Hello crafters, welcome to my stop in the Altenew Crafty Friends celebration blog hop! If you’ve already been joining in the fun, you should have arrived from Enza Gudor’s blog.

I wanted to work with one of Altenew’s newest stamp and die sets, Blooming Bouquet and create a dimensional background using the images. The theme of the Crafty Friends hop is to share a card inspired by one of your own crafty friends. And this card was very much inspired by my friend Yana Smakula; she is always sharing cards with detailed, dimensional floral backgrounds and I always love the results! Yana herself is such a kind person and I was thrilled to finally get to see her in real-life at Simon Says CREATE last April.

And I’ve not only got Yana as a friend, but SO many other people who have become so very dear to me. As many of you know, I work with Simon Says Stamp and my “Simon family” is very special to me; women like Heidi Crowl, Steph Leykauf, Sarah Kowalski, Shari Carroll and others. I truly love being part of Simon for many reasons, the most-important being the friendship.

I also have my best friend Ellen Haxelmans from Belgium, Maria Sabina Raita from Romania and Kelly Latevola from Ohio. These are just a few of my friends; I am truly blessed to have such special people in my life and that all of us share so many things in common, including crafting!

I was so happy to have Ellen visit me last month and spend a fun week together. That was our first time to spend REAL time together, as for the past 4 years we’ve only been able to Skype to see each other. So many special memories from that visit.

Another fun thing is that my sweet younger sister, Katrina Trapani has begun creating cards also, and has her own blog that she is starting to share her crafty ideas at! I am thrilled to see my sister get into crafting too!

Do you have a special crafty friend(s)?? Here is a fun collage of mine:

Pictured (L to R from top): Ellen, Sarah, Shari, Steph and Heidi, Maria, Kelly, Katrina.

So now let’s get to the card!

The beautiful flowers and leaves are stamped in a variety of Altenew dye inks (Rubellite, Olive, Bamboo, Emerald, Mountain Mist, Turquoise, Lavender Fields and Deep Iris) and then colored with Prismacolor pencils.

I purposely chose to work with kraft cardstock on this card; not only for the way colored pencils look on kraft, but also for the warm texture. The kraft cardstock adds an earthy tone to the card design, which compliments the florals very nicely. It was fun to see the results of everything on the kraft!

Another way I added texture to the card was by covering over most of the stamped “spots” in the background with yellow Nuvo Drops (both Dandelion Yellow and Limoncello). It also gave another depth of dimension to the layered florals around the background.

The cute “hello” sentiment on the bottom corner of the card is from the coordinating Blooming Bouquet die set and is cut from yellow cardstock. I wanted to tie in a bit more of that color into the design, as I felt that pulled everything together nicely.

I hope you will check out the video below to see the card come together! And for all of the details on the Altenew Crafty Friends blog hop, be sure to keep reading!

Thanks for visiting with me today… I’ll be back soon with a new tutorial to share!

There is so much more to see in this Crafty Friends blog hop (a big thank you to Altenew for putting it together)! Your next stop is Lilith Eeckels. You can find the entire hop listed below:

Altenew Card Blog

Jennifer McGuire

May Sukyong Park

Keeway Tsao

Svitlana Shayevich

Galina Filippenko

Amy Sheffer

Papercraft Magazines

Taheerah Atchia

Joni Nina Andaya

Virginia Lu

Simon Says Stamp

Enza Gudor

Nina-Marie Trapani

Lilith Eeckels

Laurel Beard

Chameleon Pens

Vicky Papaioannou

Erum Tasneem

Laurie Schmidlin

Carissa Wiley

Altenew is giving away a $100 Altenew prize pack to FIVE lucky winners. PLUS, Altenew has some amazing sponsors who have donated additional prizes for this blog hop! These are the extra prizes up for grabs:

Jennifer McGuire Ink: 1 prize pack of three Altenew stamp sets

Online Card Classes: 3 class spots

Create and Craft TV: £50 gift certificate

My Sweet Petunia: Mini MISTI

Ellen Hutson LLC: $30 gift certificate

Pretty Pink Posh: $30 gift certificate

Simon Says Stamp: $30 gift certificate

Chameleon Pens: 1 pack of 5 Chameleon pens

Tombow USA: 1 pack of 10 dual brush pens

WOW! Embossing Powder: $25 gift certificate

Butterfly Reflections Ink: $25 gift certificate

Freckled Fawn: $20 gift certificate

Papercraft Magazines: One copy of each of the latest issues of four magazines

Scrapbook & Cards Today Magazine: 1-year subscription

To have a chance at winning one of these amazing giveaways, be sure to leave a comment along each stop of the hop by Friday, October 27th, 2017 at 11:59 PM EDT! 21 WINNERS will be chosen at random from the comments left on all of these blogs in the hop and will be announced on the Altenew Card Blog and Altenew Scrapbook Blog on October 28th, 2017.

If you are interested in doing a bit of shopping, Altenew has a special set of discount codes available this week! FREE U.S. shipping with code CRAFTY or $5 OFF international shipping with code FRIENDS at Altenew’s store.