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Lisa Stein

paper crafter, crochet addict, book reader, golden retriever lover, vegan

Sending Love Hydrangea

Happy Monday to you! Thanks for spending a bit of your day here with me in my corner of the internet. Today starts our new challenge at A Blog Named Hero, and as our namesake suggests, it’s all about Hero Arts! To make it especially easy to join this month’s challenge, we’ve made it anything goes. As long as it goes with Hero Arts. 🙂

Here’s my card for this month’s challenge. It features the newish Large Hydrangea Stamp and coordinating dies. I just love hydrangeas, and one day I hope to live somewhere where I can grow them in my yard and/or garden. A girl’s got to have dreams, right?

Here are the steps to create this card:

  • Stamp the hydrangea on four pieces of watercolor paper. I used versafine ink and then clear embossed the images to help with any coloring that I was going to do.
  • Use the coordinating dies to cut out the different layers of the image. This is optional, but since I had the dies, and love dimension, I wanted to do this.
  • Use Zig Clean Color markers to color the different pieces of the image. I used green and light green for the leaves, and deep violet, violet, and lilac for the flowers.
  • Die cut a panel of cardstock to use as the base for your image. I chose a medium grey color and the second largest of the infinity postal dies from Hero Arts.
  • Stamp your sentiment onto this base, before you do anything else. Ahem. Also, please note that this sentiment is from an amazing Holiday stamp set from Hero Arts. I often find myself using sentiments from holiday sets, more than the images. Love that I get more use out of these!
  • Adhere some fun foam to the back of that panel for extra dimension when layering onto a card base.
  • Adhere the leaves, then the layers of flowers onto the base. I used tape runner adhesive for most of the leaves, and then a thin foam square on the left side, for some lift. For each of the floral die cuts I used the same thin foam squares. I usually love ALL the dimension, but for this one I wanted something less dimensional, and am so glad I had those thin foam squares in my stash. Hoarding to the rescue!
  • Attach this floral piece to your card base and then embellish with whatever you prefer. I am trying to use more sequins, but I had these Nuvo dots on my desk and they just spoke to me. I love how you can get so many different sizes with them. When I first got my bottle I was just playing around with it on a piece of acetate, and now just use that to make my dots, and then glue them on to projects as needed.

This picture shows a bit of the layering and dimension that this stamp and die set can give you. What it doesn’t show, but it should, is that I colored all the flowers in with a shimmer pen. It’s like a project isn’t complete if I haven’t gone over it with that pen. And… I just bought the black, silver and gold pens. Look out!

Now, make sure to join us in this challenge. I expect we will get lots of entries and I’m excited to see them all!

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Blog Named Hero Turns Five!

Welcome to the final stop on today’s blog hop at A Blog Named Hero!

You likely arrived from the amazing Kelly Latevola’s blog, so I’d like you to make pretend you’re cleansing your craft palate before you proceed with my post. Maybe grab something to drink? Watch a cat video? I just know that Kelly is a hard act to follow. And I mean that in a loving way. She’s amazing.

This blog hop is celebrating the fact that A Blog Named Hero is turning five. Today! Five years of amazing friendships, collaborations, and inspiration. I am so very lucky to be a part of A Blog Named Hero and I want to thank Linda and Mary Dawn for believing in me and accepting me onto their Design Team many moons ago.

I also want to make sure to mention that none of us would be here if it wasn’t for Hero Arts. It’s a given that we love the Hero Arts designs and products, or else this blog wouldn’t have even been created. But the people of Hero Arts are the source of all of the positive energy that we feel when we use their products. They are beyond generous and kind and it shows in their environmental concerns, in the way they treat their employees as family, in the way that they interact with other craft companies. It’s an honor to help spread the love of Hero Arts to our blog readers.

Now, on to my projects for today. When I was thinking about this blog hop and how it all came to be, I realized that one of the very best things about products from Hero Arts is how they stand on their own. You don’t need to be a technique maven, or a watercolor artist, or even have hours to spend in your craft area in order to make their products shine. So, I went through my stash and pulled out some background stamps, even some (half) that I’d not even gotten inky yet! I also grabbed an older sentiment stamp set that I knew would help me celebrate this milestone. And proceeded to make 20+ backgrounds.

They all have the same steps, so I’ll list them here.

  1. White heat emboss on watercolor paper.
  2. Use the new distress oxide inks to experiment on coloring the backgrounds.
  3. Die cut if you like, to make card fronts.

Let’s start off with a Congratulations card, because this is a celebration!

Hand Drawn Snowflakes Bold Prints with Cracked Pistachio ink.

Look at that gorgeous reaction with just a mist of water.

Wallpaper Pattern Bold Prints, Wilted Violet and Fossilized Amber inks

Fossilized Amber and Faded Jeans

Wilted Violet and Spiced Marmalade

Misted with water.

Garden Tile Pattern background with Fired Brick, Spiced Marmalade, Fossilized Amber, Peeled Paint, Broken China and Wilted Violet inks.

Misted with water. Love this reaction with the inks.

Flourish Background with Faded Jeans ink.

Misted with water

Branches Bold Prints with Cracked Pistachio (!!!)

Misted with shimmer spray

Branches Bold Prints with Iced Spruce ink and some white Nuvo drops.

Misted with shimmer spray

Dots background stamp with Worn Lipstick and Spiced Marmalade inks

 

Now, onto the nitty gritty of the hop! Make sure to read all the details.

A Blog Named Hero is so thankful for our wonderful sponsors and collaborating companies.  Several companies decided to help us celebrate our fifth anniversary with giveaways and they were so generous that we decided to spread the love over both hop days with different prizes to be won each day. Giveaway prizes total more than $400!  To win, leave a comment on each hop stop.  We will select winners randomly from different blogs so the more blogs you visit each day, the greater your chances of winning!  And be sure to visit A Blog Named Hero on Sunday for the list of Sunday hoppers and prizes. 

Today’s prizes include the following: 

In case you a stop here’s the entire blog hop list for today:

Comments must be left before 11:59 PM EDT on Tuesday, March 28th and winners will be announced on March 30th.

Good luck and happy hopping!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Congrats, Thanks and Hello

Hello there! Thanks for stopping by today. Once again, I’ve made three cards. Here’s what happens when I sit down to create: I think I want to use one color scheme, but I’m not sure. So I grab some more colors to try. Or I do the same technique a few times, because history says I’m going to mess them up, and will need back up. Yet, lately, knock on wood, I’m actually getting multiple cards out of each session. Which makes me very happy. I’ve been sending lots of cards to friends lately, so I like to refresh my stash.

We are collaborating with Studio Katia this month at A Blog Named Hero. And because she has such amazing sparkly stuff, we made our challenge theme “Bling it Up”. It’s a match made in heaven. I am not naturally bling inclined, but with her sequins and jewels and beads, wow, it’s hard not to be converted. 🙂

Now on to my cards! For each card I used a distress stain and just made some simple, imperfect, blobs of color randomly on the watercolor paper. Once that dried I stamped the largest bloom from the Together We Bloom stamp set into the center of the colored area. I didn’t care that it wasn’t perfect, I wanted it to be organic in design, and I just love how they turned out. I used the champagne gold paint from the Finetec set to create some organized splatters in the white areas. I also used the same paint to paint some rectangles of watercolor paper that I would use to cut out the sentiment dies. Love how that turned out, and will certainly do that again.

I also cut the same sentiment from black fun foam and then adhered the gold piece atop the foam piece. On the inside of each card I used a coordinating sentiment from the Duo Talk stamp set. I love how versatile this set is, I know I’ll likely keep it on my desk to reach for all the time. I like the mix of styles and words, definitely a useful set.

And to make sure that I adhered to the challenge theme, I had to use some of these gorgeous Vintage Sheer Fusion Sequins. They’re simply a must have for me, a person who struggles with bling. I also added some seed beads to the top of the sequins, to cover the hole. Which makes me laugh, but also supremely happy.

And here are the other cards I made, which help to explain the title of this blog post. 🙂

 

 

 

 

 

Bear Peeking in a Window

It has been my absolute pleasure to work with Jane’s Doodles this month at A Blog Named Hero. The images are darling. The quality is superb. Seriously, my wallet is not happy about this development.

This month it’s all about Clean and Simple and this is my card for the group challenge post. And I love it. There is a bear. Peeking through a window. Oh my gosh, it makes me giggle. I love his expression. He’s all “I know this might be creepy, but come on, I’m adorable. Let me in. Do you have snacks?” Now, I couldn’t exactly fit that on the card front as a sentiment, so I went with “congrats”. 🙂

This card is actually pretty simple. So, the card base is yellow cardstock that I clear embossed with a great background stamp from Hero Arts. The window is a die from My Favorite Things. The window frame is clear embossed on kraft card stock with a woodgrain stamp from Hero Arts. The background of the window, or, you know, the sky… I just used a wide marker Copic, BG10, and swiped that all over it to make it sky colored.

In this close-up you can see Mr. Bear again, in all his adorableness. And, you can also see that I used a star outline stamp from the Jane’s Doodles set to stamp some images in the sky. And then used a glitter pen to color those in for some interest.

Please come join us this month at A Blog Named Hero. The challenge is fun, easy, and there are prizes up for grabs!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hello Caffeine

This month we are collaborating with Right at Home stamps at A Blog Named Hero. And having so much fun. We got to play with some new stamp sets, and they’re right up my alley. Or should I say coffee cup? I needed to give some people gift cards for the local coffee shop, and this set was just perfect for it. I ended up making four, so I’ll have an extra for future use.

It might be a bit hard to tell, but I have that coffee cup up on some foam adhesive for dimension. I was very excited to paper piece that cup, it’s just darling. And I can see me repeating that almost every time I use this set.

Some easy die cutting for the frames, and these cards basically put themselves together. My favorite sort of card.

I have a feeling that I’ll be copying myself and this design for future gift card cards. Holidays, birthdays, I should make a bunch of these to have around. And they’re a great way to use scraps of both card stock and patterned paper.

I hope you’ll join us for this challenge. Try something new to you for our January challenge!  One random entry will win a prize from our January collaborating company, Right at Home stamps!