Clean & simple

A week in, I actually made something from the class, how cool is that? (Other people may be less impressed by that, but for me, it's amazing, what can I say.)

(This is unfinished, I finished it later with the snowflakes as below. This was my second one, and I went kind of overboard with the forest on this one, although I still like it a lot.)

I actually ordered the stamp set from Ellen Hutson late last Monday after I watched the video - mostly because I liked the sentiments in that set so much - and it came on Thursday, which is really wonderfully fast. I always get excited about e-tailers who have that kind of service. So anyway, I didn't even have a chance to try it until this weekend. The original card also used a Santa-and-reindeer stamp from another set that I didn't buy, so I had to improvise but I quite like the results.

Here's the one I did as an experiment, before that. I wasn't sure how it would come out so I just used a corner of a piece of cardstock I'd used for a previous experiment:

The trees are from the same set, and there are three different sentiments (the one not on my samples is "jingle all the way"). You can see that I was trying out inks and scribbling notes on that same piece of cardstock, but I tried to keep that corner clean so I can cut it out and mount it on a card later. My only real quibble with my results is that the trees are kind of crooked. But I definitely think it's useable.

I didn't want to leave just a blank space up at the top where Santa was on the original, and I didn't have the supplies to do snow in the exact way that Julie did for the class (which was with glitter and a glue-pad) but instead I used the three little star stamps from the Holly Jolly stamp set, spaced out on a block, and I kind of turned them to fit in the available space and stamped them at a different angle each time. The pale blue is Distress Tumbled Glass. And I put a tiny dot of silver Stickles in the middle of each snowflake star, which I don't think you can really see unless you look at the largest version of the picture, but which looks very cute.

As far as the trees, I didn't have the same stamp pads that she used - which were Avery Elle - but I pulled out every green stamp pad that I could find, and it turned out that I have a good many and none of them are exactly alike, which is good to know. I'll put my little stamped samples below but also put the names up here so you don't have to try to read my scribbling, I stamped them each twice. (Mostly they're marked 1 & 2 but it looks like I missed at least one. I think you can figure that part out, if you're really wanting to know.) The top row is Stampin Up Mossy Meadow (which is a newer pad - you can really tell with the SU pads because the new ones are so much juicier than the old ones) which is dark and somewhat grayed-out, and then Distress Crushed Olive, which you can see is much more yellow-green. The bottom row is Colorbox Evergreen (which I've had forever, and which is pigment ink rather than dye like all the others) and SU Old Olive. Evergreen is dark and a bit blue-leaning, as it should be, and Old Olive is yellow-leaning - but not near as much so as Crushed Olive - and fairly dark.

Then here we have two more Stampin' Up colors, Wild Wasabi and Pistachio Pudding. I used to think Wild Wasabi was a fairly bright green, but here it just seems like a medium crayon green, really. Pistachio Pudding is lighter and seemingly a bit grayer.

(If I remember right, Pistachio Pudding was an InColor a year or two - or possibly three - years ago; Wild Wasabi may have been one originally too but now I believe it's part of the main line. Mossy Meadows is also new-ish, as I recall. I've let my on-again-off-again SU demonstrator status expire and haven't been keeping up too well this year.)

(I just looked, I got that pretty much right. Mossy Meadow is from last year, P.Pudding is no longer available - meaning it's at least a year older than that, because the InColors retire after two years - and Wild Wasabi is in the Subtles line.)