 Hi there, it's Sandy Alnok, and I'm going to make my own patterned paper to make some cards and bookmarks today. I'm using the new set from Colorado Craft Company. It's got a flower, some butterflies, some scripture sentiments, and other card type sentiments that you can use. And I'm stamping on Arches Cold Press Watercolor Paper with VersaMark Ink, which is a clear ink, and I'm going to cover the whole page with it. How am I going to do that when it's clear? Well, I'm going to put the embossing powder on top first before I stamp the next one, and I'll know where it's at. And you can see it kind of sticks to it to this sticky ink, and I'm just going to go across the whole page to do this and kind of line it up where I want it to be. The powder will stay stuck to the paper as far as I can tell for a while. I assume that if you just never heat it, it would eventually fall off, but it'll stay long enough to do a project like this. But you can see how beautifully they stamp, and I'm connecting them and trying to leave as little space as possible between them so that I have a whole patterned kind of look across the whole thing. If there's any spaces left, there is another little leaf type of stamp in the set that you can use to fill in. And I did have a few of those spots, but look how beautiful that looks. It would be beautiful even just as white on white, a really pretty wedding card or a sympathy card, that kind of thing, but fill that in with little stamps and then start painting. You can do this with any kind of paints. I'm of course using my Daniel Smith and one of my fancy brushes, but you can use anything to do this because it's really freeing. I am not painting leaves of flowers and petals and that sort of thing. I'm just putting random blobs down. I wanted my flowers to kind of have yellow in them because that's my favorite color. However, you can put the color anywhere. I'm just crossing over lines and letting colors blend wherever they feel like blending and having fun with it. I'm using New Gamboge, Ozzy Red Gold, a bit of Serpentine Green, and then I'm going to throw some red in there, some anthracanoid scarlet, just to have a mix of colors that feels kind of fall. You could do this with like blue and white or blue and white, blue and blue, like a couple different blues for the flowers with some green and make it feel very wintery, that kind of thing. Lots of different ways you could give this a different feel. I wanted something that felt kind of fall because that's the season we're entering into and I'm ready for cooler weather to start. Anybody else? Totally ready for that. But you can see I'm just crisscrossing over lines and not worrying about trying to make these look like flowers. They're going to read as flowers to anybody who looks at it. And that'll be just grand. One of the things to be careful of is when you're using these particular kinds of colors is red, blue and yellow make neutrals. They make browns and grays. So if you're using orange, that's red and yellow. You're using green, that's blue and yellow, that gives you red, blue and yellow together. So you need to be aware of that. If you touch some of these colors to each other, you might get browns in certain areas. So just keep an eye on it as the colors do their own mixing thing that you don't get unwarranted colors, that sort of thing. So while I finish the painting of this for you, I thought I would chat a little bit since I'm doing Christian cards about my books and update you on that. I wrote some books back in 2018 and everything was great until the company went under. The publisher went into Chapter 11. They sold my contract to another company. And they finally sent me an email last July, in July of 2019, saying, Hey, you've got a new publisher. We're your new publishers. It's great. And okay, so I was waiting to hear anything. I've heard nothing. I've got no royalties, no emails, no contact, no editor, no nothing. I have zero information other than a welcome email from Penguin Random House or Random House Penguin, whatever they're calling themselves now. And I can't reach anybody. So I don't know if my books are going to remain available forever. I have absolutely zero idea. But I have a stash of my own books that I bought so that I could resell them as signed books. And that's what I'm doing with Ellen Hudson. So if you want a signed book, I just loaded her up with some in her shop. And you can get one there. I don't have any other places at this point that wanted signed books. So I don't have anywhere else to send you. And I am running out of books anyway. But if you want one now is a good time to get it because I have no idea what's going on with the books. And they make great Christmas gifts. So commercial over for that. I guess it wasn't really commercial since I'm not making anything off of them anymore. So there you go. Alrighty. Now for the dabbing off, I decided to lift some color and kind of squinting at it to see where the pigment is settling in where I have too dark of color because I knew I was going to stamp the sentiments on top. So I lightened that up, let it dry. And then I wanted to flatten it so it'd be easier to work with as I'm creating my projects. And I thought I'd try something that I normally do in Bible Journaling, which is iron my Bible paper. And I want to see if you could iron watercolor paper and guess what looks like you can. I know there are techniques where you can over iron the paper and try to get all that embossing powder off. But this is not that this is just flatten the paper so iron it just enough to do that with. And that worked pretty good came out relatively flat. So next up is trimming the paper down. So I cut two card fronts out of it. And you can decide what size you want your card front panels to be mine are going to be four by five and a quarter. That leaves me with a little tiny scrap off of one edge. And then I cut some bookmarks out of it. So I thought those would be fun. Did one two inch strip for a really long bookmark. And then that left me with a bunch of short ones I tend to like shorter bookmarks rather than giant ones that take up the entire book. So something a little smaller. And when I cut those, I also ended up with one little scrap. So I'll use those as panels on my cards and get to use up the whole thing. That's why I embossed all the way to the edge and painted all the way to the edge. I didn't tape anything down so I could use the full thing. So I've got lots of pieces that I can use for projects. You can do this with all different kinds of stamps to create yourself some. Now here's a little tip. Embossed, you can get a good black if you emboss with black embossing powder. The not embossed the letters kind of break up when they're stamped over top of the white embossing because it just doesn't the ink doesn't stick real well to it. So I recommend doing some embossing. I think I used the wow ebony for the black embossing and you can see the panels that I made the strips across the cards were made with those extra strips that I had. And then I added some ribbon because ribbons always good. I had some scraps and also added the butterflies onto each one of these so I could add some extra little little prettys on there. And if you hop over to Instagram later on today I'm going to be coloring this card. You'll get to see the flower colored in colored pencil the verse on the inside of it. And you might want to follow me on Instagram because in a couple weeks I don't have an exact date or details. There is an Instagram hop coming and I am giving away one of my Bible journaling classes in that hop. So if you want to participate keep an eye on things and I will be posting about it when that comes about. And that's about it. So I will see you guys later have a great day. I will see you again very soon. Take care. Bye