Author: Hullahbaloo

Pastel Love

Sometimes I really struggle for inspiration and sometimes inspiration comes at the craziest of times. My daughter Mia is currently studying Art as part of the option set she chose for GCSE and their current material of choice is watercolour. It was one of her recent pieces of work that inspired this card and the colour choices.

Copyright: Mia Pickard

Whilst I didn’t do watercolour myself, I went with three similar colours to blend a background going for the more subtle pastel type shades. These were applied using the blending brushes from the Mini Catalogue, which allow you to blend onto card much more evenly that daubers or sponges do.

Mia decided to use a black outline for each focal point – the eye. However, I felt I didn’t need that due to the muted shades that I chose for my background. So simply punched out a Basic White heart and popped it up on dimensionals with a die cut sentiment.

My final touch was a few of the pearls from the Hydrangea Suite – gorgeous!

Where do you go when you need inspiration?

Best Wishes,
Suzanne

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Supplies:

Hydrangea Happy Pouch

Stampin’ Up! really do design and make some absolutely gorgeous suites and thanks to the colour families they have, the embellishments and ribbon etc are always the most divine colour ways. The Hydrangea Heaven suite has to be one of the best examples for this in my opinion – I’m a purple fan, so this really floats my boat!

The papers are beautiful designs featuring Hydrangeas, with this pattern in particular grabbing my attention for a more subtle project. Of course, I also included the Clever Clasps which if you don’t look carefully in the Mini Catalogue you may miss entirely!

Isn’t the paper just divine? And I’m so happy about Stampin’ Up! bringing a clasp / clip back into the catalogue. I miss the pegs / clips from previous years as they’re such an easy and quick way to close a bag without struggling to tie a bow.

Did you spot the Clever Clasps in the catalogue?

Best Wishes,
Suzanne

Colours Used:

Measurements:

  • Designer Series Paper = 91/2 x 63/4 inches
  • Basic White scrap

Scoring:

  • Long side = 11/2, 41/2, 6, 9 inches
  • Short side = 11/2 inches

Supplies:

Plaid Daddy

Mixing and matching is a big part of the fun when crafting. Grabbing different colours, stamp sets, dies etc and bringing them together to create final project. This particular project is a great example of that – where originally I wanted to make a plaid top to sit on a box lid, but then somehow created a card front fit for a daddy’s birthday.

The Plaid Builder dies have been in my stash since the Annual Catalogue launched back in June, but have yet to be used on a project. They’re the perfect size for a card front, so when I realised the size, my plan quickly changed.

One of the dies as part of the Plaid Builder has cute little squares as off cuts, so I recycled these and paired them up with the Playful Alphabet dies to spell out ‘Daddy’ and then teamed it with the Baby Pull Toys and sets to really finish the project off. I love it!

Have you used the Plaid Builder dies? Perhaps you could join my Crafty Hullahbaloo Facebook group and share your makes?

Best Wishes,
Suzanne

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Simple Sunday #10 – Touch of Ink

Welcome to my new Sunday series, affectionately known as Simple Sunday! The aim of this series is to showcase projects using minimal supplies, ideal for the beginner crafter or someone new to Stampin’ Up! Each project is a white card base with a 3×3 panel decorated using a single stamp set or die set. This week’s project features a stamp set that you can earn FOR FREE during Sale-a-Bration between 5th January and 28th February.

Touch of Ink – this has to be my most favourite stamp set of any Sale-a-Bration that I have been part of. So I decided to add an extra card in this week for my Simple Sunday. I absolutely love both of them for different reasons.

The softer colours of the hummingbird card vs the brighter hues of the butterfly, both of them are gorgeous in their own way and I really enjoyed making them both. The stamp set is two step – which means you can stamp the outline and then get another stamp to infill – leaving you a whole host of different colour combinations.

As you can see, I went for more muted tones for the Hummingbird hovering over the sweet flowers using four separate colours to show a difference between the outline and fill colours. The Hummingbird is them popped up on dimensionals to give some extra shadow on the card itself.

The Butterfly is popped up in the same way, but the colours are a little less muted. However, this doesn’t change just how pretty the card looks. They’re both equally beautiful.

I hope you find my Simple Sunday Series useful and it shows you that you don’t have to throw everything craft product you own to create a pretty project.

Which colour way / card do you prefer?

Best Wishes,
Suzanne

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Happy Suited Birthday!

I mentioned on a post a couple of weeks ago that I struggle when making masculine cards. Which is still the case and even with a gorgeous suite such as ‘Well Suited’, I still find it takes me some time to bring a project together. However, this card came to me quite quickly and was put together in less than 10 minutes.

The vanilla panel in the middle gave me enough white space so the Paisley pattern on the Designer Series Paper (DSP) didn’t overwhelm, but then also somewhere for me to play my bow ties and sentiment.

Now I’m not sure who I’m going to give this too, but I have a masculine Birthday card prepped and in my stash ready for when I need it!

Do you find making masculine card more difficult?

Best Wishes,
Suzanne

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