sharing with you soon.

I picked out this fun little image (Homespun Christmas... you know me and images of cute things in teacups....) and used Gold Flower Soft to add a little tinsel to the tree. The image is colored with Prismacolor pencils, and I added a little Polar White Flower Soft and fine glitter in the cup for snow. These are the pencils that I used to color the image, once again working with sharpened pencils and coloring very lightly - I used mineral spirits on one layer of color on the teacup so it would be smooth, since I was working on textured paper.

Be sure to check out these other designers' blogs for inspiration -

Daniela @ For the First Time
Deborah @ Cards and Things
Jeanne @ Inky Paws
Jenny @ One Krafty Kat
Kathy @ Watermelon Sugar
Kelli @ I Made This Myself!
Laura @ Laura's Stamp Art Journal

Remember you can enter these challenges too, using your Impression Obsession stamps! See the I.O. blog for all the details - you might even win a $25 gift certificate!! We'd love to have you join us.

Flower Soft Sprinkle Challenge: Think Snow!

Thanks to those of you who entered my Flower Soft drawing yesterday! If you're looking for more ways to win Flower Soft, here are a few ideas:

--visit the Flower Soft forum over at Splitcoast Stampers or participate in one of our Flower Soft Sprinkle challenges, posted on SCS on Wednesdays, using Flower Soft products - if you don't have any fluffy stuff, you could start with one of the downloads! There are lots to choose from.
--register over at Flower Soft TV - 6 winners are drawn weekly - I even won last week!
--join the Flower Soft page on Facebook

This week's Flower Soft Sprinkle challenge over at SCS (FSC16) is to use Flower Soft on your project with the theme, "Think Snow". We'd love to have you join us, wherever that theme takes your imagination......

For my card I used a Charlie's Ark stamp set called I Love Snow - I stamped the main image in Dark Brown chalk ink (Colorbox) and watercolored the image using Espresso dye ink (Ranger) lifted from the lid of my inkpad. The base of my card uses a technique that goes by different names, but involves laying down strips of scrap paper at parallel and perpendicular angles. I have a tutorial HERE... it's a fun and easy technique, and great for beginners, too! It's one I often teach when I have students come wanting to learn "how to make cards".
I used Polar White Flower Soft mixed with Ultrafine Sand on the ground and the ruff of Charlie's hood, and Crystal Lacquer on the snowball and drips. For the scene, the Polar White was a little 'too' white, so the Sand helped break up the brightness a bit. The ribbon is rayon seam binding dyed with tea and Glimmer Mist... not sure why it looks pink in the picture!
We'd love to have you join us for the challenge over at SCS if you have some Flower Soft products to play with! There is always a prize up for grabs! Be sure to take a peek at the other team members' blogs and see what inspiration you can find!

Also - just saw this special deal from Flower Soft - you can purchase 4 sets of retired Flower Soft stamps for just $12.99! These are beautiful scenic stamps - a wheelbarrow, fence, bench, and dovecote, with accent stamps in each set, at a 75% discount!

Winner, orchid, and other stuff...

Just drew a winner for the pot of Marigold Flower Soft, and her name is.............

Sarah Stainback!

Congratulations, my friend! I still have your mailing address and I will pass it on to the fine people at Flower Soft. Have fun!

My orchid out front is in full bloom now and it looked so pretty yesterday in the late afternoon sun... here are some pictures I wanted to share! I added an update to our family blog yesterday, in case you're interested... a few hours later my husband and oldest son got themselves in a little motorcycle accident. So thankful for the Lord's protection, as things could have been much worse. I'm getting lots of practice at first aid...! Goodness.

Want Flower Soft?

I was the lucky winner of a drawing for this pot of Flower Soft on their Facebook page - this is one of the brand new color mixes called Marigold!

Thing is... I already have a pot in the mail.

Sooooooooo....... this one is up for grabs! Gotta move quickly though! I will draw a winner at midnight EST on Tuesday, Dec. 14 from those who leave a comment on this post. (You'll need to come to my blog and leave a comment, though - I won't count comments on Facebook!)

Good luck!

Hehehe...

I have a pretty strict "Don't touch my stuff" rule at my stamping desk, but sometimes, some little creative soul will sit down quietly and 'play' without being noticed....

This is what greeted me last night (with a little [oops!] Spring sneak peek from Impression Obsession...)...

Special Delivery

You know that I love to color, so I'll be honest and say that preprinted and precolored images aren't my first choice when it comes to cardmaking, but I adore these Sepia Toppers from the Charlie's Ark line... these come 6 in a package, 3 each of 2 designs, and there are 4 holiday designs to choose from at this time. You can leave the cards as is, or alter them according to your style with inks, pencils, sponging, paints, or whatever it is that makes your work uniquely 'you'.

This is the set I used for my card, which is called Special Delivery. I just couldn't leave it alone - I was itching to color Charlie... so I pulled out my colored pencils (I prefer Prismacolors, but I have a variety of other brands thrown in my collection, too) and a sharpener. I used very sharp pencils and colored very lightly (my friend Jacki says 'tickle the paper'... if that gives you an idea of the pressure!). This is the result!

I added a little dimension using a large stylus, by embossing over a foam pad. I also made some cuts in a few places with a craft knife, and popped up corners for a 3-D effect. I used a glaze pen from Sakura in the window areas, and added a sprinkle of Polar White Flower Soft here and there. I embossed around the edges of the topper too, using a Scor-Pal. Those details show better in the photo below...
These are the pencils I used:

Hope this gives you some ideas! Thanks for visiting............