Saturday Stampers-Treasures

This week's challenge is to create stamped art representing something we treasure.

After 20 years of living in Alaska I truly treasure nature's colors...particuliarly as we are quickly moving to those 8 months of solid white. So I spend the 3 beautiful months of summer gathering lots of natural materials to enjoy using in my crafting throughout the year. Here the raven (which are plentiful here all year round) keeps a watchful eye over all of nature's beauty. I started with a cream tag and used lumiere as a resist. The wrought iron flourish on the tag and the ironwork border image are Stampinton stamps.







In this second card I used probably the last of the leaves and ferns I will be able to obtain this fall. The background is made by sponging luminere onto the center panel and stamped the background. A transparency covers the entire card...and while that maybe hard to see the distress edges appear far more intense in color than IRL. Sorry I just could capture the halo effect. So while I really like this card and made it first I really wanted to do another that would show better on the blog. So Saturday Stampers your challenge inspired 2 cards this week!...thanks for the fun!
Happy stamping!

I think I shall never see a thing as lovely as a tree

TREES...yes, that is the topic for this week's challenge at Saturday Stamper. This is just the 2nd week for the new website and it looks like it is going to bring lots of inspiration.

For my challenge I pulled out a stamp that has been in my stash for 2 years. I bought it came to me unmounted as a part of a bag of miscellaneous stamps at a yard sale. When I bought it I found it still had mounting foam on the back which made it difficult to get a good test image...and the fact that it is a huge stamp of a whole tree makes in challenging to use for cards. But this challenge saved it's life as part of my collection--it's finally got it's long past due EZ mount properly fitted. If anyone knows I would love to know what company made it.

For my card I heat embossed the tree in white so I could do a dye ink resist. All inks were added with cut-n-dry foam. The card base is a purchased piece of handmade paper. Copper mesh was punched with a circle punch to enhance the small leaf icon which was made by embossing a Maryse Carrier stamped image. Hope you like it!
Here is a link if you want to check out the challenges at Saturday Stampers .

Winter is right around the corner!

Our birch and aspen leaves fell mostly this weekend. This is the latest fall I can remember in Fairbanks generally our leaves are down by the beginning of September. It is to be in the 30's this week so it was a busy weekend of preparing for winter. In anticipation of 8 months of not cleaning one's windows it is a big job that is always a part of winter preparation...not to mention the removal of all the plants, the raking of leaves and of course the storage of everything that can be damaged at 40 below.

With winter on it's way Jennifer challenged me to using a technique I didn't use all summer--embossing paste. So above is my finished card. All summer I thought about embossing paste and knew I should do it then...I was right it just didn't want to dry today. After several hours it still needed some heat gun encouragement. I mixed pearl ex into the white paste for some colors. The background is stipled Lumiere on black paper. Of course this is some of my final flowers and leaves I dried this season.

Fading summer

Frost is in the air--that morning feeling of crispness has arrived...and we will very soon say good-bye to our summer favorites. I created this card with one of the last of this season's pansys from my garden. I enjoyed making the layers with ink and stamps. Thanks Marie for the fun sketch challenge!
Thanks for stopping by!...Jan

Autumn is Here

Wow how quickly autumn arrives...and each year I am still surprised. Most of today was dreary and cloud covered, then late this afternoon the sun came sparkling through and the hills were bright with the gold of birch and aspen trees. I have been preparing by making some cards with late seasonal flowers and stamped leaves. I want to share a few of latest with you. Please know that I was recently selected to coordinate a creative team for the Stamp Shack which means I will probably be cutting back on my blog posts for a while.