Copic coloring

Just because card

November 22, 2012 By Janice Daquila-Pardo 1 Comment

First things first, Happy Thanksgiving to everyone in the US!

I decided to participate in the challenge at A Blog Named Hero to use one of your old cards to inspire you to make a new one, with a different style.

I wanted to create a card with a detailed fall scene in the foreground and a swirl of fall colors in the background. So I clear embossed the background stamp on white cardstock and then swirled distress inks in fall colors over it. I colored and cut out the little scene with the kitty beside the house to imitate my brother’s home and furkid, and I will send this little “just because” card to them!

I wanted to create a fall scene with an abstract background, so I clear embossed the background stamp and then swirled distress inks in fall colors over it.

Here is the card I made back in April that I used for inspiration on my new one. As you can see, I used the same background stamp for a similar embossed resist look on my new card, but the two results are quite different!

I wanted to let the background on this card get most of the focus, so I kept the other elements understated.

Product/technique notes:
All the stamps are by Hero Arts; I colored the detail images with Copic markers; and I did the embossed resist technique in the background with Tim Holtz distress inks.

Did we ever love that swing

October 15, 2012 By Janice Daquila-Pardo 1 Comment

A photo like this one from 1971 really takes me right back to that place and time.

Phil and I (and many times our mom) spent hours upon hours on our swing in the back yard. We talked, told secrets, sang songs and made plans together. They are wonderful memories for me.

It appears from the clothes we’re wearing in it that this sweet photo from September 1971 could have been snapped right after we had returned home from church. I am wearing a dress Mom sewed for me out of aqua dotted swiss fabric; I remember really loving this dress. And Phil looks spiffy in his striped jeans and hair so carefully combed.

Normally I liked to swing pointing the other direction—into the neighbors’ yards you see in the background here. It gave me a longer view, which somehow inspired me to swing higher!

Product/technique notes:
I used the PageMaps sketch below for this layout; as you see I followed it pretty closely because I thought it was so suited to my photo. I also used papers from My Mind’s Eye The Sweetest Thing collection and stamps (with Copic coloring) from Hero Arts.

Flowers mean I love you

June 15, 2012 By Janice Daquila-Pardo 1 Comment

Today my mom is flying back from a 10-day pilgrimage to the Holy Land. This is a trip she has always dreamed of taking, so when she found out that one of her favorite priests in town was going to lead a small group of people there, she didn’t even really have to think about it. She made her reservation and packed her bags.

This means that she just spent 10 days visiting those significant places all Christian children learn about: Nazareth, Cana, the Sea of Galilee, Jerusalem, Bethlehem, the Mount of Olives, Gethsemane…you get the idea. Yeah, this was a BIG trip.

Now, I’d like to be at the airport to welcome her home with a fistful of hand-cut flowers. But because I live 2000+ miles away I made her a card with hand-cut flowers instead! I can’t wait to hear all the stories, Mom!

Welcome home, Mom!

I am also entering this card in this month’s Young Crafters Unite challenge to make a card/project using a flower or a floral image.

Day camp

April 17, 2012 By Janice Daquila-Pardo 10 Comments

The Little Yellow Bicycle Paradise collection was perfect to use with this 1976 photo.

There were a few summers when we were growing up that Mom and Dad signed us up to go to day camp. I think it was just for a week each summer, maybe two, but it left a big impression on me.

I remember being quite nervous to go, but I loved the adventure of it. We made candles in buckets of sand that we had hollowed out into shapes, tie dyed t-shirts, swam, fished, hiked…the usual activities. But the most important part that I can remember is that we got on a bus with kids we didn’t know and went somewhere new. It meant we were old enough to do this on our own—well, with lots of adult supervision, of course.

But these adults weren’t our parents or school teachers. They were mostly young adults (like the twin sisters in my photo) who were there with us as counselors. A counselor is, by definition, there to advise and guide. My apologies to any of my school teachers (many of them nuns) who may one day read this post, but in my nine-year-old brain a camp counselor was way cooler than a teacher. Teachers imparted math and history knowledge and then held us accountable with tests. Camp counselors showed us how to do things like tie knots. And there was nary a test in sight!

Way cooler.

So, here’s to my parents for giving us the opportunity to go on this type of adventure and to my camp counselors for teaching us the things we didn’t learn in school. And in case you can’t tell, this photo was taken on dress-up day (I think it was the last day of camp), and I am the little hobo with pigtails standing second from the right. 🙂

I based this layout on a nice sketch provided at the Artful Delight blog, and I am entering it into their April challenge. I am also entering this into Shimelle’s Online scrapbooking weekend challenge #8: Create a project featuring a stamp you should use more often.

The Artful Delight sketch I referenced while making this layout.

I used all Little Yellow Bicycle patterned papers from the “Paradise” collection and colored in that beautiful Hero Arts tree stamp with Copic markers to match the rest.

Old school

February 15, 2012 By Janice Daquila-Pardo 2 Comments

Twisted Sketches has revealed sketch #139, and the twist is “old.” Be sure to head over to the site to grab the sketch and see all the other design team members’ beautiful examples. Then create something of your own and link it up!

Here is what I created using this great new sketch:

I saw this Hot Date collection by KI Memories and immediately wanted to use it to do a layout about my love of fountain pens.

Do you ever create a layout because a certain patterned paper triggers something in your brain? The background paper on my page above was the inspiration for this whole idea. It’s from a Valentine-themed collection called Hot Date by KI Memories, and as soon as I saw the little fountain pens in the design I was committed to creating an ode to fountain pens (mine in particular).

I have loved fountain pens for a very long time. Daddy had a few old ones in his valet tray on the chest of drawers in the bedroom, and I loved to take those out and turn them over in my fingers. They were made of various colored pearl laminates and had lever fillers. They fascinated me with their beauty and old-world functionality. What?! You use the lever to suction special ink into a bladder inside the pen before you can write with it? How could I think that was anything but awesome when all we ever used at school were Bic ballpoint stick pens?

So I carried my love for fountain pens into my adulthood. I even bought a few inexpensive vintage pens at flea markets, but they didn’t work very well. Then one day, in my very first job out of college, my office mate brought a rubber stamp catalog (from Rubba Dub Dub) to work and asked if I wanted to order anything from it. I pored over that book for a long time, loving the idea of rubber stamps but having no concept of how I would use them. But there was a beautiful vintage fountain pen image that won me over. It seemed so expensive to me at the time, but I had visions of using it to create my own stationery, so I bought it.

Fast forward a number of years, and I must have let slip to my new husband how much I loved fountain pens because for one of our first Christmases together (1999) he gave me a gorgeous Mont Blanc. It’s a special edition pen called Hommage à Fédéric Chopin, and it includes a CD of Chopin’s music. I adore writing with it. It feels like you really mean what you’re saying when you write it with this beauty.

As I say in my journaling: I love technology, but old school is so cool.

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