I had the honor of being a guest blogger on the Stampin’ Up Blog this week. Here are the projects I shared.
Banner Blast brings back Progressive Pages. The concept of Progressive Pages has been around for a long time but It’s been awhile since I’ve made a point of creating a progressional series of projects using the same sketch.
Using a sketch is a great way to overcome any crafting challenges you may have. One of the challenges or requests that I hear most often is for masculine themed inspiration. A simple sketch to follow, paired with the co-ordinating Banner Blast Stamp set and Banner Punch is the perfect solution! Ink them up with the colors of your favourite sports team or your kids favourite color, stamp on some matching cardstock and you can create masculine banners in a cinch!
Don’t miss your chance, Banner Blast is only available until March 31st. You can get it for free during Sale a Bration with a $60 order. Shop HERE or contact myself or your demonstrator to place your order before March 31st so that you can get your free Sale a Bration items before they are gone!
I didn’t follow a sketch for this series but came up with a simple sketch for the card and used that as my spring board to create a set of scrapbook pages as well. Choosing the colours was easy, my son is turning 10 very soon and is a big fan of our local NHL team, the Jets! Their team colors were the go-to colors for this ensemble!
I started my series off with this, Happy Birthday card. I stamped a variety of the images from Banner Blast in a variety of colors of ink on a combination of Whisper White cardstock and the matching colours of cardstock as well to create some fun banner sets. (the colors I used are, Night of Navy, Real Red, Basic Grey and some accents of Smoky Slate)
I used my Stampin Write markers to finish off the words ‘happy’ and ‘birthday’ to go with the ‘H’ and ‘B’ that were cut with the Typeset Alphabet Bigs Dies. Your Stampin’ Write markers are a great way to be selective in which parts of your stamps you use when you don’t want the whole image or greeting! I’ll show you more of that on the next card.
Here’s an alternate version of the card that I created to celebrate this milestone birthday that we are about to celebrate. Notice here that I used the the whole word, ‘happy’ which is still only part of the ‘happy birthday’ stamp from the Big Wish stamp set but that I’ve selected only the ‘th’ from birthday to finish of ‘10th’. Coloring on the images with your markers makes this pretty easy to accomplish.
I wanted to anchor the die cut letters and numbers to my cards but didn’t want to take away any focus from those die cut elements so I chose to lightly sponge a starburst using Smoky Slate ink and the negative space from a die cut and then used that feature throughout the rest of my projects.
Scaling up to an 8×8 page, I added an extra layer of banners and up-sized the buttons from the Basics Metal Buttons and layered two sizes together. Tip: ‘threads’ of cardstock are a great way to create co-ordinating thread for your projects. I don’t know about you, but naked buttons just scream to me that they need to be dressed! The Epic Day and Make Note Rotary stamps are a quick & fun way to create little journaling tags for your pages! … use them… you might even feel like a kid again! .. they take me right back to dating library cards when signing out books at the library!
Have a closer look at the details. Just click on the photo here to be taken to a larger version that you can see up close.
To complete the series, I layered the 8×8 page onto a 12×12 background and added some extra banners and a couple more details to finish it off. Again, I incorporated the sponged starbursts to anchor the added elements to the page. Going to a Jets game was a Christmas gift to our boys. From painting their faces before the game right down to the shoot out that won the game for our team, it was a night to remember and now they’ll each get one of these pages framed in a shadow box to keep in their rooms as a keepsake of this fun family gift!
Now, just swap out the colors to your favourite team (pro or of your very own little league sports star) and you’ve got a series of masculine themed projects at your finger tips!
