Punny Valentine, Intended PP375

 Hi friends and Happy New Year!  We're back at The Paper Players for a new year of challenges with you.  This week our fabulous friend, Sandy has dug herself out of the snow to host our first theme challenge and it's a cute one...

It seems like "punny" stamp sets are everywhere so I think everyone is going to have fun with this one.  I dug into my stash of retired stamps for this older hostess set called Pun Intended and it had just what I needed:

Isn't it cute?  Love this old style light bulb and the sentiment is especially cute!  I was able to play with a new-to-me product from the SU Spring catalog called Brusho Crystal Colors.  These very fine crystals come in a small little bottle that you use like a shaker.  The crystals can either be sprinkled on wet or dry watercolor paper.  If the paper is dry, then you can spritz them with water.  Either way, when mixed with water they spread and react in different ways. 

The really cool part is that they contain a mixture of colors so you'll get little drops of similar colors--you can see some speckles of orange on my "yellow" background.  The crystal colors are not matched directly to Stampin Up colors but coordinate well and contain a basic set of yellow, orange, green, blue and red.  I've only just begun to experiment with them so I'm sure there is way more to be done with them!

I used my Mini Misti to stamp the light bulb and sentiment 3 times to get a good solid impression of the ink.  Since I used watercolor paper--which is textured--being able to stamp the same image, exactly the same way multiple times is essential.  On the background, I used this cute [retired] line of hearts stamp from an even older set called Valentine Defined.  Also seemed like that little snippet of black chevron ribbon was really needed in the corner there for some decoration and interest!

I hope you've enjoyed my card today...be sure to check out the rest of our fabulous Design Team over at The Paper Players.  This week we're welcoming a brand-new Guest Designer, Elizabeth and welcoming back Annie and Jan.  We're delighted to have all of them with us!

The Paper Players Design Team 

Claire Broadwater

 Jaydee

Joanne James

Laurie Schmidt

LeAnne Pugliese

Nance Leedy 

Sandy Mathis 

Annie Abrahamson 

Jan Clothier 

Elizabeth Stewart 

You Light up my Life, Valentine PP330

Hi friends!  This week at The Paper Players my sweet friend, Claire has a theme challenge perfect for the first week of February!

Valentine's Day...hearts, flowers, candies and....light bulbs?  LOL.  When I design a card, I try to resist my first impulse because...well....I want to push myself to come up with something else.  My first thoughts were hearts or cute critters but then I saw the hostess set, Pun Intended, sitting [very dusty] on my shelf and an idea was born...lightbulbs!

Honestly, the single light bulb was the first thing I did for this card.  It was heat embossed in black on shimmer cardstock, fussy cut and colored with Daffodil Delight and Melon Mambo [retired] Blendabilities. From there I cut a piece of Smoky Slate cardstock with my Stitched Shape Framelits--using the largest square to cut a rectangle.  Check out this tutorial for those directions!  Continuing my love for tone-on-tone background stamping, I stamped some more lightbulbs in a somewhat random pattern in Smoky Slate.

Then I needed a card base to put this on and liked the way it all popped on Basic Black.  But Basic Black by itself was too plain.  I didn't want a lot of background pattern to detract from the focal piece....hmmm....what to do?  I got the idea to use my sunburst Thinlit as a ray of shining light and keeping with the punny sentiment.  Some [retired] DSP with a subtle black pattern was just the  variation I needed to add some interest.

A little more on the inside and this Valentine is perfect to give to our teenage (yikes, how did that happen?!) daughter.  Cute and sweet but heartfelt...just like her!

Be sure to pop over to the rest of the design team at The Paper Players and check out all the awesome Valentine ideas they are sharing.  I hope you'll play along with our challenge before it closes on Friday, February 10th at Noon (PST).  Thanks for stopping by!

The Paper Players Design Team 
Claire Broadwater

 Jaydee

Joanne James

Laurie Schmidt

LeAnne Pugliese

Nance Leedy
Sandy Mathis 

Crystal Komara
Valentyna Komisarenko
Deanne