Gina K Designs – February Inspiration Blog Hop – Day 1

Good afternoon! Welcome to another fabulous blog hop celebrating the new stamp release for February by the Gina K designs illustrator team! We hope to inspire you with some beautiful card projects as you hop along to each of the designer’s blogs! Today, we are featuring the stamp sets by Melanie Muenchinger and Theresa Momber.

For my card above I used Melanie's Fabulous Flowers. I stamped the lineart images first in a frame arrangement onto white card stock and then filled in with the solid images, using a rock and roll technique to get two shades of ink on each stamp. I added a little outlining with copics and matted it with Turquoise Sea cardstock, also from Gina K. I love how it turned out.

For my second card for Melanie's set, I tried the Black Magic technique - if you are new to that see Gina's excellent video here. Again I couldn't get away from the floral frame idea.

If you were at the release party the other night, you might have seen this card also using Fabulous Flowers - this time I used only the line images and clear embossed them onto white card stock, before letting loose with the sponges and Gina K Inks.

Now for some cards I made using Theresa's new set, Framescape - Simply Spring.

Theresa's new set features a frame stamp which is designed to fit on a 4.25 by 5.5 inch card, but I wanted to see if I could make it into a square - I like square cards sometimes and it gave me another option for using this set. I did it by inking up one side of the frame to a little under half way and stamping that, and then inking the other side and stamping it slightly over the first impression to complete the square. I found it actually quite easy and was able to eyeball the lining up, but I'll bet if you have a Misti tool or similar you could do this by simply sliding the card across. I then sponged my scene in springy colours - and added a few flowers and some foliage in copic marker. I decided to sponge the cardfront also to reflect the scene. The actual scene is popped up on a black mat.

You don't have to use the complete scene stamp every time either, you can use a snippet of it like I did here - I cut out a window aperture with a craft knife and popped in a slice of the scene behind it. I added a few tulips - also from the set right in front of the 'window' to help the perspective.

Theresa's set comes with a host of little add on stamps, which can be used on their own, I used the two hot air balloon images to make this masculine themed card and gift tag set. This is such a versatile set!

I really hope you have enjoyed the samples, if you have any questions, just pop me a comment here and I will answer you!

It's time to go now and enjoy the gorgeous inspiration samples from the rest of the team - don't forget to comment on each blog for your chance to win a $20 Gina K Designs gift certificate! To see who won, check the Big News Forum at StampTV a few days after the hop. Ready for some inspiration? Here are a few of the projects I have created for today’s hop:

Gina K
Melanie Muenchinger - Illustrator for Fabulous Flowers
Theresa Momber - Illustrator for Framescape – Simply Spring
Cathy Tidwell
Chris Dayton
Claire Brennan (you are here)
Donna Idlet
Karen Hightower
Laurie Schmidlin
Sean Fetterman
Sheri Gilson
Silke Ledlow
Susie Moore


Don’t forget to pop over to the Gina K Designs Store and check out all of the new products available this month in the “What’s New” section at http://www.ginakdesigns.com.
Thank you for stopping by!

Just Instagrammed

via Instagram http://ift.tt/2kTTNIu Prepping for tonight's release party at Gina K Designs, 1:00am UK time! #cardmaking #stamping #craft #blog #papercraft #stampingaddict #gkd #ginakdesigns #

...lights, camera, action....

And so I did it...I leaned how to make videos and I finished one! If you would like to see it, click this link, or the pic above to see it on YouTube! Remember, go easy on me, I'm just getting started!

...Let's have Coffee...and a sale at Gina's!

Evening folks, hope all is well where you are. Fancy a coffee? Fancy a bargain (Gina's having a wee sale, deets further down the blog post)

This was a really difficult card to make... it took me all last week just to get through the door of the studio... do you ever have trouble getting going again after a break? I really do. Once I got in there it all came together within about a half hour, which is about how long I always expect to take to make a card, but rarely do...

Anywho, to kickstart my January crafting, since there's less than a week of January left, and people are already talking about summer holidays, I dug out some zingy orange card stock and made a little paper awning to go with my cafe seats stamp from the Petite Patisserie set.

I cut a strip of the paler orange the same with as the white strip of card that my image was stamped on. Then I adhered 4 skinny strips of the darker orange on top of the paler orange and trimmed the ends to look like awning. I stuck the top end to the card base, but popped up the bottom up on several layers of dimensionals so that it sat out from the card and created that overhang. I had already scored a line across the awning about a quarter inch from the end, and so I folded that a little to help the shape along. Then I stamped a 'Caffetteria' sign (from the set) and trimmed it out with scissors and adhered to the fold.

I thought it was simple, yet striking enough to make an interesting card. I hope you like it. I coloured my stamped image with colouring pencils to match the orange cardstocks.

If you haven't seen the Patisserie set, here it is below: it's a nifty set full of sweet things to help you celebrate birthdays etc! Clicking on the image will take you to the set in the store - and that's a good thing because Gina is running a little sale - you can get 15% off right now (offer ends 1/26/17 at 11;59pm - and remember that's USA time!)

Here is a link to my Pinterest page showing examples of cards made with Petite Patisserie:

... Focus

And all of a sudden it's 2017. I'm not exactly ready for 2017 yet - been languishing under a patchwork quilt of aloe vera tissues and paracetamol blister packs, which have become a feature of Christmasses lately. Feature of life in general lately, 3 kids, 3 different schools, maximum calculated germ pool of somewhere in the region of 2,400 children all exchanging germs with maybe 4,800 parents... all at the same time... throw in an average of one sibling, a well meaning Auntie and a doting Granada per fam and you're looking at maybe 14,000 potential infectors....

Somewhere after Boxing Day I ran out of Agatha Christies and stalked a few folks on Facebook until my eyes were too sore - wound up lying in bed staring at the ceiling.

Nothing like enforced reflection round about this time of year and so I gave in and played along - I chose a word. Been watching people on FB do this for a few years now, didn't really give it much credence until last year when I dallied with the idea of 'Simplify'. I didn't really carry it through as well as I might have, but I mulled it over and thought that maybe perhaps it wasn't a bad thing to have a guiding idea of sorts.

This year I'm thinking I like the sound of 'Focus'. I have a ton of trouble focusing - I want to do everything. All the time. I have a million ideas, there's a million directions I want to go in and I feel all creative and arty, but I often find that I don't exactly end up where I thought I would so I'm thinking Focus could be useful.

Take this picture - it's Ross Castle in Killarney, County Kerry Ireland. I have a long association in my head with Ross Castle. When I was small, maybe 8 or 9, we had a set of encyclopaedia at home. It was a complete set, you know the type, one volume per letter of the alphabet. I spent years poring over those books, soaking up bits of miscellaneous information. One of the articles I remember most was a few pages in the 'I' volume. Ireland. I knew the encyclopaedia were produced in USA and I was curious about what they had to say about Ireland, where I lived. The opening paragraph text was ranged around a small photograph of a man driving a horse and cart past an ancient castle ruin, overgrown with ivy. It was an evening shot and the image was all shades of inky blue splashed with gold. There was a light on in a castle window and the cart carried a lamp.

There was no caption to the photo and I had no way of knowing where the castle was. The article about Ireland spoke of a land filled with castle ruins and I suppose the editors felt that the image was generic enough not to need a caption. It was an image that I looked at a thousand times or more and I felt very drawn to it. I developed an interest in things historical and a fascination with Castles. As years went by I visited many of the castles in Ireland. I finally made it to county Kerry and even though Ross Castle had been restored and cleaned up I knew instantly it was the castle from the picture. I prefer the image of it that I have in my mind, the old darkened ivy crawling over the walls, the wooden cartwheels and the lamp light. I often thought that in a parallel universe I might have been an archaeologist or a historian, but I expended a lot of energy daydreaming and wandering around looking at castles instead of making up my mind to study history properly. I kind of went with the flow and followed a skill that I had - and that has been very interesting, but I am thinking that maybe it's time to pin down a few goals for myself and aim for something specific instead of floating along on a slip stream.

First thing I'm focusing on this year is making stamping videos, you have been warned, lol. I have never produced a video before and I'm expecting a few stinkers to begin with, but it's first on my list and I've cleared the desk!

So what are you focusing on this year? I'd love to hear.