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,