Final Halloween Card of 2010?

I'm hoping to make a Halloween tag or two today before Halloween gets here, but here's my last Halloween card before I move onto to Thanksgiving:





This is a free standing card that you mail folded up and flat in a normal sized envelope. The recipient simply pushes the base down the card to open it. There is a side view on the website if you click on the image.

The pattern paper was from this year's stack, so it might be available if you like it and hurry.

It you have not invested in one yet, a scoring board is indispensable for making this card. I used Martha Stewart's which I got with one of the rare discount coupons on her stuff at Michael's so all of the measurements in the directions are based on that one where zero is the top left and the values increment to the right. There are a number of brands out there though that put zero in the center so you may have to adjust the measurements to your tool.

Sometimes It's Better Not to Come in First

It seems like America's Got Talent just went off the air and she didn't win but look who's got a Christmas CD and DVD already:















Some blog viewers filter or edit content, if content is missing please view the post directly at its original source: http://sharedcards.blogspot.com/

Copic Markers + Krylon Fixatif = Bleached Marker

I've been working on Christmas cards that have Copic coloring on them as well as areas where I put down glue and sprinked glitter over it, but the glitter wasn't quite staying on the image as well I would like so I decided to seal it.

Having used Krylon fixatif to seal chalked images, and having a big can of it, it seemed like the obvious choice, and it seemed to work ok at first. After it dried a few hours, all of the Copic marker areas looked like part of the color had been bleached out of them.

The next attempt was using a product called Super Seal. This works as long as you put a very light coat on and start off your piece of work. If there is too much of it, it is able to get the Copic ink to start bleeding into other areas, which suggests part of it is alcohol based.

Trick or Treat Leftovers

Here's a card I pulled together from the leftover pieces of the last card I posted.

There are some tricks to getting it to go together easier, so I'd recommend clicking on the image and checking out the directions if you like this one.

Trick or Treat Pumpkin Card

Here's a nice card that's not too hard to make. The colored paper is all from the same Bazzill basics stack, so the colors are the same muted tone and coordinate well together. Since they are muted they coordinate perfectly with the background mat which uses muted colors as well. The background was from a 12x12 sheet which had some printed distressing on the corners that I kept in the bottom right for visual interest where you are going to look when you open the card.




The pumpkin is colored and shaded on white paper using Copic markers. The shading adds another dimension. I highly recommend people develop some way of coloring their images but if you don't have any way of coloring a pumpkin image you can always just stamp it on orange cardstock.

If you have been following along you should recognize this pumpkin image as one of the dollar stamps I've been using a lot. You can also think of this card as the final step up on the series of simple orange cards I posted using this image because this does represent what you can do when you move beyond a simple pack of cheap colored cardstock to a higher quality coordinated pack of cardstock and a modern stack that uses the same types of colors.

As always, click on the card for the larger image and direction sheet if you want more.

Witches' Brew for World Card Making Day

	Oct 2nd is World Card Making Day and soon it will be Halloween so what better way to celebrate than to have some witches mix up a special treat!
I got this image a few weeks ago at a rubber stamp convention as unmounted rubber from a company called Rubber Cottage. It's a great way to buy stamps because you can usually get the unmounted rubber for about half the price (or less) of a fully mounted wood block, which means you can buy twice as much. You buy the cling foam (they sell it there) and put the back of your unmounted rubber image on the super sticky side and then cut it out with a good pair of scissors. The other side of the cling foam will stick to any acrylic block just like a clear stamp. You can also cut out the foam first, then stamp the cling side using Staz-on and then mount it.
Someone at the convention usually sells white plastic sheets you can stick the cling side to and organize them in a binder. This lets you have all the advantages of real vulcanized rubber in about the same space as clear stamps. Since I use this method to store them, I don't bother stamping the cling side since I won't be able to see it when I'm looking though them. Once you fill up a sheet, just ink all the images and stamp the sheet onto a piece of paper if you want a correctly flipped version of the image to look through.
I had wanted to do something a little fancier with the image but it was so large that I ended up just framing it with paper because I didn't want to go to a larger card size. The image itself was a witch to color. Before it's colored it looks like a giant mess of lines and it's difficult to follow which line is which. It was worth the effort in the end though.
Click the image above for the instruction sheet if you want more information on the colors used. For the fire, I didn't do normal Copic blending like you see on the dresses, faces and hats. Instead I just laid down flicks of red, then orange and then yellow while it was wet. The ink blended together down toward the yellow so it looks natural but I wanted to leave the random splashes of color to balance out the witches being so dark.