Bellas

One of my favorite stamps to work with are Bellas. You can see them here. So I decided to upload a few cards I've made with some of their stamps. :) Enjoy!

Balloonabella, shown above, is colored with Prismacolor colored pencils and blended with Odorless Mineral Spirits, which will be known as OMS from here on out because I'm lazy :) If you've never colored with a Prismacolor pencil, and you enjoy coloring with colored pencils, you should really try them. They're like the Cadillac of pencils! I love mine! I used a Sakura Glaze pen on her shoes (it gives them a lovely embossed look) and tied a pice of green ribbon around a piece of lightly striped green and white paper coming from under the matted image.

One complaint about square stamps is that they do cost extra postage to mail.

This Bella, called Curly Surpriseabella was colored with Spica (pronounced spee kah) pens. These pens give a sparkle effect to what they color. I used a pair of wavy patterned scissors to cut the card front slightly shorter than the card back, to which I adhered the blue gingham paper. The matted image overhangs the front just a bit when open. The white fabric strip is called a "frazzle" and it's what you get when you take a woven fabric and cut the very end, and then tear the fabric into strips, and fray the edges. I also used a piece of polka dot satin ribbon stapled to the edge of the image matte. Even though there are different patterns of paper, typically if you use papers from the same color family, you can get away with this.

I used a glaze pen on her shoes. I love that "patent" look it gives them!


The next card is one that I really like. It's using a technique called paper piecing. When I first started using paper piecing it meant something a little different. But this method basically means I've stamped the image on the card stock, and then I've stamped the image again on a piece of patterned paper, and cut the portion that I want to piece out and run it through my Xyron Sticker Maker to make a part of the card a little different. As you can see, this next Bella is wearing a houndstooth skirt and carrying the matching handbag. The way I accomplished this was to stamp MWAHbella onto the cardstock, the stamp her again onto the houndstooth patterned paper. I then cut out the skirt and handbag and placed the directly over the stamped image on plain cardstock. I colored in her top with a Spica pen, and her boots with a Glaze pen. She is adorable isn't she? I then matted the image on a piece of white cored card stock I had run through the Cuttlebug with the Spots and Dots embossing folder. I sanded the embossed card stock slightly and adhered those down to the pink paper with brown polka dots. The ribbon was adhered at the time the image was matted to the embossed cardstock. Guess what I used on her boots? YEP! Glaze pen! I have fallen in love with those things! In fact, I love most anything by Sakura. Jelly roll pens, Souffle pens, Glaze pens, they're all awesome! I haven't met a pen by them that I don't like! :)

Anyway, that is my post for the night, hope it makes up for not getting it done by midnight. :) NIGHT!