Purchases & swatches

I bought a lot of cardmaking stuff lately - not only for the class, but also because I had this one particular idea in mind before the class even started. Specifically, I got it in my head to do some kind of blingy metallic thing. Nothing specific, but I bought some things with that in mind. Instead, I'm still making multiples of the card I showed before - with not a hint of metallic to it - and I haven't tried to do anything else yet, including this metallic idea and/or any cards from the class besides the one. (I really tremendously enjoyed looking at all their ideas, though.)

One of the perks of these classes from Online Card Classes is that (if you take the class at the time it first comes out) you get coupon codes for various e-tailers. I think for both the classes I've done it's been the same: 10% each at Simon Says Stamp, Ellen Hutson, & Inspiration Emporium. (added, to clarify: In this case, the codes were good starting sometime in October, before the class actually started, and they expire on the day of "wrap-up day" which ends the class. Which is, in this case, only a few hours away.)

I've used these coupon codes pretty freely; this is just a selection of what I got:

The stamp set is the one I've been using for the cards I've been doing (see the link above) - I've used all three sentiments from this set, plus the little trees and star/snowflake stamps, so this turned out to be a really good value. The only other stamps I bought were little rectangles to do swatching with, to go with the tags which are in the picture. I'll put some of my samples below, I really like this format for swatching. Another thing I've really used is on the bottom of the piled-up stuff in the picture above, and you can't really see it because everything else is on top of it - that's the Bristol Smooth cardstock, which I think is 100 lb. I really like the weight and the feel of it for stamping - especially for these one-layer cards that I've been doing. I know you can buy cardstock that's even heavier but I think that would be too much. 100 lb. feels (to coin a phrase) just right.

Other things I've bought lean heavily toward the metallics, because as I said I've got this idea in my brain and I'm not going to be happy til I produce something using it. I bought a set of Kraft-Core metallic cards & envelopes - I may end up with so much bling it's blinding. I bought a glue-pad because I didn't have one, and Distress Glitter to try out, and some Wow embossing powder. I have done embossing before but I don't have many colors, so I bought a clear and a metallic one - I can't remember, it might have been brass? I don't have most of this in front of me right now. And I also bought a set of metallic Stickles - I used the silver one for the one-layer cards. And then I bought some stuff like StazOn refills and minis of matte medium and Glossy Accents, also of which I had before but are used-up/dried-out etc., since it's been a while since I used them. My old StazOn (Jet Black) pad was basically dried up so I bought the midi pad as well as the refill, just in case, but I hope the big pad is also still reinkable. I don't know why it wouldn't be. (I really like the midi pad, though, now I want to get some other colors!) Oh, and the blue thing is a Gelato in Blueberry, I believe it was, because I hadn't ever tried them and I wanted to try one out before I committed to buying sets.

Oh! I did buy another small stamp set, or rather it was a stamp-&-die set - it was two small snowflake stamps and a coordinating die. (This one, from Hero Arts.) That was my basic idea, metallic with snowflakes, and I was thinking of blue as an accent color, which was why I picked that particular Gelato. If I ever stop stamping little one-layer forests - which is great fun, which is why I keep at it - I'll stop and experiment with all this other stuff I bought!

So here's the swatches, still in progress - I think I took pictures of the reds and the greens:

(You may notice that I was pretty sloppy with the stamping. I wasn't really making any effort to stamp things just so, since it's the color of the ink that's important here.)

I'm not entirely sure if I've dug down to the bottom of my stamp-pad stash yet. I do have a list of what I had, so I just need to compare and see if anything's missing. One thing I found out by doing this was that both of my red SU pads are a mess - that's Real Red and Cherry Cobbler, which are the ones I've used a lot for holiday colors in the past. At some point I apparently got carried away with the glitter and got it all over both of them. You can see it here on the way the Real Red stamped, if you look close. Both of those are the old-style SU pads, so I could stand to buy new ones anyway. I have refills for both of them, I think, but reinking won't help if the pads are messed up. (Right now nothing I'm doing is especially using red anyway. If need be I could fill in with Primrose Petals or the Distress Barn Red, in a pinch.)