SQUIRRELZ STASH BASH -- NOVEMBER 30, 2022

Hello friends and fellow crafters!  It's that time of the month again where my closest crafty buddies and I bash through our stash to use those oh-I-gotta-have-it items that have been collecting dust instead of being loved.  That's right it's time for the

  SQUIRRELZ STASH BASH

November 2022 edition!!!!!

This month we are focusing our attention on LEAVES and MASKING.  Now I have to be honest here...most of the time I had NO IDEA what I was going to do for my card!  Thank goodness for YouTube and my addiction to crafty videos, because this time, it came in super handy!  I was doing my usual spending-time-in-my-craft-room-watching-videos-instead-of-crafting thing a few days ago, when I came upon THIS VIDEO by Ardyth Percy-Robb.  If you are unfamiliar with her, you had best go make yourself familiar with her RIGHT NOW!!!  She is a fabulous card maker, and I love how she thinks outside the box! 

 

In her video she is focused on creative finishing touches to elevate your card making, but right around the 7:48 mark, she starts doing some masking with snowflakes and post its.  The masking is multi-layered, and she keeps adding more snowflake masks, and blending on different shades of blue (after letting the previous blending dry, of course!) until she is happy with the number of snowflakes on her panel.  After she adds her darkest shade of blue, she removes all the masks and has a "blizzard" of white and blue snowflakes!  The lightbulb came on right above my head (I swear it did!), and I thought "HEY, that would be PERFECT for this month's theme and technique!"

Now, being the Christmas-lover that I am, and given the time of the year, my card was definitely going to be Christmas in nature.  My first thought went straight to holly leaves, so I dug out my MFT holly leaves die set and got to work die cutting full sticky post its.  Here is a picture of all the masks after I removed them from my card panel, plus the inks I used for blending:

And here is my finished card:

I am totally smitten with how this came out!  I placed all the leaves in bunches of threes, like we usually see them in the crafting world, and followed what Ardyth did in her video.  When I removed all the masks, I didn't care for how glaringly white the first leaves looked, so I decided to die cut some more of the leaves from green foil cardstock to cover them up.  Before I added them though, I cut down the panel with a Spellbinders rectangle die.  The cluster in the center is popped up with foam tape.  Then I glued the panel to a scalloped green foil mat cut with a Gina Marie Designs Stitched Scalloped rectangle die.  That was then mounted to a kraft A2 card base. I used my Bearly Art glue for all the adhering.  I will leave the sentiment for the inside of the card, since the front is so busy.

OK, now if you just happened along by today, that is great!  You can continue hopping along by going to the fabulous V's blog.  Please consider subscribing to our blogs, if you don't already, and also leave us some comment love!  That's all for now.  Take Care!  😀

~ Marie 💗