Cross Canada Blog Hop January 2018

Welcome to our January Blog Hop featuring artwork that welcomes in 2018, featuring new products from the Seasonal Inspirations 2018 catalog. To purchase any of the items seen in our blog hop today, contact your local consultant to place an order.

We hope that you will take the time to leave comments on our posts, as we love to get feedback from our viewers....whether it was something that you really liked or some new technique that was used that you would like to learn how to do....by leaving us comments, we get to hear what you like, and what you want to see. Thank you… now on to our hop!

If you have just hopped onto my blog, you can start here as this is a circular hop, but if you want to follow us across Canada then please start at the beginning and join Michelle . If you came from Michelle's blog of Creations with Michelle  then you are in the right place! 

We have been having pretty mild weather here in Atlantic Canada so far... I am ready for spring and summer. I am definitely a water girl, so I had to show everyone some cards I made with the new "Making Waves" Collection. There will definitely be a TON of layouts done with this very soon, but the flu has been kicking my butt for like 2 weeks so this is all I have done with it so far. The highlight of the collection is the stunning mermaids, but I wanted to showcase the punny cardmaking set with thin cuts. Where I haven't really felt up to scrapping, I wanted to create some backgrounds to start, so I cut up some water colour paper, and used the wide water colour brush to make some waves on 2 of them. For the whale card, I wanted a little more blending, so I dripped the water colour paints from the water brush onto the all purpose mat and then smooshed the paper into it. Then I hit them with a heat gun to dry them up. Since this tends to make the paper bend, I stuck them under my cutting mat while I did the next few steps.

 I cut out some of the adorable die cuts out of white daisy cardstock, and stamped them up. With the octopus I first inked up with Pansy, then ran the outside through Eggplant (Rock n Roll technique). The whale is black, and the crabs are Sorbet. Each water colour background is backed with Peacock Cardstock (remember that cardstock is now 2-toned, so you get different looks).

The whale card simply uses a zip strip and some of the new Make Waves shimmer trim, with the adorable new Make Waves bling. This has these cute little shaped sequins on it. I then added some shimmer brush on the blowhole spray, and it did go on a little heavy, but mistakes happen.

Here I added the backside of some Lemon Cardstock (leftover from the December Calendar special), more shimmer trim, and another zip strip.

I bent the sentiment on the block to give it some shape, and coloured the heart under the octopus with my Shin Han Markers.

I hope that I have made you want to look at this line, these cards would be great to make with your leftovers!

Your next stop on the Cross Canada Hop is Nicky of Simply Artistic

If you get lost along the way, you can head to Michelle S Blog, http://mycreationswithmichelle.blogspot.ca, as she has the complete blog list. 

Thanks for hopping along with us - we hope we were able to inspire you to get creative using some of the designs, products and techniques seen along the way. We hope you will join us again next month when we will be featuring projects that are inspired by love and friendships. So mark February 15th on your calendars and hop along with us.