Flourishes.....and Blog Candy!!

WOW!! It's finally here...my wonderful stamping friends, Jan Caruso and Sharon Dolittle and I have been working to create our own paper arts company. I'm thrilled to announce that Flourishes is now open for business. We started small, selling our cards at local stores, but soon realized we wanted to do more. Our online store... www.flourishes.org.. is offering some wonderful products.

First - our featured product is a set of Fabriano cards and envelopes. These are so hard to come by and we have a limited supply to offer you. We also offer Basic Grey papers in the 6 x 6 pads and a selection of May Arts Ribbon.

We soon will be offering ink pads, punches and our own stamp line and if you live in the Northwest Florida area, we hope to be opening the studio for classes in the near future.

Now for Blog Candy!! To qualify, please comment on what you think of our new online store and what products you would like to see. I'll make a random selection from the comments on Sunday morning, June 3. The winner will receive this wonderful Summer Leaves set.

Back Home!!

I'm back from a whirlwind trip to the west coast. We hopped in the vette and headed first to Las Vegas, then to Ventura, CA.

The trip was smooth with very little weather problems and little road construction, so we made good time. It's been a few years since we visited Vegas - the city seems to reinvent itself every few years. They'll have to do something about the traffic along the strip though. We took the monorail as well as the double decker buses and still took about an hour to go halfway down the strip.

While in Vegas I stopped at the Viva Las Vegas Stamp Store. I've ordered from them before, via the internet and was curious to see the store. It's a jam packed store with floor to ceiling rubber, but with little accessories. I think they press their own rubber and you can get anything unmounted. I picked up a few mardi gras stamps then headed back to the casino!!

Our stop in Ventura, CA was great. We lived in the area for 17 years and we wanted to go back to see some old friends. Of course I had to visit my old stamp store, Violet's Rubber Stamp Inn. It was jam packed with stamps and lots of other goodies - just as I remembered, but I was saddened to hear that they will be closing the store in August. They are just not getting the return on investment that they used to. I took many wonderful classes at this store, and spent my share of $$ when I lived there, so hearing of the upcoming closure was very heartbreaking for me.

I purchased a few stamps along with several bottles of "Radiant Rain" - which are twinkling H2O's in spray or dauber bottles. I also picked up a set of Terra Bella finishes, the opulence kit, which is a set of 8 pots of a thick pearlized gel medium. I had not seen these before and can't wait to use them. I hope to have a project or two finished and will post them here.

masking

One of the first things you learn as a stamper is the masking technique. So often we stampers want to learn the latest and greatest techniques or use the newest tools that we either simply don't bother with the things we learned when we first started, or that we use masking so often it seems second nature to us. At last months stamp meeting we revisited masking, both masking the image itself as well as doing a mortise mask.

Today's card is my take on simple masking. I started with a quarter sheet of vanilla card stock and used repositionable scotch tape around the perimeter, leaving a nice rectangle in the middle. I sponged regal rose, celery and apricot inks inside of the masked out portion. Using Swirls (Autumn leaves), I bleached using the large swirl stamp, then used ruby red on the smaller swirl stamps. The sentiment (SU) is stamped with ancient page leaf green.

Once I was happy with the colors, and leaving the tape on, I inked the entire rectangle with versamark and embossed in clear (you will want to remove the tape after applying the embossing powder, but before heating it).

I cut the image down so that only a small vanilla border remained, and mounted it on regal rose with a ribbon behind it.

The basic card is apricot with swirls stamped in rose. I covered the card with a sheet of vellum and attached the image to the front.

Jan Caruso's new blog

Just wanted to let you all know that my dear stamping friend, Jan Caruso, has started her own blog. Jan is a wonderfully, creative person and very talented stamper and I am so happy she decided to share some of her creations with the rest of us.

Please check in on her blog from time to time (a link to it is on the left) and let her know what you think.

Welcome Jan, to the blog word!!

a little toile goes a long way

I was in Michael's over the weekend with some friends, primarily to look at the new Martha Stewart products, but also to scavenge through the $1 bins. I like Martha's products - her color palette has always been very pleasing to me, so we purchased some of the paper (and split it up so that we each got at least one of each color).

I was intrigued, so the next day I ventured out to another Michael's, a little further away. I scored big on the clear $1 stamps, and while I was walking around the discount bins, something caught my eye.

In an otherwise empty $1 bin, sat two round buttons. I reached in to get a better look and ....oh no........toile.

Why "oh no" you ask? Well, I don't care for toile...so why were these button calling to me? I found them very pretty. BUT I don't like toile. I stood there thinking....then it hit me.

I don't like toile because whenever I see a room done in toile.....well the ROOM is DONE in toile!!. Toile overload!! The wallpaper, bedspread, curtains, pillows, upholstrey. I get toile vertigo when I see something like that.

A little toile goes a long way.

I realized with this one little button, I would create a simple card with the button as the focal point. My little creation is below. And guess what....I love the little toile scene.

(Martha Stewart paper (swan color), cuttlebug EF (textile), stamp by Fiskars, misc ribbon and a $1 toile button)

Take Ten Design Challenge

The Sring issue of Take Ten magazine Issued a challenge to all readers to submit cards using their design sketch on page 25 of that issue. I've participated in their challenges before and have had cards published, so I thought I would try again. Their deadline is May 1 - here are my submissions.

Martini: stamps from Autumn Leaves (Swirls) and Vap! Scrap (martini), background paper from Provo Craft

Lighthouse: stamps from SU (crosshatch) , PSX (lighthouse) and ERA Graphics (Dream); colorwash sprays from Stamp Zia

Car: unknown stamp, cuttlebug embossing folder

Cut away

This month we tried another technique - cutting away at part of an image to allow the background paper to show through. Alice showed us this technique using a butterfly image and this is my take.....I started with a piece of glossy card stock that I had previously colored using reinkers and water. I embossed the dragonfly images (company unknown for the larger ones, SU for the small) and stamped the cattails (Stampscapes). Using an exacto knife, I cut away at the larger dragonfly wings, to allow the blue card stock to show through. The purple background is stamped with canvas (SU), along with swirls and flowers (Autumn Leaves). The "imagine" embellishment is from Making Memories and is mounted on an oval die cut from sizzix.