N&T November Release Week Day 3 - Giveaways

Hey everyone!  Welcome back for Day 3 of Neat & Tangled's November release week.  Today we're featuring two of my new products:  Radiating Star stencil and Joyful Sentiments.

Obviously it's the holiday season, and the Radiating Star stencil works perfectly for that, but it's a design that I think will be useful throughout the year, a fun alternative to a sunburst stamp or stencil.  I am a big fan of Christmas music and I have been known to play it year round.  Joyful sentiments features some of my favorite Christmas hymns.  There are so many beautiful lyrics in those songs, and I tried to pull some of my favorites and ones that you might not already have in your stash.

OK, so let's talk about today's cards.  For the first one, using a sponge tool, I applied Distress Inks to a watercolor panel.  Then I spritzed the top corner of the panel with water, placed the stencil over top and with a paper towel removed some of the ink.  I did this a second time, but this time, I placed a piece of paper towel over top of the wet panel/stencil placed a jar on top and let it dry that way.  I love this technique, it's subtle, but with dark colors has a great impact.



The Joyful sentiments set comes with several sizes of stars, and I stamped the largest in the center of my stencil image and embossed it.  I did this twice to get a puffier look, and then stamped and embossed the rays.  Those I only did one embossing on.

The sentiment was initially embossed in silver, but it didn't have the pop I wanted, so I went ahead and embossed it twice more in white (thank goodness for the MISTI!).  There are a couple of areas where you can see a bit of silver beneath, I really like how this look turned out, almost like a hurricane glass look and I'll be experimenting with it a bit more I think.



The second card is quite similar in layout, but for this one, I used gelatos on plain white cardstock.  I basically colored the gelatos over the stencil (using a couple shades of yellow), and then rubbed it into all the nooks and crannies of the stencil with my finger, repeating as necessary.  If you have Distress Crayons this technique works with those as well.  For the outer parts off the stencil I mostly wanted color and not necessarily the texture you get towards the center of the star as there is a lot of product there since I knew I was going to be stamping the sentiment and didn't want too uneven a surface for that.

The sentiment was stamped in Versafine and then clear embossed.

You can see the texture/dimension you can achieve using gelatos in this close up.



Please head over to the Neat & Tangled blog to see what the rest of the team created.  You'll be able to enter to win today's featured products there.

I also have some giveaways.  For a chance to win one of my new release products, be a follower and leave me a comment with your favorite Christmas song.  There are also extra chances to win on instagram (@mprantner), so you'll want to check that out too.

Come back tomorrow for our final day of reveals!