Watercolor Wings decorated notebooks for another Pinkies Blog Hop!

Thank you for joining us on another Pinkies Blog Hop! We're showcasing lots of gorgeous projects using products from the new Stampin' Up!® Annual Catalogue. Simply use the buttons at the end of each post to keep hopping!

Thank you if you have joined me from Sarah's blog - what lovely ideas!

I have totally fallen head over heels with the Watercolor Wings stamp set - I am a huge fan of butterflies and the two-step layered butterflies in this set are just beautiful. I love their slightly sketchy, textured look and have discovered that there are endless ways of combining ink colours to produce a myriad of designs.

Today, however, I am keeping it simple and using just two colours in my projects: Perfect Plum and the new Mint Macaron. I adore how these two colours go so beautifully together. Come and see what I have done with them:

I decided to decorate two hardback notebooks by covering them with some of the Mint Macaron Envelope Paper, stuck down with Fast Fuse (so quick and easy to do!). I then stamped a large butterfly directly onto the larger book's cover with the larger butterfly layer pieces from the stamp set. I cut out a filigree butterfly from Perfect Plum cardstock with the Butterfly Thinlits using my trusty Bigshot (and a bit of wax paper to release it easily) and applied tiny dots of Tombow glue to the back of it to stick it down securely:

For the smaller notebook I used my Chalk Talk Framelits to make a double-layered label, wrapped a little of the gorgeous Mint Macaron 1" (2.5cm) Dotted Lace Trim around it, overlapping two pieces ever so slightly to make it appear wider. I then stamped one of the smaller butterflies from Watercolor Wings onto Whisper White cardstock, cut it out with the Butterflies Thinlits' smallest butterfly shape and then adhered it to the ribbon with Stampin' Dimensionals:

I think it looks really pretty, don't you? A good mix of vintage and feminine whilst still being clean and simple.

This last photograph shows the inside of the larger notebook. I decided to stamp the inside cover with the words "There is nothing in the caterpillar that tells you it is going to be a butterfly" taken from the Butterfly Basics Stamp Set. I also stamped some of the stylised flowers from that set onto the first page of the book and the front cover too, to keep it from being too plain! I love how these two stamp sets and the two butterfly thinlits sets coordinate so beautifully. Even better is that they are available in bundles with a 15% saving - thank you Stampin' Up! for that!

That's it for today, don't forget that you can get two FREE stamp sets if you join my team before the end of June 2015, I welcome both hobbyists and business-minded stampers and am happy to help answer any questions you may have about how to join and what to expect. If you join my team you will also come under the umbrella of the Pinkies team and together we offer a huge pool of knowledge, experience, inspiration, ideas  and friendship. I love being a demo and being a Pinkie too is the cherry on top of that!

Thank you for taking the time to view my post today, please click on the images below to hop onwards to the next person, Christa's, blog, or, back towards Sarah's.

Hope you come back to see me again soon:  next week I will have another project to show you, using the same colours and stamps that I have used today' to make a pretty gift set of cards which would make an ideal teacher thank you present! 

Until next time, happy crafting everyone!

Lucy x

Cherry On Top cookie pouch

Today I have a quick post for a quick-to-make cookie packet treat pouch using the fabulous new Cherry On Top Designer Series Paper (DSP) Stack.

The paper comes in several designs all in a really useful 6x6" (15.2x15.2cm) sheet size. There are a bumper 48 sheets in each stack - with four each of 12 double-sided designs in fabby, bright and cheery, Summery colours and gorgeous patterns. Stampin' Up! have had the simply genius idea of offering coordinating packs of matching A4 cardstock colours to go with each of the paper stacks and other packs of DSP in the new Annual Catalogue. The Cherry On Top Cardstock pack has 8 sheets each of Bermuda Bay, Cucumber Crush and Watermelon Wonder cardstock for a great price of £6.50. No more struggling to find enough sheets of matching cardstock when you are on a roll and making multiple projects with your DSP! Yey!

Here are the papers in action:

I chose the fun cup cake, ice creams and cherries sheet and the multi-coloured nibbled doughnuts designs to make these pouches which hold a cute two-pack of double-chocolate Oreo cookies which I bought from my local corner shop. I am sure that you could easily adapt the design and measurements to fit a treat of your choice though if you can't find these exact ones... 

I put a line of Fast Fuse glue along the bottom edge and along one side edge of the DSP and wrapped the paper around the snack pack, pressing down the seams gently, making sure that I kept the edges of the papers straight and also allowing enough room for the packs to slide in and out of the pouch easily. I used a small (3/4") circle punch to cut a half-moon thumb-grip hole out of the front of the pouch.

I punched two Decorative Label Punch shapes out - one in Crushed Cucumber and one in Watermelon Wonder - to make the pull tabs. I then stapled a narrow "faux-ribbon" to the top, made from strip of one of the other cute paper designs in the Cherry On Top DSP, and "flagged" on the ends using the same circle punch as the thumb-grip hole (to make a change from the usual fish-tail flags I would normally do!). I decorated the labels with punched out hearts which were left over from my recent Telford Swaps  and raised them up on half a dimensional each. (The heart stamp is from the Something To Say stamp set, punched out using the Itty Bitty Accents Punch Pack.)  The top half of the label tabs were glued together with Tombow and then the lower halves were attached to the cookie packs using glue dots. 

In the photographs above and below you can see that I  scored a series of lines at the bottom of each treat pouch to make it look like the sealed ends of the cookie packaging. To do this I used my Simply Scored Scoring Tool and the smaller end of the Stylus to create four score lines at 1/8th of an inch intervals. You can also see how neatly the tab top fits inside the pouch under the thumb-grip hole. There is plenty of space left on the punched labels for any message you might like to write on them for the recipient of the cookie treat pouch. If these were to be a table gift at a party, then you could maybe attach another label on the front of the pouch with each guest's name and use them for place-settings too, perhaps?

There was just enough room to glue-dot an individually-wrapped peppermint teabag onto the cookie pack, below the label, so that I could slide the cookies and the attached teabag together into the pouch, meaning that the people I sent these to, could sit down with their feet up and have a soothing cuppa and a couple of biccies on me, whilst they flicked through their lovely brand new copy of the Stampin' Up! catalogue that I sent to them!

Not got a copy of the catalogue yet? Would you like me to send you a paper copy? Then contact me and I will be very happy to send you one if you don't already have your own demonstrator... The first five people to request a catalogue, will get one of my Cherry On Top "cookie and cuppa" treat pouches, plus, an In Color bookmark sampler with their catalogue too. 

(Thanks go to my fellow Pinkie, Katy, for the inspiration for the sampler.)

Until next time, happy crafting everyone!

Lucy x

Click on the above image for more information on how to get two FREE stamp sets in June!