Color Fusers April 2022

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FRIENDS!! I cannot tell you how excited I was about this month’s color combination challenge! I say challenge, because some months they really are, but not this month! I had instant inspiration for this project. Don’t you LOVE when that happens?

Look at this awesome combination of Crumb Cake, Bermuda Bay, Old Olive and Bumblebee. Let’s have a moment of silence for Bumblebee as it is heading into retirement. In Disney speak we would say ‘The Vault’. Hahaha! But you never know, previous In Color’s have returned as permanent Stampin’ Up! colors—like Coastal Cabana!

As soon as I saw this combo I thought of this amazing photo of my daughter Summer on the Thailand Incentive Trip in 2017. I absolutely LOVED sharing this experience with Summer. The travel to arrive in Thailand tested me beyond belief and often when I think something is hard, or “I can’t do this”, I actually think of that experience! If you know, YOU KNOW! The travel was like nothing else and I hope to NEVER repeat it again!

And because of that, the moments we spent together on that trip, have even more value to me. As a mom, I will never ever forget being able to share that with Summer.

This picture of Summer was taken at Ao Bang Thao right off the shore by our hotel

I started with a base of 12x12 Bumblebee card stock and layered a nice big piece of Designer Series Paper from the Daffodil Afternoon Sale a bration collection. This pattern was PERFECT for these pages! The strip of Bermuda Bay stripe is from the Sunshine & Rainbows SAB DSP too. Who does not LOVE free paper!

My photo mat is Crumb Cake and then I incorporated all of the colors from our challenge into my design using the Artfully Layered Bundle. I have created so many projects with this bundle, its just amazing!

The Tailored Made Tags are a must have in my craft room. I use them consistently on scrapbook pages and of course in card design. I would suggest #addtocart if you haven’t already!

“You are Amazing” is die cut using the Amazing Thanks Dies and they are just the perfect accent to this page. Layered on a Tailor Made Tag with a bit of ribbon and twine is such a great way to incorporate a sentiment onto your scrapbook page.

I used a mix of die cut elements, some stamping and coloring with Old Olive Stampin’ Blends and just basic stamping to create texture and dimension to help tell the story of this tropical adventure we had together. My design style always incorporates embellishments and the Playing With Patterns Resin Dots were perfect for this page.

Happy & Heartfelt is another stamp set I have barely put back on my shelf! I love the variety of sentiments and this one was just right for the top left of this page. I added a little heart from the Sweet Hearts Dies and the sentiment is cut from a new up and coming die set called Stylish Shapes. These will be another #addtocart item I will suggest once the new Annual Catalogue begins in May.

When I designed Stamps & Stretchy Pants a few years ago it was to serve two purposes. The most important was to create this digital legacy for my kids. I wanted them to be able to go some place to see our Favorite Family Recipes (yes, I have a whole recipe section under Lifestyle) and be reminded of my passion for scrapbooking and card making. I think it will help them get to know ME beyond just being their MOM and that is really important to me. Secondly, I really really really wanted to apply for the Artisan Design Team so I needed a blog!

And because my blogs spirit is to record in a digital aspect, my life, I have chosen to add a few fun photos of our trip to Thailand together! I hope you don’t mind! :)

I hope you are inspired by this amazing color combination! I would love to see what you create so share it on Instagram and tag me! You can find me @stampwithbrenda

I cannot wait to see what the rest of the Color Fusers Team has created this month with the bold fun color combination!

Next up is one of my former Artisan Teammates from the 2021 year. You will absolutely LOVE what Janneke has designed, I have no questions about it. She is so talented and has such a lovely style! Just hit 'NEXT STOP’ to check out her creation.


If you would like to go in reverse or jump back, click on the button below and you will find yourself directed to my fellow Artisan Design Team member Tami! I cannot say enough about how kind and generous and amazingly talented Tami is, so please make sure to go all the way around the Hop. You do not want to miss any of the creativity on this team!

If you are inspired to create anything based on my scrapbook page, please do! And if you need any supplies and live in Canada, you can easily shop with me by hitting any of the product images below!

Around the World on Wednesday--Fun with Basics!

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This month our team is focusing on BASICS—-this can be items with ‘basic’ in the title or crafting basics that are a must have for us. My project, a scrapbook page, combines Basic White as its my go to neutral and a focus on DIES because its very rare that I can make a project of ANY kind without using my Stamp Cut & Emboss Machine.

I also recently just hit a couple of fun milestones—15 years and 500,000 CSV in sales (which is Canadian dollars is over 600,000!) so I wanted to scrapbook a picture of my first meeting/photo with Shelli Gardner at Convention. Remember Convention? Were you ever lucky enough to go? I was blessed enough to go a few times and have such amazing memories!

I am absolutely in LOVE with how this page turned out. It is definitely going on display in my craft room so I can look at it all the time!

The base of my page is Basic White and I also used that for the 5x7 photo mat and all of the clouds. The various clouds came from the Give it a Whirl Dies and the Basic Borders Dies. Both are MUST HAVES if you love the Rainbow of Happiness Bundle. They support this bundle perfectly!

This page might be full of Basic White elements but it is anything but basic if you ask me!

It think it was destiny that my outfit in this page just happened to match the Sunshine & Rainbows DSP, haha! It was actually perfect and the little piece of colored strips on the left is what influenced the colors in the rainbows.

The sentiment “So Happy to Know You” is truly perfect. Over the years I have had the pleasure to meet and visit with Shelli on several occasions. She even came to one of my events in Calgary and we had a lovely phone call when she called to congratulate me on my recent achievements. Her call really affirmed to me the Stampin’ Up! value of “We Care About People First”.

You would never know by her megawatt smile that this picture was taken at the end of a very long day at Convention, there was barely anyone left when I nervously asked her to pose for this picture with me! Of course she said yes with her gorgeous smile!

The sentiment is stamped in Magenta Madness ink and is die cut with the Sweet Hearts Dies (I love when SU adds a great label die into a set) and has my favorite white twine (in truth I rarely make anything without twine. I LOVE IT) and Crinkled Seam Binding Ribbon. Also a craft room must have. Any ribbon in Basic White has unlimited potential because we can color it to match our projects.

I love these Amazing Thanks Dies…add them to cart NOW! Haha! I loved how fresh they looked cut in Basic Black and Vellum. They are a great size for card making and paper crafting! And the phrase is perfect for this page!

I love how the Brilliant Rainbow dies bring this whole page to life with the accent clouds. I love the little rainbow tag above the stamped sentiment and how the pop of color in the bigger rainbow jumps off of the Basic White background. I hope this page inspires you to start your canvas with Basic White and layer in a bit of color. Let your photo guide you with what colors too add onto your project.

Please visit Tricia Butts from the United States who is next on the hop! Thanks so much for joining in with us!

See you next month! We always have unique and fun themes for our hop! And if my page layout inspired you, please click on any images or the Shop with Me tab on the side. Thank you in advance for helping me love what I do!

Color Fusers January 2022

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Hello friends and welcome to another year of the Color Fusers Blog Hop! I really love participating in the Hop because it forces me to look at my SU colors in a new way and experiment with new color combos! The color combos are all submitted by the Hop Team Members. To kick off the new Year, Happy 2022 everyone!, we are playing with Night of Navy, Mint Macaron, Blushing Bride and Soft Suede.

As soon as I saw these colors I knew that I wanted to make a scrapbook page —a January winter theme page. Making this in advance will also hopefully ensure that I get outside in January to do something fun, so I have a couple of cute pictures to add to my page! This might sound ridiculous, but when its -30, trust me, you don’t really want to be outside!

This layout also works perfectly to support a monthly class that I offer, Year in Memories, where we scrapbook each month of the year. At the end you have a complete album of 2022!

I started with a base of Mint Macaron because I felt that it was the color that linked the other 3 together. Soft Suede works perfectly as an accent color, along with Blushing Bride. Night of Navy gets a bit more attention as I chose it for the photo mats. I also decided on vertical pictures, because let’s face it, we take alot of selfies.

Fun Fact: I have over 4,000 selfies on my camera roll. Guess you could say I like myselfie. Hahaha!

 

This page is a mix of recently retired, really retired and new products! Sometimes past products are the perfect fit for our projects so I try not to stress out too much about using them, but I always make sure there is something NEW and CURRENT on my pages too. This way I can discuss all sorts of things during my classes.

The sentiment “Celebrating another year” is actually masked from a larger phrase and is from the stamp set Well Said. This set is retired but I have hung onto it because it has some more unique phrases such as “Time for a New Adventure” which is at the bottom of my page. I thought they were both rather fitting for a January, new year, page.

The Soft Suede half circle is embossed with a retired folder too. Behind the sentiment you see some twine and a snowflake, cut from the Gingerbread dies. All 3 of the Mint Macaron snowflakes were die cut from Basic White card stock and then I ran my Blending Brush across with some Mint Macaron ink. I added my favorite new embellishment, the Iridescent Rhinestone Jewels, to the side.

The top left corner of my page features the Merry Snowflakes stamp set in the background. I mounted the 3 snowflakes from the set onto a block and used it with Mint Macaron ink to stamp across the background of my page.

The Blushing Bride die cut snowflake is from the So Many Snowflakes Dies which are in the Annual Catalogue. Paired up with some new stamps, this is a fun little area of interest! The Brilliant Rainbow Dies supplied the Soft Suede scallop border along my photo mat and I isolated “Happy” from a stamp in the Slim Sayings set, which is a new JJ catalogue release. January can be found in the set Days to Remember which was one of the best new sets in the Annual Catalogue for memory keepers! It isn’t too often that date sets come around!

The bottom little section is my favorite though because I love how “Time for a New Adventure” and 2022 work together! In the spirit of a new year, I would agree! And I am choosing to enter this new year with a positive heart and mind. The date is mounted on a circle from the Sunshine & Rainbows paper which is a free Sale-a-bration choice.

Overall I really love this color combo and I think it completely suites this page design! I can’t wait to add some photos to it! Thank you for joining us on our first Hop of 2022! I hope you will leave a comment and join us for the whole year!

Next up on the Hop is the amazing Bonnie O’Neill—I can’t wait to see what she makes with this color combo! You can also hit the Previous Tab to see Tami’s creation. We are a small group this month so make sure you give us all some love.

Around the World on Wednesday--My Favorite Month!

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I am really excited about the theme for this month’s Around the World on Wednesday Blog Hop! Our theme is our FAVORITE month…and it was a tricky one for me as my birthday is in January so obviously I LOVE BIRTHDAY MONTH but its also cold AF so my love of summer wins out!

July is my FAVORITE month because it is the month that we spend a week at the lake with the entire Nelson family. 19 grandkids and cousins! Isn’t that spectacular?

Deciding on the month of July as my favorite month also coincided perfectly with a new bundle of products that I was recently able to order. This bundle was a perk for Demonstrators attending On Stage this month and it will be available in the upcoming January-July Occasions Catalogue. You will LOVE this catalogue, hands down this publication is in my Top Ten favorites of all time. All I will say is Rainbows, Cactuses and Pineapples oh my!

This is our annual family picture that we take at Greenwater Lake each year. We have been visiting this lake since my oldest son was an infant—17 summers!

I knew I wanted to use this family picture and I wanted to make sure to honor the tones of the water and the trees in my design. I used a base piece of paper from the Hand-Penned Designer Series collection that was Garden Green with a white floral print.

I layered a piece of Basic White 12x12 that I trimmed down to 11 1/2 x 11 1/2 inches. As the main photo mat I used a piece of DSP from the new Heart & Home Designer Series Paper collection. One side of all of the papers is this amazing wood panel design in Basic Grey. There are several patterns of a wood look so I chose the one that looked like a tree to continue with the nature element.

I also added a striped piece of DSP in Mint Macaron from the Hand-Penned Designer Series collection. I made sure the stripes were going horizontal in nature to help elongate the page.

 

I love to create focal points or vignettes (areas of interest) on my scrapbook page that help tell the story. Sentiments are very important to me and they are honestly the criteria by how I pick most stamp sets. I absolutely love the sentiment “What a Beautiful Day for Love”. Obviously you can use this for a wedding or a baby’s arrival, but should it not be how we approach all of our days? Every day is a beautiful day for love and I never leave those words unsaid to my kids. I tell them all the time and it fills my heart when my teenage son will repeat them back to me on the phone or with his friends!

I stamped this gorgeous floral image, one of two in the stamp set Blessings of Home, in Momento Ink. I then colored it in with a term I have coined “Lazy Watercoloring”. I simply add ink to one of our clear blocks and use my Water Painter (the fine tip) to the ink with a very small amount of water. I then colored in the flowers with Bumblebee, Blushing Bride, Coastal Cabana and Garden Green ink. It barely took me any time at all which is why I love it!

I die cut the shape with the new Flowers of Home Dies and added it to a So Saffron die cut. I cut this using the Seasonal Labels Dies and ran it through the Timber 3D folder. I love how this page is a mix of so many different products from 3 different publications!

Stamping softly in the background added such a beautiful element to this page. I used the smaller floral image in Smoky Slate ink.

The sentiment is stamped in Bumblebee Ink and is also cut with the Seasonal Labels Dies! I added some white twine from the Bakers Twine Essentials Package and some of the Blushing Bride Frayed Grosgrain Ribbon behind my sentiment.

A few sprigs cut in Garden Green cardstock from the new Flowers of Home dies and this little area was complete—-or was it? No it wasn’t, it also need to add an embellishment so I chose some from the Classic Matte Dots (another upcoming new product). You will love these as you get 2 sizes and 4 colors—-white, vanilla/pearl, grey and black.

I created another focal point on the top right of my page. I stamped the smaller flower in Momento ink and colored it with Blushing Bride, Bumblebee and Garden Green ink. What I really love about this area is there is not a stamp in the set that actually says “Perfect Day”. I used my Stampin’ Write Basic Grey marker to combine two individual sentiments into one that better suited my page. I love how we can customize so many of our Stampin’ Up! products!

I added the same twine, ribbon and Matte Dots to this area plus a few sequins from the Subtle Shimmer Sequins. I love these sequins so much and hope they are available after the Holiday Catalogue period ends.

I am so in love with this page and creating it right now was perfect therapy for me. The days are shorter now and the weather has changed but making this page took me right back to the lazy days of summer.

I can’t wait to see what the rest of the Hop creates this month! There are some seriously talented people on this hop and the inspiration is unbelievable!

I am one of your Canadian ‘stop’s on this hop and next up you are going to the United States to see what Tricia Butts has designed for this challenge!

 
 

Color Fusers November 2021

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Hello friends! Wow, did October ever go by quickly! Its now November 1st and officially Christmas season. Fall and halloween are dead, bring on the holiday! Although that is NOT what I am sharing with you today! Our color combo this month could be viewed as a tricky one as the 4 tones are all quick dark, however I had the best pictures to work with this color theme!

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This month our crafty group is creating projects with Merry Merlot, Misty Moonlight, Cinnamon Cider and Early Espresso. Back in July I had a Besties Photo shoot with two of my long time friends and we did a little picnic afterwards. The picnic set up totally reminded me of Misty Moonlight and a pattern from the In Good Taste Designer Series stack so I used that as my inspiration to design this page.

These are two of my besties I met while in University! We hit things off working at a restaurant together. We have actually not all lived in the same city for over 20 years but despite the distance I know they would have my back always and no matter what #friendsforever

These are two of my besties I met while in University! We hit things off working at a restaurant together. We have actually not all lived in the same city for over 20 years but despite the distance I know they would have my back always and no matter what #friendsforever

I started with a 12x12 in Misty Moonlight and on the top half of the page I stamped the large flowers from the Blossoms in Bloom stamp set. I actually love this stamp set as I love a good image that can fill in space. I stamped it in the same ink color for a tone on tone look.

The bottom of my page features the In Good Taste DSP with a couple of strips of Cinnamon Cider DSP from the retired In Color 6x6 stacks (last years design). Adding this strip felt like a natural way to incorporate this color and create division between the two sections of my page.

Are you an F Bomb kind of mom? Hahaha, we are and my friend had these cups designed especially for us!

Are you an F Bomb kind of mom? Hahaha, we are and my friend had these cups designed especially for us!

 

I used Early Espresso card stock as my photo mats and I ran them both through the Timber 3D Embossing Folder for a subtle effect.

It was easy to add in Merry Merlot by die cutting some flowers from the Pierced Blooms Dies. This is one of my favorite die sets in the Annual Catalogue!

I added some retired In Color Enamel Dots and the sentiment is from the Blossoms in Bloom stamp set.

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You can find the sentiment “Friends Forever” in the Lighthearted Lines stamp set. NOTE: Friends Forever is part of a phrase and l used my Paper Snips to do some Stampin’ surgery on this rubber stamp as I really wanted to use this part of the phrase all on its own.

The label is also a die from the Pierced Blooms Dies and I added a bit of retired Cinnamon Cider ribbon behind and some gold thread.

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I am so pleased with how this page turned out using this color combination! I cannot wait to see what the other girls create this month! Please visit everyone’s blogs and share some love and comments! And if you don’t follow me on Instagram you can find me @stampwithbrenda

You can go backwards to see what Melissa has created and forwards to see what Melanie has designed! I know they will both wow you with their creativity!

Have an awesome November and see you next month! If you live in Canada and are looking for some creative inspiration I would love you to stamp with me! Please reach out at any time!