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!