Taylored Expressions Blast from the Past Blog Hop

Happy Thursday! Today I'm participating in a blog hop hosted by Taylored Expressions. The theme was "Old Glory" and we had to use the patriotic color combination of red, white, and blue. This was our sketch inspiration by Sankari Wegman:

When I signed up for this challenge, I immediately knew I wanted to use the Cuppie in San Francisco image along with some fireworks. This is the card I came up with:

If you can believe it, I colored the main image with my Prismacolor colored pencils! I know...shocking for those of you who know me because my coloring weapon of choice is usually Copic markers. The only part I used one color of Copic marker is for the sand area. The base is colored with E31 Brick Beige and I went over the shadows with a sandy brown colored pencil.

I didn't want to leave the background of the image white so my husband suggested coloring a sunset. That was a challenge! I'd never done a sunset before so I hope it turned out okay! I found a picture of a sunset online as a reference.

For the ruffled ribbon effect, I took two strips of super sticky Scor-Tape and made ribbon pleats on top and then used tiny glue dots to keep the ruffles down. I like how that turned out!

I found a flower sunburst stamp from A Muse Studio that I though mimicked fireworks so I stamped that in red and blue ink. Then, I took my handy Sakura Glue pen and "colored" each petal and pour yummy A Muse Studio Diamond Glitter all over it! Sooo sparkly!!!

Usually it's a rare occasion to have a clear skies when fireworks go off in San Francisco. Most of the time we see colored fog!  Hee hee!

I'm so fortunate to live so close to the Golden Gate Bridge and admire it's beauty in person every time I get the craving to get some good Dim Sum in the city!

Please check out all the creations of the other participants and have a super day!

Taylored Expressions Blog Hop!

Thanks for stopping by and welcome to the blog hop hosted by Taylored Expressions! Our mission was to make a card using any TE stamp set released prior to May 2010. I chose to use "Sewing Cuppie" from the Crafty Cuppie set.

I started off attempting to make a card but for some reason the design wasn't coming together as I had envisioned. I'm sure that never happens to anyone else! I decided I would make a sewing notebook for myself since I'm a beginner to that craft. I thought that jotting down all the helpful tips I find on various websites would be a good reference to have in one place. I recently bought a Janome Sew Mini as my first sewing machine.  It's so cute and lightweight!  It's about the size of a 8 1/2 by 11 sheet of cardstock!

I took a piece of Kraft cardstock and made my own background by alternately stamping the sewing basket image from Crafty Expressions and Tiny Heart from A Muse. Then, I adhered it to an 8 x 10 1/2 notebook and put a strip of Enchanted Evening grosgrain ribbon from Papertrey Ink along the side. 

For the centerpiece of the notebook, I used Real Red cardstock from Stampin' Up! for the base and a piece of patterned paper from the Junebug collection by Basic Grey. Love the colors and floral designs! The Enchanted Evening polka dot satin ribbon is by Papertrey Ink.

I adhered Sewing Cuppie on Real Red cardstock to give it a double matted look against the patterned paper.  I used my Copic markers to color my image and a really light blue green Copic for the background image. There was a sheet of patterned paper from the Junebug collection that looked like a quilt design so I paper-pieced it to the fabric that Cuppie was sewing. To make the sparkly frame, I put strips of 1/8" Scor-Tape from Scor-Pal on all four sides and sprinkled TE Bronze Splendor glitter on the tape.  I love how sparkly it turned out! 

I hope you enjoyed checking out my sewing notebook and have fun seeing all the other fabulous creations!