Spellbinding Stamps New for You Challenge

Hi everyone! Happy, happy New Year! Hope everyone’s 2016 is off to a great start! For me, things have been crazy since before Christmas. I received a promotion at work and have been working hard to get acclimated to my new position and trying to balance everything else in life. So there’s lots of new things going on in my life which is appropriate for our challenge at Spellbinding Stamps this week. The theme for our challenge is New for You.

For this challenge project I chose to the adorable Sadie sitting on her little cup of coffee (or tea).

In keeping with the “new” challenge I decided to try my hand a using a Minc foiling machine. Confession, I’ve probably had my Minc for 8 months (or more – eek) and I’ve never used it until Dec 24th when I made a last minute Christmas card. The main reason I hadn’t used it was because I didn’t have the right kind of printer. Using a foiling machine requires that your images be printed with either a copier or a laser printer. Foiling does not work on ink jet printers.  I was finally able to get an inexpensive Cannon laser printer so that I could use it for foiling. So to start this project I printed the Sadie image on my laser printer before coloring with my Copic markers.

Once she was colored I cut it down removing as much of the white areas as possible.

I had test foiled the same Sadie image using one of the clear transfer folders that came with my Minc. I found that they didn’t produce a good result do to some micro-fine scratches in the transfer folder that showed up in my foiled image. I’m happy that I tested an image before I’d started coloring anything. In the end I simply used a piece of 60 lb cardstock folded in half. I placed my colored Sadie image inside the folded cardstock and then placed a piece of gold foil on top of the colored image and ran it through my Minc machine twice. That foiled the entire image lines in gold.

I also tried out my new Minc toner pen to use in conjunction with the Minc machine. I used it to color the outside edge and bottom edge of the cup as well as adding a couple of lines on the saucer. The pen has a very broad round tip on it so it would be difficult to use it for detail work, but it creates a very cool technique. I used the same 60 lb cardstock and another piece of gold foil on top of the image and ran it through the Minc twice.*

*A note about coloring with Copics and using this foiling technique. You can choose to foil first and then color or color first and then foil. Coloring first won’t create much of a variance in the appearance of the foil and it can aid in covering up any areas that bleed outside the lines when coloring On the other hand coloring after won’t affect the foil at all either so it’s really a personal preference.

Once my image was done I fussy cut it out and set it aside to prepare my background.

In keeping with the challenge theme I used a new background stamp with a coffee theme. I stamped the background onto some cardstock using Versamark ink and used some new champagne colored embossing powder on it and heat embossed it. I’m in love with the color of this embossing powder!!

I die cut my embossed background with my stitched rectangle die and then cut a second piece of kraft cardstock with my scalloped die. The kraft cardstock I used was new and already had a foil design on it so it went with my foiled image.

 

I adhered my layers to a dark coffee colored cardstock and added some dimensional foam to the top two layers of the card.

For a finishing touch I had a little wood coffee cup embellishment that’s on the end of a wooden stick. It’s almost like a wooden coffee stirrer. I tied a piece of dark twine around the stick and adhered it between the layers.

I really enjoyed making this card! I love the Sadie image and coffee is one of my favorite things so it made for a great card. I had a lot of fun playing with my new toys and things that I used in making this card. Everything NEW for the New Year!

We’d love to have you share your creations featuring your favorite Spellbinding Stamp and all of your new crafty goodies you received for Christmas.

Please visit the Spellbinding Stamps blog to check out the other fabulous creations that my fellow crafty design team ladies have created for this challenge. I know you’ll enjoy their beautiful creations.

If you like this cute little Sadie image, you can pick her up in the Etsy shop here.