Enjoy the Ride - Zindorf style

The first thing I thought when I got my hands on this stamp set was that it would be perfect for a Michelle Zindorf style card.   Unfortunately, I didn't commit to the larger size her style requires, so...

The ribbon was stamped a few days ago, just as an experiment. I didn't really intend for it to be on the card, but it was looking a little too symmetrical for my taste, and I needed to break it up.  The ribbon is ordinary cheap 1/4 inch satin ribbon, and I used plain black ink to stamp on it - the sentiment is from the same set as the bicycle.  It it took the ink really well!  Those are brads in the corners; they are reflecting light funny since I smashed them with a hammer.

Challenges:
Paper Playtime - masculine plus sentiment
The Artistic Stamper - travel
The Craft Garden - inspiration
Crafting when we can - for boys
Sentimental Sundays - metal

Fairy flight

I was tasked to make a large (8.5 x 5.5 inches) card for the whole bowling league to sign, to wish one of the members a speedy recovery after surgery.  I knew the usual motif in these instances is flowers, and I know Michelle Zindorf designs nice cards, so I paged through her tutorials and found one that seemed to fit the bill.  Since I did have any of her stamps and didn't feel like brayering, It ended up looking like this:

The coloring was all done with pencils.  Of course I used Masking and burnishing to color the sky, and  I used a combination of the Puzzle Layer and Paper Piecing techniques on the flower.  I decided to pass on the ribbon - it isn't only an issue of mailing, but when people are writing on both sides of the inside of the card,  it isn't very nice for them to have to work around lumps.

Challenges:
Kerry's Color throwdown - colors
Amber's Crafts and Stuff - favorite things (techniques)
Crafty Creations - paper piecing
Creative Card Crew - Spring
Flutterby Wednesdays - soft pastels
The Paper Variety - flowers
Color Throwdown - colors
Creative Stamp Friends - swirls

A Little Birdy revisited

About a year ago I made a card using a Michelle Zindorf tutorial.  I liked the result for the most part, but it seemed a little crowded, probably because I was making a standard quarterfold size card, and the tutorial is for a a larger 5 x 6.5 card.  Today I needed a big card, big enough for 38 people to sign it - a get well card for a 70yo woman with terminal cancer.  You can't just say "Get Well" to someone who isn't going to.  I didn't some searching and decided that this quote said what I wanted to say:

"Some days there won't be a song in your heart.  Sing anyway." ~ Emory Austin

 Of course, with these words on the inside, I was certain that I needed a bird on the outside.  I revisited the tut and put together something close, although not as close as the first attempt:

It's a lot softer and less busy, which under the circumstances is a good thing, I think.  The purple makes more sense when you can see the true colors, too.

Challenges:
Crafty Sentiments - spring
Digi Doodle - Spots/dots
Hanna and Friends - purple and one other color
Shelly's Images - ribbon
Stampin B's - flower
Gingersnap Creations - jewel colors plus gold
Freshly Brewed - ribbons and bows

Triple Play

This odd card is called a Triple Play, because you can make 3 of them out of a 12x12 sheet of cardstock. the small front flap is the right size to hold an ATC, and the inside, if you can call it an inside, holds about as much as a postcard, even though it is 9x4 inches. The card style is largely useless unless you are mailing something in a long business envelope and you want to add a card, and don't care about writing a lot on the card.

This is the perfect size for me to mail with ATCs. I would never mail it by itself, but with ATCs - I made three of them, and two are gone already. Since I had the images waiting in a little bin waiting to be finished into ATCs, it was easy to put them on these cards instead. the black border on the inside was made by cutting a strip of black cardstock with decorative scissors.

Embrace Rock and Roll!

I started off doing the tutorial for the Embrace Life card by Michelle Zindorf, but I decided as soon as I started looking through my flowers that I didn't really want to do flowers. I wanted to make a card that rocks, so I used the fabulous Rock and Roll stamp set that I won from Sherrod Studio (thanks, Kim!). Even if I hadn't won it, once she marked it 40% off (yes, it's on sale right now!) I would have had to buy it. Much better than flowers, I think!



After I finished my Rock and Roll medallion, I decided that what I really wanted to make was a spring card. The photo shows the card standing up, but it folds flat into an envelope. Cool, huh!

I colored the image with a gold metallic pen and Glaze Gellies, then burnished on Tim Holtz Distress inks for the background color. I finished it up with a little bit of white Milky Gel.

vases - 2

I thought these would be an easy tutorial, but this was surprisingly difficult. The hardest part, and one of the aspects that made it interesting, was that Michelle Zindorf brayers on patterned paper instead of the usual Whisper white. I didn't have the pattern she did, but I didn't realize that would be a problem. The first try I threw away. How bad do you think it was if these are the ones I kept? I guess it's a good thing these are ATCs; it's hard to throw away bigger art.




Not only was the process of brayering ink on patterned paper a sticky point, there were other things I didn't like about the tutorial. Why was the bright part of the vase on the same side as the shadow? Were is the back lip of the vase? Why would you stamp something in solid black and then try to color it? I wandered off and did my own thing, but it was not an improvement. This will not be remembered as one of my favorites.

Usagi

Cat and I have been working on Zindorf tutorials, and a few days ago, I picked this one to try. Cat objected, saying she wanted to do the one we ended up doing two days ago - the tutorial featured rabbits, but since I already decided I wanted to do owls, I did it with owls. Cat did hers with a rabbit. Then (and this is the part that cracks me up), she says that she wants to do the original owl tut that I picked, because she already stamped the owls.

Well, since I already used owls with the rabbit tut, I decided to use a rabbit with the owl tut. I recalled that in Japan, instead of seeing a man in the moon, they see a rabbit, so I took that as my inspiration for this ATC - a plain brown hare striving to transcend the mortal plane to fulfill his destiny as the rabbit in the moon.



I took some chances with the color - instead of sticking to shades of blue, I used some green and purple to develope the color of the sky. I used gold embossing on the leaves and some gold metallic accents on the rabbit to symbolize his spiritual journey.

I had another reason to make a brown and purple ATC as well - it's the challenge this week at Fun with ATCs.

Owl always love you

It's the beginning of the month, which means a new free digital stamp at Designed2Delight. If you make a card with it and post it by Monday, you get a free digital stamp next week. If you use that stamp, then you get another one the following week, and so on. It's a great way to collect digital stamps, and it is a great way to get the experience of being on a design team without the stress.



I used another Zindorf tut for this one, although I changed so many things in the tutorial, I doubt Michelle herself would recognize it. I did, however, attempt to use SU inks on this one, thereby learning that spots and brayers don't mix.

Sunset still lake

This Zindorf tutorial was not as hard as it looked. I substituted Tim Holtz distress inks for the SU colors, and the "branch" is a tulip stem from a CTMH set; I thought it looked like a small palm, and those do occasionally get submerged, I think.



Michelle Zindorf makes huge cards, so I either have to cut out a lot of the framing and layering that she puts into her cards, or I have to make the focal image smaller, which is sometimes difficult.

A little birdy

The archnemesis is out of town, so I had time to do another Zindorf tutorial today. My cardstock (GP110) was starting to get tired after a while, so I didn't work it as much as Michelle did, but it is okay, good enough to send to my mom.



The whitish parts on the bottom half are done with a embossing resist technique. after I put it together, I thought the top trim was a little dark, so i put a little white stamping up there to balance the whole thing.

At one point, my bird looked really good, but I had to keep coloring it, and it has suffered as a result. This is a real mish mash of stamps - the bird is Tim Holtz, the flourishes are TAC, and the flower is SU. I'm submitting this for the Embossing Powder Challenge at Gingersnap Creations.

California sunset - NOT

Cat challenged me to do a Zindorf tut called "California Sunset", and I've been putting it off for a while, but tonight, after seeing what Cat made for the challenge, I couldn't put it off any longer.

My first attempt was so bad I threw it away before I finished it. The paper I was using wasn't smooth enough, and I kept getting lines from the brayer. I used slicker paper for my second try:



No, I'm not particularly pleased with this. In fact, it's pretty awful. The only redeeming part is on the inside. It's a Tim Holtz stamp that says,

creativity is
allowing yourself
to make mistakes
art is knowing
which ones to keep

I'm thinking this is not really a keeper.



This one started out okay. I used a manila folder and distress inks to make this one, but I didn't see how much I got wrong until after I put it all together. The water spot (drip from when I cleaned my stamp afterward) the ink spots, and when I tried to straighten out my card in the scan, I realized how far off my horizon is.

Now that you've seen mine, you have to see Cat's. Keep in mind that this is a HUGE card - this is all that would fit in my scanner, 8 1/2 by 11, the base of the card being a raspberry file folder.



I'm not 100% sure, but I think Cat drew that wild octopus - it looks like her style. Isn't this a hoot!?!

Thank you black bird

Here's another Michelle Zindorf tutorial, but I did it like a Tim Holtz tutorial, which is to say I used Tim's stamps and inks to make Michelle's card.



It's funny that blogger resizes the photo in such a way that these two cards look like they are the same size. You can tell by the scale of the flowers and the printed paper that the one on top is the ATC.



These were pretty easy. The hardest part was finding printed paper to coordinate. I think my black ink pad needs reinking, too, but don't tell Deb Lovett.

Cup of Joe and flower

Cup of joe and flower is the name of a tutorial by Michelle Zindorf. My friend, Cat, is taking one of her brayer workshops next month, and asked me if I'd like to come along. Since we are talking about Florida, and I'm in Virginia, this was going to be an insanely impractical proposition (not even considering the fact that the class itself is about $150). I had just done the Tim Holtz 12 tags tuts, and suggested that if I really wanted to learn Zindorf technique, I could do just as well to apply myself as diligently to her tuts as I did Tims' rather than traveling all that way. Somehow that became a challenge for us to do Zindorf tuts in the New Year. This is the first one, chosen by Cat.



This is an ATC. It was either this tiny flower and cup (TAC stamps), or a really huge cup and flower, and I have much more use for the ATC than a huge card. Frankly, I didn't like this tut very much - I think it is not one of her better ones. First of all, if you look at the original tut, she uses a detail flower stamp, and a bold cup stamp - I don't like combining styles that way. Second, she drew coffee in the cup. People will put flowers in a coffee cup, but not in their coffee!

Anyway, this was my first time using the clear embossing powder as a mask for an image, and I think I learned a lot by doing the process, not just reading about it. Now it is my turn to pick a tut. I'm going to pick a brayer tut. That is the point, after all. I'm supposed to learn all the things Michelle would teach us in a brayer workshop.

It happens that this is also the challenge at the Ildi Co blog right now, to use scraps and metal on a card. No full sheets of cardstock were harmed in the making of this card (Not that I need to be stingy, I'm just saying).