Wonder & Light Sampler

If you have been following my blog at all,you know how much I love creating a great sampler. Well, I think I hit a home run this time. 

As soon as I saw the Lights of Aurora Suite in the new mini catalogue, I was hooked. I have done so many northern lights Art projects with students, and even paint nights for myself. I remember distinctly the first time I ever saw them in person. 

It has been a while since I have made a sampler for myself. I decided this was the perfect paper. Our house is painted light blue in all the rooms, with our kitchen featuring black counters, and crisp, white cupboards. This will fit in my kitchen sampler frames perfectly.  

I used the stamp set and dies to make the two squares in the corners. The trees are actually pieces of two dies in the set. I also used the new Basic Black 2 tone paper for the background, but also to give the layered trees a bit more depth. The paper is slightly different shades on the two sides, and is a but less saturated than the Basic Black cardstock. It has almost a watercolor feel to it. It also has a white core, which meant I had to clean up some cut edges with a black marker.

The two mid sized panels used the Sign Design punch to layer and feature the sentiment, as well as embossed white on black cardstock. I added some Basic White cloud images from the die set, and piled them all up with dimensionals to give them more depth. 

The large panel proved to be a bit challenging. The sampler is a 9" x 9" square, sized for the frames I use in my kitchen. The panel is 8 inches long, which steps down for each layer, but the DSP needed to be 7 3/4" wide. The DSP... is 6" x 6". I ended up choosing two pages that worked reasonably well together, and cut them to the proper height. I layered them until they were the right width, and then mitered them. This involved cutting from the top corner to the bottom corner on an angle to create two triangles. The final look works well.

The words across the middle panel took me a while to decide on. There are four script words in the stamp set: magic, live, light, and wonder. It seemed to work.  I know the set is Light & Wonder, but the reverse seemed to work best for my sampler. The letters are from the Alphabet a la Mode die set. I cut 7 layers of each letter and glued each together to get more depth and strength. It also provides a bit of a 3D effect. You could use dimensionals,  but the letters are very narrow so that is tough. I glued mine, but you could also use peel and stick adhesive on the back of the cardstock before cutting. 

All in all, I think I am pretty happy with my sampler. I added some embellishments to finish it up, and then decided it would be the project for my next class. I have had people ask for sampler classes, so here we are.  My first one. And even better id that I have people registered for both virtual and in person classes!!

Register here if you would like to join me. Please register ASAP!