May 2019 Guest Designer | Jill Hawkins

Hello friends!

I am so excited to introduce you to our May 2019 guest designer, Jill Hawkins!  :)

Hello fellow Neat & Tangled Fans! I’m Jill Hawkins and my crafty little heart is exhilarated to be joining you here as the Neat & Tangled Guest Designer for May! My family and I live in Chicagoland (land of Chicago, not an amusement park), and my background is in Architecture. AKA: An amazing education I’ll never make enough money to pay off  I started making cards as my creative outlet to give friends. Then, I entered a weekly challenge once and won! Well, that was that. A decade + later, I still spend most  nights happily making cards for friends, challenges, a magazine and fabulous companies in this crazy talented industry! One of my favorites is Neat & Tangled, due in no small part to my friend Miriam’s brilliant graphic oriented designs. I am WAY excited and SO grateful to Danielle for having me along! Thank YOU! 

I am such a fan of her work, be sure to follow her blog and Instagram for even more inspiration!

And now for her projects for today!

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My first card this month features Elena Roussakis’s cutie little set, Jump for Joy! When I saw this squirrel, I swear my heart leaped with delight!  He is just the stinkin’ cutest! I absolutely had to use him straightaway this month.

For this card, I wanted to keep things simple. I masked off half the card to blend on some green and yellow Distress Oxide inks. Then I flipped the mask to create a bubbly cloud sky. I colored these cuties with Copic Markers and die cut them out, adhering them to the card base with foam adhesive to make them pop leap flip off the card! And that sentiment, don’t even get me started on that adorability! I finished off the card with some stitching and plan to give this cutie card to our son. He’s going to love it! 

Thanks for having me along for a few minutes of your day! :)

Jill

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April Guest Designer | Natasha Valkovskaya

Hello friends!

I am so happy to introduce you to our April 2019 guest designer, Natasha Valkovskaya.

I live in Yekaterinburg - a beautiful city in the heart of Russia - with my husband, two kids, a golden retriever and a guinea pig. I am an English teacher and a teacher trainer by day; and an avid cardmaker by night. I’ve been crafty all my life, but it’s cardamking and papercrafting that have stolen my heart (and much of my budget) over the last few years. My style is predominantly clean and simple, I think it really brings the image or the message to the fore; I also like playing with watercolour, and sometimes I like getting artsy. I adore making boxes and pretty packaging, so Neat and Tangled box dies are some of my favourite! I enjoy cooking (and sadly eating this), travelling, reading and playing board games.

I am such a fan of her work, be sure to follow her blog and Instagram for even more inspiration!

And now for her projects for today!

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I’m so excited and honoured to be a guest designer for Neat and Tangled in April! Can’t wait to share with you the projects I’ve created with their amazing goodies.
  

Today I have two cards featuring Heart Duo stencil and Lovely Lotus set. For my first card, I created a background with two shades of pink and the Heart Duo stencil.

Then  I heat embossed one of the floral images from the Lovely Lotus set on a piece of vellum and adhered it onto my panel with a double-sided adhesive sheet. To finish of this super quick and easy card, I added a sentiment from the Typed Sentiments set, which you already know is my current favorite!

For my second card, I again used the Heart Duo stencil to create my background, this time in shades of blue. I used distress inks, which I later used to color the lotus too. I heat embossed the biggest flower in gold and colored it. 

I also added some splatters which I seem to add to most of my cards. For the sentiment I went for gold on white, because I thought it would be softer than a black strip, although I do love the bold look of a white on black sentiment.

Thank you for spending time with me! I hope you like my ideas and are inspired to get crafty! Have a great day and find time for something that makes you happy!

Natasha

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Joan Bardee and Dala Horse

Hey everyone!  Our June guest designer, Joan Bardee, is back today to share a wonderful set of CAS foiled cards!  Here's Joan:

Super talented Miriam Prantner designed several Scandinavian-influenced stamp sets for Neat & Tangled and each one is fantastic.  As soon as I saw Dala Horse, I knew I “needed” it. (Hint:  I need more Scandinavian influenced sets. Please design more!).

Decided to use the large Dala Horse and a few of the teeny tiny leaves in the set to whip up a trio of blue cards, using foil on each one. These might work as Christmas cards, but I think I’ll use them as thinking of you cards.

The first one uses a pale blue duplex cardstock (the inside is white) and Hologram Foil.  Very hard to photograph!

Next card uses medium blue duplex cardstock with gold foil.

The last card uses navy duplex cardstock with gold foil.  

If you don’t foil, you can get the same effect by using metallic embossing powders.  But I was determined to use the Mini Minc that has been collecting dust and I’m glad I did. The foil and the dala horse look great together.

They were pretty easy to make and the process was identical for each one.

1. Take a sheet of 8.5 x 11 white cardstock and score in the middle of each side, making 4 A2 sized spaces.  This allows you to see where you should stamp. Do not cut.
2. Stamp the dala horse and the leaves with Hero Arts Intense Black ink (or other very dark black ink with good coverage) in one quadrant of the sheet of white cardstock.
3. Copy the stamped white cardstock once each on dark, medium, and light blue cardstocks.  You MUST use a laser printer. Inkjet will not work.  If you don’t have a laser printer, make copies at places such Staples, or Kinkos.  
4. Trim, score, and fold the blue sheets of cardstock in half so that you have 3 horizontal A2 cards.  Save the unused halves of each blue cardstock for another use.
5. Turn on your Minc to #4 (or laminator) and heat up.
6. Place each folded blue card with the shiny side of the foil on top of the stamped images in a holder and run through the Minc or laminator.
7. Stare at the cards and decide they need something.  (I call this the Danger Zone because I often ruin my cards at this stage.)  Let’s not do too much damage here and keep them simple.
8. Add a foiled strip of cardstock on the bottom of each card. To do that, make a solid black square with your Word or other graphics program and print out the square using black ink on a laser printer. This black square will now accept foil.
9. Cut the strips of black toner cardstock and foil in the same way as described above.
10. Adhere to each card.
11. Do not tell non-stampers how you did this.  Let them wonder!!  

MOOD WHEN DONE = Accomplished! Have a great weekend!

Thanks Joan!  These are simply lovely!  Joan will be back next Friday with another project to share!

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Guest Designer: Kathy Racoosin

We made it to Friday! Yay!

We've got a colorful card for you today from our super sweet and incredibly talented friend, Kathy Racoosin! She used our Paris stamp set and worked her marker magic!

If that didn't brighten up your day I don't know what will! :) And now I'm off to grab a cup of tea!

Hope you all have a great weekend!
Danielle

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August Guest Designer: Cristina Kowalczyk!

Happy Friday Friends! I am SO excited to introduce our August guest designer, Cristina Kowalczyk!  She is on a bit of a crafty hiatus promoting her new book, The Book of Unknown Americans, but found some time to join us this month!

Here is a little from Cristina:

I have been on a big crafting break lately, so I was over the moon to get a few sets from Neat & Tangled and to have time to play with them. For these cards, I used You & Me and Tiny Triangles.

I'm always inspired by sentiments, and when I saw how cute and versatile the sentiments were in You & Me, I was off to the races. I stamped some hearts in a supporting role on two of the cards, and I used the Tiny Triangles stamp as a background on the third. I just stamped it in black and colored in the open triangles with Copics. The glitter on the one-layer card is Stickles that I just blobbed directly onto the card front. 

I just had my twelve-year wedding anniversary, so I had love on the brain, I think. And that triangle card will be perfect for sending to a friend. 

Thanks, Danielle, for letting me hang with you guys for the month!

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Pretty amazing, huh? :)  Be sure to check back again next Friday for more from Cristina!

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May Guest Designer: Debby Hughes!

Hello friends! I'm here today with another gorgeous project from our May guest, Debby Hughes!  I absolutely love this card - what a great use of Stop and Go!

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Hi Debby here! I'm so happy to be guesting again this week. Last week my cards were all soft, organic and watercoloury (that's a real word right?). Well this week I'm going clean and graphic with the fabulous Stop and Go set. The stop signal is stamped and copic coloured and then I used two masks to get the red signal with heart inside. The first mask is a die cut heart from stamping mask paper and for the second I stamped the stop signal on the masking paper and carefully cut out the signal area. By placing the heart mask in the center of the signal area and then the other mask around the signal area I was left with an spot I could set to with some Barn Door distress ink and a mini blending tool :D I was so happy when I lifted the masks to see a perfect heart shaped stop signal!

I stamped the small 'stop' from the set in the center of the heart and then created the sentiment from a silver glitter die cut 'you' and more stamping to finish the sentiment. This set is great that way, lots of options for you to combine to make your own sentiments :) Finally I added some die cut silver glitter hearts and a few enamel dots before mounting the panel on a dark grey card base to bring in the same tones as the metal from the signal.

Thanks for joining me today and I look forward to being back next week with my final guest post :)

Supplies: Stamps - Neat & Tangled stop and go; Dies - Simon Says Stamp you, large holiday shapes, small holiday shapes; Card - Simon Says Stamp slate, Neenah solar white 110lb, DCWV glitter card; Ink - Versafine onyx black, Memento tuxedo black, Distress Ink barn door; Tim Holtz mini blender tool; Inkadinkado stamping mask paper; Doodlebug ladybug enamel dots; Copics - T3, T5, T6, T8

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