2018 Favourites - Fifth Category - Pencil Colouring, Alcohol Marker, & Watercolouring

Welcome back for the fifth posting of my 2018 favourites!

By now you are all cleaned up after your big Christmas celebrations, are more than likely still stuffed. Hope you enjoyed your Christmas celebrations.

I am sharing with you my favourites in the colouring category today. This includes alcohol marker colouring, watercolour colouring, and pencil colouring.

This first card was not made for a class, but for a birthday card. I used my first set of Altenew Artist Markers for this card. Since the birthday was in Fall, the colours worked out great.

The next three cards are my favourite watercolouring cards, (All stamps from Altenew)

The next five cards are stamped with Kaisercraft Poinsettia stamp & Die set and coloured with coloured pencils. I love how they turned out!

Hope you enjoyed seeing my favourite colouring cards.

Happy creating!

2018 Favourites - Third Category - Spellbinders

Welcome back for another 2018 Favourites Category!

I hope you had a wonderful Christmas with family and friends. Today I am sharing my favourite Spellbinders cards made in 2018.

For this first card, layering a die cut can make it pop off the card with the dimension created with that technique. Using a heavier weight cardstock makes it even thicker when layered.

This next card I have always wanted to repeat with other creative ideas, but when teaching classes there seldom is time do do things like that. I hope one day to have the time and create more cards with this dome die. 

The next two cards are created with the same die. Though a small die set, there are so many options in creating with it.

The following three cards are made with a leaf layering die, and is one of my favourites from Spellbinders. Using different colours, you can create flowers that remind on of the Bird of Paradise flower.

This little die set was mainly designed to make a gingerbread house box, but can be used to create many other projects as seen in the next three favourites. And, it is so much fun to create with!

The Geranium and leaf die set, was also fun to create with.

Well, that's it for my favourite die cards. Hope you enjoyed the review of some of these cards.

Happy creating!

MERRY CHRISTMAS EVERYONE!

Dana and I wish you a very Merry Christmas!

May your festivities be filled with love and the reason of the season fill you with joy and sharing.

We thank you for following us all these years, and hope that you enjoy coming here for inspiration.

Happy creating!

&

2018 Favourites - Second Category - Shabby Chic

Welcome!

Continuing on today with sharing my favourites of 2018. Today's category is Shabby Chic cards. In today's share, I am not including the Shabby Chic Christmas cards we made throughout the year. Here, everyone like to start making their Christmas cards in July. We try to hold 1 or 2 Christmas classes a month starting in July, and then they get more frequent as we hit the Fall months.

I think we made more Shabby Chic Christmas cards this year than we did other Shabby Chic cards. One of my favourite papers to use for Shabby chic is from 49th and Market. They have gorgeous papers! I have been coming across a few more papers that often work well for Shabby Chic creations; like Authentique, Stamperia, Maja Design, Ciao Bella, Kaisercraft, & some of the BoBunny papers to mention a few.

We had three Shabby Chic classes this year that were not Christmas related, and of those three my favourites came from two different classes.

49th & MARKET - Tattered Garden had one card that I really liked. Of course it was one of the thickest cards we made. But don't you like how the layers of paper are rolled back to expose the floral paper beneath? And those paper tubes? They really add something unique and visually intriguing.

The next Shabby Chic (non-Christmas) card favourite is from the 49th & Market 'Rusty Autumn' class.

I love how you can use just a hint of Autumn colours and make something really look like a Fall card. I am partial to this type of green, which really is not a Fall colour. By adding the straw-like bleached coconut fibres, which make you think of straw, helps you to think Autumn.

So these are my two favourite, non-Christmas, Shabby Chic cards for 2018. If you have never tried making a Shabby Chic card, and have had a desire to do so, I encourage you to give it a try. They are a lot of fun to create, and if there are no Shabby Chic classes where you live, there is a lot of help on Pinterest, blogs and You Tube.

Happy creating!

2018 Favorites Introduction & First Category - Graphic 45

Welcome everyone!

Going through the creations of the year and picking out the favourites to review at the end of each year is one of the hardest things to do. It is probably because there are so many to look over, and then to pick just a few from them is much more of a challenge than expected. Every year it is the same.

As a papercrafting instructor, I make more cards than I would if I wasn't teaching. This year I kept track of the number of creations, just out of curiosity. For 2018 I created 297 cards, 4 mixed media projects, 1 mini album (wish I could have made more because I love creating albums), and 1 other project. I did not even count my many pages in the 4 bullet journal books I created this year! Now these 297 cards are for both the classes I taught, and the cards that I made that were not for classes. Very few of the cards made for myself were massed produced, so that says a lot about the number of cards created this year.

I made the decision to post my favourites in different categories; Graphic 45, Shabby Chic, Spellbinders, Stamping, Watercolouring, Christmas, Card Kits, and Personal. Now some of these, of course, overlap but I chose to keep them in one certain category.

GRAPHIC 45 is one of my favourite paper companies and I always love creating with their paper. There are always discoveries of newer companies that also have gorgeous papers and I love coming across them and adding them onto my favourites list, but Graphic 45 still remains there.

I would have to say that for 2018 my favourite paper collection from G45 was 'Floral Shoppe'. It was absolutely gorgeous! We at Scrapbooking Essentials BC only had one class using the beautiful floral paper, but I did make some more at home for needed cards that I wanted to use that paper with.

Some may say it was too challenging to fussy cut this paper, but to me it was so worth it because of how you can make the layered flowers look on a card. As you well know I love layers and dimension and that is what can really take paper to another world of creativity.

Because this is my favourite of all the Graphic 45 papers this year and there were only four cards for the class, I am sharing all of my 'Floral Shoppe' cards with you today.

First, the class cards.

Because you can hardly see them, here are the cards individually.

Just love this gorgeous paper!

OK, here are cards I made for my personal use, using this same paper collection.

These two cards I made for my twin sisters birthday in June. I had to make these mailable, so I could not get too carried away with my dimensional preferences.

Here is a closer look at them.

Sometimes  when I look at the photos of the Floral Shoppe cards I wish I still had them all because they are so beautiful.

I also decided to use this gorgeous paper for a wedding card. This one I was able to get a little more dimensional with. However, I need to apologize for the brightness of the photos. It kind of threw off the colours a bit.

You can see that this card is a little thicker than the others. I love to layer and bunch up floral cars to give dimension to cards.

Thank you for stopping by today to have a look at my favourite Graphic 45 cards for 2018. Be sure to check in again to view my favourites of the next category - Shabby Chic cards.


Happy Creating!