July’s Paper Pumpkin kit, On My Mind, was designed to coordinate with three suites from the Stampin’ Up Annual Catalog: Woven Threads, Garden Lane, and Come Sail Away. If I were going to buy one of these product suites, it would have been Come Sail Away. (I opted for Noble Peacock and Magnolia Lane instead.) Since I didn’t buy any of the coordinating stamp sets, I liked having the opportunity to work with the suites without buying them.
The kit included a Pretty Peacock ink spot and this stamp set and the supplies to make the cards pictured below it:
Here are the cards we made at my workshop:
This card uses the supplies from the kit in an alternate way. One go-to method of getting more out of Paper Pumpkin kits is to cut open the envelopes and use the patterned lining as decorative paper, which is what I did with this card. The card contains elements of each product suite. The white card base is the only supply that was not included in the Paper Pumpkin kit.
I stamped this next card with the new silver Delicata ink that appears in the Holiday Catalog, which will go live on September 4th. Sometimes with metallic inks, I feel the need the to clear emboss them to give them more dimension. I didn’t feel that with this ink. It has great shine and texture. As with most craft inks, the Delicata takes extra time to dry. However, it seemed not to take as long as other brands of ink I’ve used in the past and it was nice not to do the extra embossing. This card is a heavily influenced by a card by Bente Snow (whose website is currently under construction).
Supplies:
Cardstock: Smokey Slate (?), Petal Pink, Very Vanilla
Ink: Silver Delicata
Accessories: Petal Pink Organdy Striped Ribbon, Banner Triple Punch
In addition to making alternate versions of cards at my workshop, we made “spruced up” versions of the cards in the kit. The only extra supplies I used when designing these cards were various colors of cardstock. In the pictures below, the Stampin’ Up version of the card is on the left and my version is on the right.
Garden Lane cards:
I really try to keep track of where I get inspiration from so I can give credit where credit is due, but I can’t remember if this card was copied from someone else, or if it’s an amalgamation of ideas from several different cards. If it looks familiar, let me know who did it first so I can share their name. For this card, I used Mellow Moss cardstock.
Woven Threads:
Out of all the cards in this kit, this one was my least favorite. However, some ladies at the workshop who are also quilters really loved it. I used Seaside Spray and Terra Cotta Tile cardstock on this one.
Sailing home:
I changed the orientation of this card from portrait to landscape. The only other element I added was the strip of Night of Navy Cardstock.
My next Paper Pumpkin workshop is at 7:00 pm on Friday, September 13th. You can here RSVP on meetup.com.
On the second card, I used the inner part of the kit’s envelopes as DSP. I used the card front with the nest as a focal point. I colored in the eggs and leaves to draw the eye to the nest itself. You probably can’t see it in the picture, but I brushed a little Wink of Stella across the tops of the eggs to make them sparkle. Aside from the sentiment on the inside, this card didn’t require any stamping.
Before the dawn of die-cut rubber and photopolymer stamps, we Stampin’ Up customers had to cut out our own stamps. They arrived on a sheet of rubber attached to foam mount. We used special scissors with tiny points and giant handles to snip out our stamps and then mount them to wood blocks. People sometimes altered the stamps–cutting a sentiment from one stamp and mounting it on a spare wood block. Luckily, we don’t have to snip our own stamps anymore, which is why I forgot about manually trimming until a few people on the PAPER PUMPKIN FANCLUB Facebook page brought up how they used an Xacto-knife to separate some of the shapes from the December kit, Day by Day, to make the stamp set more versatile. This was a fabulous idea. While some people divided their stamps more thoroughly, I only separated this one:
Momster Ink 