Taylored Expressions February Studio Challenge

         Please scroll down for my IHP February Design Team Challenge 

HI Everyone,

Every month the Taylored Expressions Design Team has a Studio Challenge where we share a little bit of our creative process, answer a crafty challenge and share some of our favorite tips and tricks :) This month's design team challenge is:

Recipe for success!  When you sit down to create a card just for fun, for the pure joy of stamping, without any type of assignment or deadline, what steps do you usually take? Tell us how you get started and take us along on your creative journey.

I love those moments when it is just me and my stamp corner - sometimes I am not sure where to start -so in those moments I usually try to find a sketch challenge online because then I can visualize a card - or sometimes, I look through my stamps and find one that I haven't stamped recently and just start stamping. For this card, I decided to pick one of my most favorite favorite stamp set ever: Hangin' Out (there are also coordinating Hanging Out stamp sets - At the beach, a Halloween themed one: Wicked Wardrobe and a christmas themed one by the North Pole) . I just love this stamp set and always love paper piecing the dress or creating a baby card with the other stamps in this set. Here are a couple of pictures of my card making process (it was taken by my phone so I am sorry about the quality of the pictures):

I love the DP from the Pebbles Family Ties 6x6 paper pad and paper pieced the dress from the blue polka dot paper and the sash from the yellow paper:

Here is a picture of the Border dies (cloud border) and Grass Border dies that I used for the card and the poles that cut out and colored in with copics (umm and yes, I always almost only have 2"x 2" of my table for my card making process - ha! )

After cutting out some hills and sponging the clouds, I added a little birdie to the hill - here I was trying to place it to try to figure out which hill to put the bird on :) I ended up deciding that the bird should go in the bottom right corner of the card (I colored it with copics and cut it out and popped it out with some dimensionals):

 And for the sun and the sentiment, I used the Garden Party Blooms stamp set and used both of those colors for the sun:

And here is the whole card put together - I just love this stamp set (I seriously just love it!! :) and mix and matching sentiments with this stamp set is so easy - so perfect for birthdays, friendships, thank you cards or just blank cards :)

Here it is from another angle, I added some dimensionals to the dress and some twine in between the poles and also some liquid pearls around the sun:

Card Ingredients:

Stamps: Hangin' Out and Garden Party Blooms by Taylored Expressions

Paper: Pebbles Family Ties (6x6) paper pad

Inks: Memento Teal Zeal, Bahama Blue, Cantaloupe, Tangelo and Tuxedo Black

Accessories: Grass Border dies, Cloud border die, dimensionals, corner chomper

If you ever get stuck in the stamping process, its always fun to check out some sketch challenges or to go through your paper collections and paper piece something from some of your favorite papers - one easy way to have your papers coordinate is to try the Project Pantry kits that Taylor offers or join the Key Ingredients club where you can monthly receive an already put together kit ready for card making or scrapbooking :) I can't wait to see what all the ladies have created with the challenge this month - please hop over with me and check them out!!

• Carole Burrage
• Charmaine Ikach
• Jen Shults
• Kerri Michaud
• Lynnette Kauffman
• Sankari Wegman
• Shannon White
• Shelly Mercado
• Stephanie Kraft
• Tammie Edgerton
• Taylor VanBruggen
• Wanda Guess

Thanks for stopping by!
Big hugs!
Sankari :)