Two Crafters, Two Companies, Too Much Fun

Today is the first installment of a month-long series that is a bit of friendly competition.  My sister-in-law, Trenna, and I both are creative demonstrators working for direct sales stamp companies.  Umm . . . different direct sales companies, me with CLOSE TO MY HEART and her with that other large one whose name escapes me at the moment. (wink, wink)

We live half a country apart and only get to craft together once in a while.  On her last visit here, we decided it would be fun to challenge each other to use various stamps chosen for one another from our own catalogs.  We would each pick a couple of stamps to use on cards, and the other would have to match up, as best she could, to the same type of stamp set.  We will be doing this each Monday in June.

Here are the first stamp sets chosen:

Well, flowers are pretty easy, as most stampers have some of those in their stash. She chose her flower set, and I am using Friendship Is A Blessing, CC42115 which was available in May.  It may pop up again sometime on a sale, so keep an eye out.  Of course, you can try these cards with any flower set you may have in your stash.

For my first card, shown above, I started simply by doing a collage of three of the images and then cutting the white daisy layer with our Stitched Rectangle Frames Thin Cuts.  I cut a frame with Black Ore paper and then the bottom layer with the reverse side of some Hillside Cottage patterned paper.  You can see I just barely colored the flowers with a bit of flamingo ink on a water brush.  The sentiment is stamped in the top left and bottom right corners where they are accentuated with enamel dots. The iridescent look of the black frame, which unfortunately isn't easily captured by the camera, really makes this card pop.

I tried a second card, this time using a single bloom to create a background on the card, and filling in with a few small blooms of color only, no outline.  Then I added a center strip accented by black ore 1/4 inch strips.  The sentiment was stamped in flamingo ink.  The 3 bloom cluster was colored with flamingo, canary, and sage inks, and mounted on a circle of black ore with a 1/4 border around the circle.  Enamel dots in white finish the look.

Here is a closer look:

Which do you prefer?  Why?

Now I hope you will hop over to Trenna's blog and see what she did with her stamp set.  We generally have quite different styles.  Both she and I have fairly new You-Tube channels - hers and mine.  My latest videos are spotlighting the Hillside Cottage line.

So check those out as well, because we just might also have a little competition going as to who can add the most new subscribers in June.  How about helping a girl (or even two) out? (wink, wink)  Check us out on You-tube - LIKE and SUBSCRIBE while you are there.