Featuring Kelly Purkey │ April Release

Can you believe its already the end of April! I sure can't, this month WHIZZED by me, at warp speed! Its been a month of making, living, spring cleaning and allergies. Man the allergies...killing me!

The making has been super fun so I wanted to share with you the things I made using the latest stamps and kits from Kelly Purkey. Its a great month, so much variety and so many good stamps!

The first thing I made was a really quick travelers notebook spread using a few of Kelly's newest stamp sets that are a collab with Hero Arts and part of her Clearly Kelly line. There are 8 new mini Destination Stamp Sets. They cover some really great locations; Chicago, Los Angeles, Portland, Texas, New York, San Francisco, Magical for all the Disney lovers and one for Road Trips. You can see them all right here.

I of course focused on all the cute little food items she included on many of the sets and made a quick patterned card of all of them scattered about. I kept the overall look very black and white and added in some pops of color with the washi tape and the pink ink color. This sure makes me want to head out and sample all of these delicious foods. And how cute is that food truck stamp, its part of the Portland set and will gets lots of use on our many food truck nights with friends.

My next project was photo driven for sure, this giant floating flamingo that my daughter picked out for our pool is my new favorite thing. Its stays in our pool all the time and its hilarious because it catches our eye as it floats about all the time and its so random but fun at the same time. It definitely brings a smile to my face.

Its also inspired by my daughters love of all things Minecraft. She's obsessed. So when it was time to figure out what to do with this photo and how to make it different and special and about her I went with pixels. The first thing I did was size my photo to 8.5" square, its the largest I can go on my printer without having to send out for a print, and since time was short, I printed at home. Because I was going to work in layers, I knew it would be important for the photo to be cut exactly the same way each time and because my squares weren't an exact dimension (they're 1.7") I thought it was best to add in cut lines before I printed the photo. I ending up drawing the cut lines on top of the photo using the line tool in Photoshop Elements and it totally worked. After I printed the three photos, I cut two of the photos photo apart and layered the first photo, my bottom layer directly on to a 9" square piece of cardstock, leaving a .25" border around the edge. I saved and set aside the second cut photo to use for my layers.

I new I wanted to add some stamping to the photo using the Megababe stamp set because I loved the icons on this stamp set. They are perfect for making patterns and fun backgrounds. For the stamping I used Brilliance Platinum Planet ink which is a silver ink. They make a white ink, Moonlight White that is my favorite for stamping on photos. The inks really pop on the darker colors.

Once the stamping was done I cut the third photo apart and then started layering the photos in the right spots making sure to vary the levels using foam tape. Some photos are only 1 level, some have 2 levels and some have 3. The varying heights really adds lots of interest to the picture.

I then stamped a bit more on the background piece of cardstock this time using the Hero Arts Shadow Ink in Silver. I used that ink because the Brilliance Platinum was too light to show up on the white cardstock but the Silver was a perfect match to the way the platinum ink looks on the photo. In person it looks like I only used one ink instead of two.

It was a super fun technique and I hope you give it a try.

My last project was a Pocket Page spread using Brandi Kincaid's mini kit called Tiny Victories. The cards alone won me over and they are just so whimsical and cute.

The title card was created  quickly using some typed text and that cute Brandi stamp. I layered it on top of one card from the Good Morning kit. I loved that rainbow stripe and it worked so well with the colors from Brandi's kit.

That fist bump card is everything!

There is another stamp set that sadly is already sold out called Bad Day and I used it on the photo below and one the one of my beer. Its a great set so if you grabbed it good for you, its super cool.

As I'm typing everything else is still in stock so if youre shopping right now I hope you get everything that you wanted. There is an alpha set and a month by month set that are also really cool that I haven't had a chance to play with yet so make sure you check those out too.

See you soon,

Featuring Kelly Purkey │ March Release

Hello everyone, and happy Friday! I wanted to pop in real quick before the weekend to share with you the two projects I made using Kelly's March Release. The release this past month had one mini kit designed by Christine Herrin who I am a big fan of and four stamp sets. You can see the full release right here.

I made two projects with items from the release this month and my favorite was this layout I made completely inspired by the Ellie Goulding concert we went to a few days ago. I used the Mulberry Alpha Stamps exclusively on this layout. I was so inspired by the amazing set design during the concert that I used it for inspiration for this layout. Ellie had seven screens in really cool geometric shapes behind her during the show. They were used as screens most of the time but for each song they served a different purpose. I snapped a few pics of them throughout the show and as we were driving home looking at all of my pictures I thought "oh, that would be a cool layout design." I knew the alpha stamps would be perfect to stamp some of my favorites songs from the concert to create my background and it worked great as you can see below.

The first thing I did was create a template based on the set design so that I could clip some of the many, many pictures I took during the concert too. I printed it out in three sections since I don't have a large format printer and then cut around the sections with an exacto knife. I then decided where on the background I wanted to photos to go and then started mapping out the best way to add the stamping.

I used the deep navy ink from Kelly's Urban Ink set and went letter my letter across my page and I made sure to leave a little space to add in the gold puffy star stickers to break up all the text. I'm not going to lie, this took some time. I made sure to go really slow and take my time because invariably during projects like this I drop a stamp or smudge ink and I really didn't want to have that happen. All in all it took me about and hour and a half to do all the stamping and I didn't mess it up once! Yay me!

Once I was done and I laid my photo block on top I found that the stamping was to close in color to the photos so they were both competing too much with each other. My solution was to layer a piece of vellum over the top of the stamping and it softened it just enough to let both parts stand out. I moved my stars on top of the vellum so they would pop more and I'm glad that I did. Here you can see how it looks underneath the vellum. Its really pretty but just a bit too bold.

I absolutely love how this turned out. If you have a chance to see Ellie Goulding's tour I highly recommend it, it was such an amazing show and she is crazy talented.

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My second project was a Pocket Page spread using Christine Herrin's Spring Break mini kit. I loved the colors of this kit and of course I love seeing Christine's amazing brush work on the stamps and the cards. My daughter attends a year round school so she doesn't get a traditional Spring Break but she happens to be off track in March so its technically a break in spring although its not spring break, does that make sense?

I was totally drawn to all of the green cards in this kit since they paired so well with my photos from week 10. I used the escape stamp from the kit and I also used a few from the Gimme a Break and Let's Make Magic sets.

The little blocks from the Lets Make Magic Set are so funny, I can see using these a lot, especially the Netflix one. Ha! Here you can see how I used them right on top of my photo of my daughter jumping for joy and on the card in the middle where I changed up that card to read beautiful instead of in the water. I used the new Union Ave. alpha set which pairs perfectly with the Bushwick alpha to stamp the 00.

I hope you loved this latest release! It looks like everything is still in stock but I know quantities are getting limited on some items, so happy shopping while its all still in stock!

See you soon,

Featuring Color Cast Designs │ February and March

Playing a little bit of catch up and realizing that these posts featuring my work for Color Cast Designs have some how turned into every other month posts, and that is certainly not the way I planned them to go. That being said, the past two months of releases have been so great, so I'm excited to share and at the same time catch you up on some of the Pocket Page spreads I have made this year.

For the February Release I made this Pocket Page spread for week four. I used several of the sets on this spread, specifically the Giant Ampersands, Currently Take Two, and the large Hello.

The giant & was by far one of my favorite items in February and I have it on good authority that some other items that are very similar are coming in the April releases! Wink Wink!

The aqua blue colors paired so well with these Ashley Goldberg journaling cards and I love how it looked together.

For March's release I made two projects this first layout features the In The Deets set and the March Confetti Stars. That green mirror today is Ah-mazing in person, hard to photograph but so gorgeous. For this layout I went back to one of my favorite sketches to showcase some photos from my birthday in San Francisco. I paired the acrylic pieces with some skinny washi that I laid out in a gingham pattern to play off of the background of the photos. Pink and Green is a color combo that just never gets old.

My second project was this Pocket Page spread from week eight and I went a bit crazy and pulled out all of the pink I could find. I used items from the My Life set, In the Deets and an & from the March Confetti set.

I adore how this 'The Story' pops and blends on top of my full page photo

I wanted to mention that most of the acrylic pieces are placed on top of my page protectors this week, I do that sometimes especially when I have several on one side of a spread. I find that if I use more than one thicker embellishment on one side it can make the page protector buckle and lay funny so attaching them on the outside is an easy fix for that. I have never had a problem with anything falling off but I make sure to coat the back sides really well with adhesive.

Things over at Color Cast Designs are going strong and I couldn't be happier for the business Jessica has built. Its truly a pleasure working for her and showcasing her designs.

To tempt you even further, I have seen the product for the April release and let me tell you, its REALLY good! If you love shades of lavender and purple you are going to be SO happy! The release is happening on April 21st so make sure to mark your calendars. Jessica has already shared this sneak peak over on Instagram so make sure you follow her over there.

See you soon,