My Favorite Things and a Spring Card

I love to visit other blogs to see what other people are creating. Quite often I also learn new techniques or learn of new products etc from visiting blogs. I would like to return the favor and share some of my favorite things from time to time and maybe some of you will learn something new from me. So I will share some of my favorite tools, crafting supplies, sites, techniques etc....some of "My Favorite Things" in my crafting world. I thought for my first favorite thing post I would share with all of you what got me started in making cards....Brass Stencils!

The card above was made for challenge day last week on ISC. The challenge was to make a Spring card. Usually I grab my stamps and start stamping and coloring but this time I pulled out my brass stencils and went back to what I fell in love with when I first started making my own cards. My Spring card uses two stencils from Dreamweaver Brass Stencils. The background is the bare tree stencil which I stenciled color using Colorbox pigment inks. After drying the ink I then used Dreamweaver's Spring stencil to paste emboss the word and then sprinkled glitter before the embossing paste dried. The card design is inspired by a project from one of Lynell Harlow's books of projects using the Dreamweaver stencils.

Below is a picture of some brass stencils. Sorry I didn't realize when I was taking the picture that the camera was reflecting onto the stencils. There are many nice brass stencils on the market but I am a big fan of the Dreamweaver line. The brass stencils are designed by the very talented Lynell Harlow. She has a blog that I like to follow for inspiration and ideas. You can find it HERE and you can also purchase stencils HERE.



Below are some cards I made a long time ago but thought I would share them as they also use brass stencils. The first one uses the crane brass stencil. I embossed the cranes, then stenciled them with gold pigment ink and then finished with a touch of glitter on their heads.

The next one uses Dreamweaver's flamingo stencil which I paste embossed and then colored with chalks. Love this stencil!

This last card uses Dreamweaver's Cyprus tree stencil which I used to spray bleach onto the cardstock bleaching out the color. I thought the end result looked like a bonsai tree so I continued on to finish the card with an Asian theme.

I use to play a lot with my brass stencils then I got caught up in the rubber stamp frenzy. I'm thinking it's time to pull those stencils back out and rediscover what all I can do with them....like run them through my die cut machine for easy embossing!

Hope you enjoyed my Spring card and my favorite things post. Also hope you are all keeping warm. Here in the Midwest we are buried in snow from the blizzard we had this week. We are still digging our way out! Thanks for stopping by.