Queen Kat Designs CHA releases!

Okay, I am TOTALLY in love with this wing stamp!

Sure, it's not the first we've released at Queen Kat Designs, considering that I designed two of them, but this one ... YEAH! This is one of the Queen Herself's first hand-drawn sketch stamps, and it turned out utterly awesome. It's got some great flow to it, and is wonderfully inspiring.

Don't ask me where the winged frog came from. I picked up a set of the dies on sale from Sizzix, and when I got the heart ... well, it had to be done. I could blame the fever, but frankly, this is just too much fun. Now I have to figure out how to take some good indoor pictures without the freakin yellow cast to them. GRRR.



See? See? I can do SOMETHING normal, even when sick.

If you adore wings, and can't get enough of wing stamps, check out Queen Kat Designs for all of our fabulously fun sets of wings to complete your collections!

Blog Party Madness!

Are you enjoying the Queen Kat Designs Round Robin Blog Party?

This particular challenge was hosted by the fabulous and wonderful Sierra Grannie. It's snowing on her, and she wanted COLOR COLOR COLOR to banish the wintertime blues.

... I think this is more colour than I have EVER used on a single card.

I honestly lost track around 35-40 colours. I was too busy building this fluffy bright monster to keep counting. Stamps used are all from Queen Kat Designs.

Get Inked! -- February

The following cards were created using the stamp set and some of the techniques from Queen Kat Designs Get Inked! kit for February.

These may be St Patrick's Day stamps, but traditional I am not. Not a whole lot of glaring green here -- gimme my subtle earthtones! All right, I know, I know -- I'll do something "traditional" eventually.


This is Versamark, and mica powders (Perfect Pearls), with foam tape to raise Greetings off the second layer of green paper. The scanner clearly does not like Perfect Pearls, and this looks muddy. Hey, that's why we make cards -- so we can SEND them to someone and they can see them in person!



Versamark watermarking around the outside bottom layer. The ring of shamrocks was done with two colours of chalk ink, as was Greetings. (No surprise, this completely subtle, non-traditional one is my favourite of the batch.)

Watermarks, anyone? I love how Versamark makes wonderful tone-on-tone background papers. The Luck shamrock is done with Versamark and Perfect Pearls again, then applied using foam tape.

If you haven't signed up to get the kits yet, you need to be ready when the March kits are ready for release. These kits go FAST!

Chalk Resist

I'm a junkie for neat resist techniques. At the Heirloom show, (and going with strep was NOT fun, I came home and passed out, and yes, I wore a mask to protect others), a woman at the Judi-Kins booth was demoing a resist technique I'd never seen before. Since I have a fascination and adoration for resists, I paid close attention, and just goggled.

It is ridiculously simple, and doesn't require a lot of "extras" like most resist techniques: no embossing powder and thus no heat tool, no masking fluid, no resist ink.

Here's the Materials list:

Rubber stamps
Fluid chalk inks
Matte Kote paper
Paper towels

And that is IT.

To do this resist, ink up your stamp (or stamps) with a VERY light colour of chalk ink. Stamp on the matte kote paper. Give it a bit to let dry, till all the "shiny" of the ink is gone.

Now, take your chalk ink pads (and darker is better for this resist, light ones don't work as well), and smear -- DO NOT PAT -- across the previously stamped image. Work in blocks, or swirls, and just go to town inking the paper.

Wipe off immediately with paper towel. Rub the colours into themselves and off the paper, do not rub darker inks into lighter ones, or you'll get some smearing of the colour.

The stamped image will show through the second layer of inks. It's not a strong resist, it's very subtle, but utterly gorgeous for background papers. Any degree of detail in the stamp you use is fine -- I've used both highly detailed, and relatively simple images with success.

You can see how the images show through the green and brown chalks. I then stamped the same image over the top in a permanent Coffee ink. This is one of the rare Obviously Masculine cards I've done. Nice and earthy, and surprisingly, no florals, dragonflies, or even leaves to be seen.

Cardisms

Layers of vellum and diecuts, with a sticker strip, stamped backgrounds.


Thing 2 had a birthday party to go to. Guess who helped me make this card? :D I've got to remember to STAND on big stamps to get solid impressions.


Foam stamp, gingerbread girl embossed. Liquid Pearls make awesome frosting. Cuttlebug snowflake diecuts. For Thing 1's secret santa.

I actually didn't manage to get ANY pictures of the Christmas cards I sent out. I'd do another, only THE DOG ATE MY FOAM CHRISTMAS TREE STAMP!! A cat knocked it off the table, and the dog ATE IT!

What a card!!

Right, I'm feverish and punny, and that's never a good combination. So instead of trying and failing to be witty (just half-witted here tonight) ...


Charcoal cardstock. Asian coin mosaic stamped onto watercolour paper, embossed, then watercoloured. I just love my watercolour pencils. Pearl-Ex blended to make the coins metallic.


Yep, more watercolours! Dragonfly postcard stamped onto watercolour paper, and then painted. I got a little carried away with adding the mulberry paper punches. Ooops. It happens to the best (and worst) of us.

Done for a challenge at Queen Kat Designs. The card isn't blurry, it's my scanner, which hates dimensional accents. Gold is Pearl-Ex added to Versamark stamped images, with a wooden button as a clasp for the door.

Thank heavens DG gave me my Christmas present early. I now have a functional digital camera to solve the image problems.

Gasp -- I've been Carded!

Can't resist a good pun -- or a bad one for that matter. ANYWAY, before this digresses further, a few cards.

I love making cards, really, I do. I'm not much into the scrapbooking -- I usually leave that to my mother, who thinks Sandi Genovese is a goddess (my parents even have a really cheesy pic of my dad with Sandi, go figure). And actually, the cards sort of ... evolved, you might say, through my other crafting. You know how it is, one thing just leads to another. Jewelry and collage both lend themselves rapidly towards card making, especially once you start accumulating goodies. And let me tell you, you don't want to see what my work area looks like.

On with the pictures, because I do begin to ramble at 1 am.

I love ink. And adhesive. And of course, stamps. The Dream card was actually my first card done on completely white paper. No colour at all, till I added it. It went to my youngest daughter's teacher, who was wonderfully helpful during a period where we were quite broke, and she went and bought some of the school supplies that were not listed in the requirements but were still needed.


The next one, the Love card, was done for a darling and wonderful woman, known to the world as Sierra Grannie, of Queen Kat Designs. She had surgery a while back, so I put this one together to give her a little smile while recovering. I can never resist an excuse to send out a RAK (for those living on another planet and not In The Know, that's a Random Act of Kindness. Or Kardness, for the punny.).



This next card is relatively unisex, because it was a birthday card for my father, who has determined that he's going to regress in years instead of advance, because the idea of me being 40 just sends him into a serious late-midlife-crisis.



As you can see from the last two, I love my Sizzix. The leaves, AND the embossing plates for the second card, are all Cuttlebug, used in my Sizzix.

Card Making

I love playing with watercolours!

The scanner didn't pick up some details, like the shimmer of the embossing powder used on the outlines, or the shimmers of the PearlEx used in some of the detailing, like on the dragonfly wings on the first card, and the coins on the second. Ah well.