Travel- Stick It To Me!

I'm up on the Paper Issues blog today  with the Stick it To Me challenge and it's a super special day, it's my wedding anniversary! Brian and I have been married 19 years today.  He is patient with me and all of my photos (ok, most of them) I stop to take and keeps me laughing.  Here's me hogging the window seat on our Spring Break flight to capture the scenery from the skies!

See the how to on my previous blog post on watercolors with the packaging technique.  This is the project I was creating the background for in the tutorial photos!

Since this was the sticker challenge, I was all about using as many stickers from the Carta Bella Pack your Bags collection and others from an older travel collection, Pink Paislee Atlas. When layering stickers, I prefer to use the tone on tone style so they coordinate and don't end up being messy/distracting from the background layer.

Here's a few more close ups to see the stickers and watercolor background. You can also see how I layered the watercolor stripes to the solid white cardstock and the arrow patterned paper.  This helped to make it lay flat and it wasn't as warped as it had been without the backing!

I added foam ahesive to some of the stickers to add depth and layers. It was a fun challenge to use only stickers as the focus of the design.  I hope you give this one a try before August 5th.  It is a great way to use up your sticker stash and find coordinating pieces to match your paper, photos, or background.

Don't forget to stop by the Paper Issues store for all of your paper crafting needs. 

 We love seeing your awesome designs so tag us on social media!  

Post your projects for July challenges in the Facebook group. 

 Never know when your design entry gets picked to win the monthly gift cards!

You can play along through August 5th.

Thanks for stopping by my blog today!

Soak up the Sun

Today I am up on the Paper Issues blog with a Working with Water Colors post. 

I used the Sun and Fun free cut file and turned it into a stitching cut file. 

The water colors are the focal point of the sun center and the background, 

as well as a way to add a vintage look to the title word strips.

Here are a few close ups of the layout: If you have never turned cut lines into stitching marks for your needle, check out my cut file stitching tutorial post here to show you more!

The foam adhesive keeps the layers separated and casts slight shadows to create depth above the water color background.  Water colors are also a focal point of the center of the sun cut file. I love how my children's beach sunset photo worked so well with this sunny cut file and water color splash background.

Adding watercolors is easy by using the packaging technique. Here's how it looked under the cut file and photo. It is important to layer the colors and dry the area in between the layers. I use a hair dryer to dry the paper quickly and this minimizes paper warping.

Here's another background showing the packaging watercolor process.  I cut a scrap of plastic packaging and add water color to it. It naturally beads up/pools on the plastic.  Press it onto the paper where you'd like the color layered.

When it is sufficient, I stop and dry the area with a heat device such as a heat gun or hair dryer.

On this example, next I moved onto a golden yellow stripe. You can see slight variations of yellow and gold I layered in varying places before drying it.

I added the light blue-green color after setting the yellow stripe. You can see the small scrap of plastic used for this.

Here's the final tutorial picture of this now dried watercolor packaging technique! Pretty cool look to build a layout design on!

I am excited to see your water color magic! 

 Post your projects on Paper Issues July challenge album 

and have a chance to win gift cards this month.

As always there's a SALE at Paper Issues!  

Grab all of your favorite swag bag kits, 

Christmas in July kit, or collecion favorites for 20% off!

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