Altenew April 2018 Release and Blog Hop (+GIVEAWAYS!)

Good morning!  I’m thrilled to be joining the amazing Altenew design team to celebrate their April 2018 release!  They have a fabulous selection of stamps and dies in this month’s release!

I decided to keep to a black, white, gold, and blue palette and I love how the cards look like a set!

For my first card I did a loose watercolor wash of ombre blues on a piece of canson montval watercolor paper.  I let it dry and then die-cut it with the new Gradient Lines cover die.  I laid the die-cut over a piece of white cardstock and held it in place with post-it tape.  Then I puzzle-pieced the negative strips into the die and adhered them in place before carefully removing the die which I reserved for another card.  This left a really neat striped ombre effect on my background panel.

Next I stamped the Happy Heart florals onto a piece of white cardstock and heat-embossed them with gold embossing powder.  I used copic markers to add shading to the center of each flower in colors that matched the background stripes.  Next I die-cut the You Are Loved sentiment from black cardstock and gold glitter cardstock and adhered them together on a slight offset angle.  I layered the florals onto opposite corners of the panels and adhered the sentiment in the top left.  I finished the card with a sprinkling of gold sequins and a layer of spectrum noir clear sparkle on the black cardstock.

My next card uses the original Gradient Stripes cover die piece.  I simply adhered that to a white cardstock panel and sprayed it with the jet black spray.  I layered a few more of my copic colored flowers from the Happy Heart set under the You Are Loved sentiment and added a gold sequins.  I die-cut the sentiment with black cardstock and gold mirror cardstock for a slightly different effect and added a layer of spectrum noir clear sparkle to the black cardstock.

For my last card I made the Mega Greetings the focus of my card.  I stamped some of the berries and leaves onto a white cardstock panel and heat-embossed them with gold embossing powder.  Next I stamped the flowers from Happy Heart onto white cardstock and heat-embossed them with gold embossing powder before die-cutting them with the coordinating dies.  I used similar shades to copic color the die-cut flowers but used slightly darker shades of blue.

I adhered the flowers over the gold embossed background and then die-cut the Mega Greetings hello from black cardstock and gold glitter cardstock.  This time I layered the gold glitter over the black and adhered it to the panel with foam mounting tape.  I stamped the rest of the sentiment from Happy Heart onto black cardstock with versamark and heat-embossed it with white embossing powder.  I trimmed that down to a label and adhered it to the card with foam mounting tape.  Finally I finished the card with a few turquoise blue sequins!