Tag: Spellbinders

  • Using up leftover foil

    Using up leftover foil

    The critters’ gaze directs the viewers’ gaze, so use it to your advantage.

  • You Make My Heart Smile

    You Make My Heart Smile

    For this card I used the Spellbinders Glimmer Hot Foil Kit of the Month for December 2023.

  • Orchid Postage Collage

    Orchid Postage Collage

    This card was inspired by the Waffle Flower December Sneak Peak Club that included the Mini Slimline Postage Collage dies and stencil.

  • Monochrome Holiday Stocking

    Monochrome Holiday Stocking

    This die set is great to use with scraps, because there are lots of small dies that combine to create characters and greenery.

  • Lovely Layers Quail

    This is also the very first video on my brand new YouTube channel, @ValleyOakPaper. I’d love it if you watched and subscribed. To begin with I’ll be releasing weekly cardmaking videos there.

  • Crafty Business Update

    Crafty Business Update

    Silicon Valley in-person shoppingUnique Boutique is open 10.30 to 2.30 Monday through Friday at the Sunnyvale Senior CenterDe Anza Flea Market: October 7th, next and probably final day. Unique Boutique Craft Fair: November 3rd – 4th, Sunnyvale Senior Center

  • Pumpkin & Plaid

    Pumpkin & Plaid

    The theme was supposed to be making your own plaid, but as you’ll see I cheated.

  • Bring on the Heat Embossing

    Bring on the Heat Embossing

    I knew I wanted hot colors for the landscape itself, but I die cut the landscape from white. Then I used Distress Oxide Inks to color them.

  • Cupertino Caturday

    Cupertino Caturday

    This week I’ve been busy preparing for the De Anza Flea Market on Saturday. Attendance should be better than last month, because it’s not a holiday weekend and it’ll be less hot. I’ll be in the same location as last month, O45.

  • Whale Thank-You Cards

    Whale Thank-You Cards

    I cut out the parts of the whale from inexpensive watercolor paper and colored them with Distress Watercolor pencils following photos of humpback whales. The upper part and tail are colored with Black Soot. For the shadows under the whale I used Hickory Smoke.

  • Whale in a Bottle

    Whale in a Bottle

    The bottle die is 5.5” tall. That means that you can use it to create a shaped A2 card. Unfortunately that also means that it’s a little too big to fit comfortably on an A2 card. So that’s why I chose to make this a 5 by 7 card instead.

  • Stacked Mini Album

    Stacked Mini Album

    This mini album is very easy to make and has room for lots of embellishments. It will available for purchase at my booth at the De Anza Flea Market on Saturday, July 1st, 2023. If it doesn’t sell there, I’ll list it in my Etsy shop.

  • Merry Everything

    Merry Everything

    Ink smooshing is a very popular technique that creates backgrounds with random blotches of ink. A couple of tips: You can smoosh your ink pads onto your craft mat. That’s where the name of the technique comes from.

  • Coloring Koalas with Alcohol Markers

    Coloring Koalas with Alcohol Markers

    The main feature of these two cards are from the Spellbinders Playful Koalas stamp and die set. I stamped the koalas, birds and greenery in Memento Rich Cocoa. This is a solvent-based dye ink that enables you to color stamped images with alcohol markers.

  • Interactive Father’s Day Card

    Interactive Father’s Day Card

    Once the glue has set, turn the piece right side up. You should be able to tug at the sliding tab and get the center of the sliding mechanism to fold up. If the mechanism works smoothly, you can remove the release paper from the foam tape and place the mechanism on the card base.

  • Affiliate Programs

    Affiliate Programs

    The way affiliate programs work is that if you as a shopper click on an affiliate link, your browser saves a cookie. If you buy anything from the affiliate site within the referral window, the affiliate (blogger) gets a percentage of the sale as commission. The length of the referral window differs from merchant to…

  • Vintage Typewriter Father’s Day Card

    Vintage Typewriter Father’s Day Card

    This is a relatively simple card, but it gets the message across and who doesn’t love a vintage typewriter? I got the idea for this card when I was looking at the die set on the Spellbinders web site.

  • Vellum Cards with Envelopes

    Vellum Cards with Envelopes

    Vellum is tricky, because glue will show through it. There are a couple of different strategies for getting around this.

  • Mini Slimline Cards

    Mini Slimline Cards

    If you’re not sure how to place flowers, there are two principles that can guide you. The first one is to place flowers around the focal point of the card. The second one is to place decorations in a diagonal. If you combine the two principles, you cluster decorations around the sentiment and let them…

  • Pop-Up Tree

    Pop-Up Tree

    The theme for the Instagram hop this Sunday was Butterfly or Bee and Symmetry. I took the chance to use the recent Flowering tree pop-up die set from Spellbinders. It creates a fantastic four-tiered card that folds flat into a regular A2 format. It’s a real stunner and not too hard to pull off.

  • Update Post

    Update Post

    The weather is finally getting warmer here in the Bay 😎 Area. I celebrated by going for a swim in the community pool. It’s been such a cold and wet winter, we’re all longing for sunny days. 🏝️

  • Pink Mother’s Day Card

    Pink Mother’s Day Card

    This is where things went wrong. Out of sheer habit, I doubled up the die cuts. That meant that I couldn’t create an eclipse card. 🤦🏼‍♀️ Find out how I recovered from my mistake.

  • Duckling Cards

    Duckling Cards

    I started by laying out the dies on inexpensive watercolor paper and marking out how much space each of them would need. Then I colored the marked areas with Distress Crayons.

  • Single-Layer Spring Card

    Single-Layer Spring Card

    At this point I really wanted to add dimension to the card. But it was supposed to be a single layer card. So instead of adding dimension, I added texture.