Guest-designing for CAS-ual Fridays Stamps – Day 1!

Good morning!  I am SO excited to be guest-designing for CAS-ual Fridays Stamps for the next three days!  Michele, the lovely owner of CAS-ual Fridays Stamps contacted me a few weeks ago and asked if I would be interested in creating some cards with her stamps.  I had been checking out her website after seeing some of the music stamps in a challenge blog but hadn’t gotten around to placing an order yet.  So when I read her email I did a quick Snoopy dance around my living room and then replied with a super enthusiastic, YES! 🙂

So, here I am:  day 1!  I definitely erred on the side of bold and bright today!

All of today’s cards use the new Ken Oliver Color Burst Powders.  I love the vibrancy of the colors and they create really fun patterns!  For the first card I started off by taping a piece of watercolor paper to my work surface.  I prepped the paper with my powder tool and stamped the music staff from CAS-ual Fridays Stamps Love Notes onto the paper with versamark before heat-embossing it with white superfine embossing powder.  Then I uncapped the Violet and Alizarin Crimson powders and puffed a tiny bit of powder onto the watercolor paper:

And then added a few spritzes of water to end up with this:

Yep that tiny bit of powder produced THAT much color!  I knew I wanted vibrant colors to help make the white embossing pop and that certainly did the trick!  As I’ve been experimenting with the powders I’ve found that I really prefer putting them on dry and adding water as it gives me a little more control over where the color goes and how much it blends.  I really like using them with this particular stamp as I knew the embossed lines of the staff and the stems of the notes would help to control some of the color.

Oh and sidenote, I have no idea where the pops of blue came from…there must be some rogue powder somewhere!

So, I let that panel dry completely and then trimmed it down using the lines of the staff as my guide.  After the watercoloring was dry I added the sentiment by stamping it with versamark and heat-embossing it with white superfine embossing powder.  To finish the card I took a piece of red cardstock and cut two strips to frame my watercolor panel.  I adhered the strips to the panel and then adhered the panel to a top-folding A2 black cardstock base.  And just for a little extra sparkle I added a few 4mm and 6mm red sequins!

For my next card I followed a similar plan but used Pthalo Green, Ultramarine Blue, and Violet instead:

I deliberately tried to keep the water heaviest at the top of the panel and lightest at the bottom to get that interesting splatter effect at the bottom.  I really like the way that looked on the first card and wanted to try to focus more on that splatter for this card.  I used the same Love Notes stamp for this card but trimmed off only the top, added a strip of purple, and added a sprinkling of purple sequins to change it up a bit.

My last card for today uses the same powders but just to change things up I spritzed the paper with water first and then puffed on the Alizarin Red and Ultramarine Blue powders.  Once the watercoloring was dry I prepped the paper with my powder tool and then stamped the treble clef and sentiment from Big Treble with versamark before heat-embossing it with superfine white embossing powder.  I added a few glass slippers sequins but thought the card was missing something.  I loved the big white embossed treble clef but thought it needed a little more sparkle.  So I used the coordinating Treble Clef Fri-dies to cut the treble clef from silver glitter paper.  I mounted it to the card with foam mounting tape and deliberately offset it so that the white embossed treble clef would give the die-cut a little extra dimension!

Anyway, that’s it for today!  Please head over to the CAS-ual Fridays Stamps blog and leave some love and stop by tomorrow for a music-themed shaker and a floral-inspired card!  Thanks so much for visiting!  If it’s your first time, hello, and I hope you’ll come back again! 🙂