Altenew’s 4th Anniversary Blog Hop Day 2 (+GIVEAWAY!)

Good morning!  I am so excited to help Altenew celebrate their fourth anniversary today!  They’re having FOUR days of blog hops with lots of exciting prizes from Altenew and their exciting sponsors!  You can find all the giveaways details at the bottom of my post!  Today I decided to play with my alcohol inks to create a birthday card with a moody color palette!

I started by dropping alcohol ink blending solution onto a piece of heavyweight yupo paper.  I’ve found that heavyweight paper is the best for heat-embossing.  Yupo paper is technically plastic so it warps easily if you apply too much heat but the heavyweight definitely takes heat better.  You can find more of my tricks for heat-embossing on yupo here!  I used alcohol inks in currant, eggplant, wild plum, and cool peri.  I really love the combination of those dark moody colors!  I used a few drops of alcohol ink blending solution to get the alcohol ink moving and used my air puffer to blend the colors together.  I let it dry completely and then stamped the Arabesque Medallion twice with versamark before heat-embossing it with gold tinsel embossing powder.  I deliberately positioned the stamp to follow the lines of the alcohol ink.

I trimmed the yupo paper down and adhered it to a white card base.  Then I stamped the greeting from Birthday Builder onto gold cardstock and heat-embossed it with black embossing powder.  I trimmed it down and added a strip of black cardstock beneath the gold and then adhered it to my card with foam mounting tape. I love the combination of those colors with gold and black!

Since it’s Altenew‘s Anniversary I decided to share a small gallery of cards I’ve created over the years using stamps and dies from Altenew!  They’ve been one of my favorite companies from the very beginning and I am honored to be a stop on the hop today!

HAPPY ANNIVERSARY ALTENEW!! Here’s to many, MANY more!! 🙂