Tag: coffee backgrounds

Mix It Up with Mixed Media

Hello friends and a happy July to you!  We’re celebrating July 4th Independence Day this weekend and I know it will be hot!  I think we’ll be watching fireworks from our TV inside the cool air this year!  Hope that whatever you’re doing this weekend that you stay cool and safe while you’re having fun.

Today also brings us to a new challenge over at the Mix It Up Challenge Blog.    The challenges always run for 6 weeks so there is plenty of time to enter.  The theme given for us this time is: Mixed Media or you can always do the ‘Anything Goes” too.  Here’s the card that I came up with for the challenge using the theme:

This was such a fun card to make!  I normally do mixed media on my art journal pages or a larger/3D item, but this time I wanted to make a card for this theme.  I pulled out some really fun AALL & Create products that I’ve been wanting to use and I thought this would be a good opportunity to try them out!  (I don’t know what it is about these wonky characters, but I think the weird eyeballs are so cute!)  I’ve used the “Coffee Time” stamp set with the girl, coffee cups and coffee beans at the bottom.  I’ve also used a Simon Says Stamp “Sunflower Fields” in the background and the “Sending Sunshine” sentiment.

To create the background: I’ve stamped a very large sunflower image in yellow ink over a white card base.  I’ve then used an AALL & Create “coffee stains” stencil with brown ink over top.  I then ink blended some more brown inks over the edges of the panel and then splattered it with both brown and white paints.  I took a pen and doodled around the edges and then attached it to an A2 top folding brown card base.  I had a left over strip from a collection of coffee backgrounds that I’ve made in a previous post you can see HERE and attached that to the bottom where I stamped the coffee beans in brown ink over it.  (I thought it would make for a good “grounding” for the coffee girl and cups to stand on.)

I’ve used another AALL & Create product called “Heart Nook” that I die cut some circles from, and I thought looked like coffee stains, in glitter cardstock.  I also cut an additional strip of that to go along the bottom strip of the card.  I then added the stack of coffee cups, the girl that I colored up with Copics and fussy cut out.  I white heat embossed the sentiment, die cut and popped both that along with the girl using foam tape.  I also separately cut out her eyeball and popped that up over her for extra dimension.

I hope you’ve enjoyed my coffee mixed media card today!  I had fun coloring her up and very happy to use more things from my stash too!  Please be sure to pop on over to the Mix It Up Challenge blog to have a look at what the rest of the team created and play along!

Have a wonderful July 4th weekend.

Challenges:

  1. Just Us Girls – Stencil Week (coffee stains stencil)
  2. Crafty Catz – Anything Goes
  3. Creative Fingers – Anything Goes
  4. Pammie’s Inky Pinkies – PIP2526 – Sunshine (hope sentiment and yellow works!)
  5. Addicted to Stamps & More – Die Cut(s) and/or Stencil(s) – I used both!

April AJ Page-One Cup at a Time

Hello friends!  I hope you’ve been enjoying your month so far!  We’ve had a few really nice days this month, but it’s still a tad bit chilly and hopefully it will warm up more next month!  It’s hard to believe we are already headed into May for this year!

That means it’s time for the monthly Art Journal Page collaboration with my crafty friend, Carol (from Crafty-Stamper)! We get creative trying to use up our never-ending stash piles along with a prompt for each month.  I know she always has great inspiration to share, so please check out her blog too! Here’s my AJ page with the “SMASH OUR STASH” April prompt of “HALF” -(e.g. 2 halves to create whole item/half of something):

Yes, coffee please!  I’m a coffee lover and so is my husband!  I don’t think we’d be able to start a day without it!  I know there are lots of people who don’t like coffee and that’s OK…as long as there will be some somewhere for me, I’m good! 😉☕

It was my husband that inspired this page for me when I asked him what his favorite shape was, and he answered with a circle.  Looking down at my coffee cup was the circle I saw and decided to take more inspiration from a coffee cup we purchased at one of our favorite local coffee cafes you can see in the top corner of the photo.  To achieve the look, I took a cardstock color matching the cup and splattered white paint over it.  The “HALF” is obviously the coffee cup that was cut out with circle dies.  I cut another piece of the handle which makes it look like the view you would see from the top of the cup.  The other “HALF” of the cup was placed in the corner area at the bottom and this coffee is more of my husband who likes plain black coffee.  But this is certainly how we start our day together which is great since he’s retired now.  The other “HALF” cup has the latte art, and I did that one with light sponging around the edge and then took my colored pencils to free hand the design.  Not sure if that’s exactly what it looks like, but I gave it a try.

  • For the background:  I’ve used a strip of wood plank pattern paper from my stash, and I’ve also heat embossed a coffee bean background stamp with, of course, coffee embossing powder that I’ve had for a very long time, and it was a great time to use it!  I’ve also heat embossed the “coffee” sentiment and quotes with it. Below the embossed coffee is a sentiment that says:  “Take life one cup at a time” and the other two at the bottom say: “First we drink coffee, then we do the things”😂 
  • The coffee cup-stained background, I’ll share more about below.

I also took a big brush marker to go around the edges of the cups and the sentiment strips.  I wanted the heat embossing to stand out a bit more over the brown cardstock, so I took a white Tim Holtz crayon and rubbed over top of it to brighten it up.

Have you ever made backgrounds with coffee?  I had such a fun time playing with it and decided to make several different backgrounds that I could use for later!

I don’t drink instant coffee, but I have some in my cupboard because I like to make a chocolate cake that has instant coffee in it…so good!  I took some of this instant coffee and made the coffee cup-stained background for my page to create more circles that went with my circle coffee cups.

I also decided that since I had a cup of it, that I would go ahead and make more backgrounds with it and just play around with different things.  I splattered, I smooshed, I’ve added salt along with a few other things and let dry and make patterns with.  Once dry, I cleaned them off and here are the results of my play.  I wish I had done another cup circle background though.

I hope you’ve enjoyed my art journal page and been inspired in some way!  Thanks so much for dropping in!  Have a great weekend!  Mine will be busy!

Challenges:

  1. Art Journal Journey – Geometric Forms
  2. Creative Artiste – Anything Goes Mixed Media
  3. Creative Fingers – Anything Goes
  4. Try it On Tuesday – Inspired by a Song (Can’t think of coffee with the “Coffee Song” by Frank Sinatra!)
  5. Lil’ Patch of Crafty Friends – Anything Goes
  6. Penny’s Paper-Crafty – Anything Goes using paper