Joppy goes Blog Hoppy

Hello,

I love that I can make a rhythm out of joppy and hoppy - its always a struggle thinking of a blog title!

Welcome to anyone who has not visited my blog before, I have a fairly new blog, have not participated in the blog hop before and so its especially great to see you!

I had a lovely open house last Saturday and invited some of my crafting friends to come and look at what the new Spring/Summer catalogue has to offer and I made some cards to display and the cards I have put up for the blog hop today I made with a stamp set featured on page 44. called Best Catch and co-ordinating Catch of the day thinlits dies. I haven't seen very much on the Internet or on Pinterest anywhere made with this set so I am especially pleased to show you this great set.

There is one very special man in my life to whom I recently became engaged and he loves fishing so I thought this set would come in handy. Also he reliably informs me that the fish looked rather like salmon and that salmon are pink and grey and shiny - so with this information I proceeded to colour the stamped images of the fish with watercolour pencils in brown - for the gills, pink along the top of the body and grey along the bottom of the body of the fish. I used a blender pen to go over the rough pencil lines I put down and transformed them into smooth watercolours and then carefully went over the whole fish with some 'wink of stella'. Hey presto shiny scales on my fish!

I used cajun craze coloured card for the card base and some of the free sale-a-bration foil card from Stampin' Up in the grapefruit grove colour and embossed with the 'ruffled' embossing folder which looks a bit like waves. The foil card works really well when embossed it comes out like metal effect and the photograph can't quite capture it because it picks up all of the lights as rainbow colours which is not as obvious when viewing it in fresh air mode.

The card pictured above has a piece of linen thread that is fed through a hole at the end of the fishing rod  made with a paper piercing tool and is attached to the inside of the card with some tape. When you open the card the fish comes out from behind the bullrushes and is drawn up towards the top of the fishing line - as if it has been caught. (An action card!) The fishes and the bullrushes are extra dies and they could be coloured up in a range of ways. I am looking forwards to using them again. (You could hide the tape by putting the hole all the way through the card and taping it on the back.) The bullrushes are cut twice and one is coloured and one in plain card and the second one is popped up on a dimensional so you can hid the fish in between.

I love that the fish design, when cut out with the matching framelit, has a 3D effect because the little fins cut out so you can push them up and you can also give them a little curl with a bone folder - I think this makes the fish look happy and playful. It also helps him hold his fishing bag!

Putting the hat on one of them was Simon's idea - so good to have a creative fisherman around when you need one!

This stamp set is great as it has 3 sentiments and 6 images that can be used as backgrounds or main images on a card or scrapbook page and it is a 'dist INK tive' which is Stampin' Up's way of saying it gives you lots of details in the inked images. It passes my test of being able to use it in 5 different ways (More of my ideas when I have recovered from my open house event and have some time to make the remaining projects).

If you buy the stamp set and the thinlits dies as a bundle 'Best Catch' they cost £40.50 and then if you add the 'ruffled' embossing folder for £9.25 = £49.75 and you have gone over the £45.00 price point for a sale-a-bration reward and you can get the foil sheets for FREE! how fabulous is that. (8 sheets of 12x12 foil card 4 each of Grapefruit Grove and Lovely Lipstick).  Plenty to use embossed or plain in many different ways.

To move on to the next fabulous project from the Spring/Summer catalog see the link below - have a happy hopping Saturday!

Jop x