 Well hey there, it's Sandy Alnok and I'm going to show you how to do some masking while you do your embossing without having to do any cutting of masks. But before I get to that, I'm going to show you a new release from Ellen Hudson. If you just want to see the tutorial, then that starts at about six minutes or so into this video. So first off is the baronial dies. These are the same as the frame dies Ellen's been releasing lately, but it's for a four bar card for baronial. It's smaller than an A2. It still works on an A2, but for anybody who likes to do the smaller ones, these are a complement to the other rectangles that are in the previous release. And every time Ellen has one of these nested dies, just know that there's a second set. All the in-between sizes are in the second set tucked in behind there, in the same package. So the first stamp set is the cake, oh my goodness, cake and cupcakes always make me happy. I made a four bar card for this one and I airbrushed the background before cutting the die so that when I flipped the die, the frame from the die, then I had the green on top and the pink on bottom. So reversing what's in the background on the card and just colored the cupcake with my Copics and put some glossy accents on that frosting. Then we have these balloons, they're freeform balloons. There's a group of them and then there's one single. And what I did was take a piece of watercolor paper and I die cut the big one out of the background and I removed that and then just painted the balloons separately and then I painted the sky separately. And then I painted just a little swoosh for the ground down there, a little hillside. And then when I put it all back, I could put glossy accents onto the yellow balloons and add glitter. And then once that was all done, I could put glossy accents on the red and then I ended up with two different types of shine on the card, which was a whole lot of fun. This Mod Flowers die, I'm going to apologize for my machine. My machine, I had the wrong sandwich in here, so only part of the die cut, but it did something really cool because only portions of them were popped. Like they should have all cut out nicely, but only parts of them did. So I took advantage of that, didn't throw the piece of paper away. I just used some dimensional adhesive underneath of them to lift them up just a little bit further so it looked intentional instead of like an accident. And then just added a little tiny bit of paint to each one of them and made a four bar card out of it, again with that same frame around it. Next up, we have this sweet little mini note and basically it folds in half and has a perforated front that the person who receives it can zip open. And what I did was make a little tab for mine. There is a stamp in one of the stamp sets in the best friend stamp set that says open here and it has an arrow. You could stamp that on the front, but I thought it might be clearer if I put a little piece of paper with just the word open sticking out and glue it on the back of the door. And what I have done with mine is pre-perfed that right hand side so they're only tearing the top and the bottom and hopefully that will make it really clear to them what they do. But I had to adhere that entire window down all the edges so that when they pulled it up it doesn't disappear and all fall apart. So I'm gonna put the double stick adhesive all the way around and then before I mail it I will peel that off and adhere it down and stick one of my little pre-made tabs in here just cut it off after the word open, glue it in there so that it just sticks to the back of the door and that way I hope that it's really clear to them how to open it. So you can tell me if you think an arrow stamped on there is easier or my crazy method because I tend to do things the hard way. But each one of these has different things in it. I've used some of the Love Note stamp set that you can see under my left hand that has some script sentiments and then the best friend stamp set has things like this. Diamonds used to be a girl's best friend then came coffee and yoga pants, am I right? Yes I am a yoga pants wearer after a year of quarantine who is not wearing yoga pants now right? And each one of these is just kind of fun I've paired the Love Note set and the best friends in different ways just what I thought might make a good little secret note to tuck inside of a card. And this last one the sentiment was so funny from the best friend set that I put googly eyes on the front because inside it says sometimes it scares me how in sync our weirdness is. Do you know anybody like that? So I thought the googly eyes were better than any of the images in the Love Note stamp set so I just used googly's. Next up is hexagons you know me and my hexagons. There's as always a double set so all the in-between sizes are in the second set. And there are two stamp sets I want to show you. One is this stitched stamp set that has a whole bunch of sentiments. If you are a seamstress or you send cards to people who sew you're going to love that one but they have now made images that you can piece together in a hexagon so it's going to fit. I am so excited and I have made this card that you will see in a tutorial here on my channel on Sunday so you can come back and see how I did that, how I pieced the pieces together and the techniques that I used for coloring it, etc. Because it's a lot of fun to make super bright happy cheery card. But now on to the card that we're going to make today. I'm going to use the Mondo tulips that have a die with it. I'm going to use the Hello Die for a sentiment and I want to show you real quickly this is the card that's going to be on Ellen Hudson's channel on the second which is Sunday. I believe is that Sunday? Yes. And I will be over there with that video. And then this is the card we're making today and it's a very loose one and I did some special things with the embossing so that I didn't have to mask off everything and I'll show you how I did that. So stamp set at the ready. I'm going to put down my powder and I'm going to stamp a couple of these tulips and I'm stamping them in the clear VersaMark ink because VersaMark is the one that's going to stick to the powder. It's going to hold it in place. And I'm using Hero Arts Detailed White. So it's white on white. You're not going to see very much for the moment, but hang tight. I will get a better view of it for you. I'm going to do another cluster off to the left. And then I'm going to need to do some in the middle. Now, how do you mask that off when you can hardly see anything? And that's what I struggled with because I wanted to make a whole garden of tulips across the entire card. So first getting the two clusters on either side first was important. And then if I look at an angle, I can see exactly my placement. And I happen to know that on the left side and the right side, there's tulips overlapping from the earlier embossing. Now make sure you let this cool down before you do it. If either side is still hot, your powder is going to stick to everything. So let it cool down for sure and then stamp it. Go ahead and stamp it. Let the ink be there. That's totally fine. And put your powder on. But you can look at an angle and you can see the difference between the powder that is brand new from this stamp and the powder that was already heat embossed. And I'm taking a brush that I am not worried about because I don't want to get powder in my good brushes. But I'm taking a brush and I'm just going to dust off the first row of tulips. So anywhere where there was overlap that I want to just remove that area, I'm going to dust off any of the powder because then I can just heat set it and none of those lines will appear. So it's kind of like masking but we're doing it with embossing powder instead. And that is going to save you from having to figure out how to do any embossing, masking kind of stuff while you can't see anything because it's just really hard when you're doing white on white. So just kind of double checking a bunch of different areas. I decided to even, there was a top of a tulip that could appear behind another one and it just seemed visually confusing. So got all of that heat set and we get onto the painting which is going to be this super easy part of this card. And I'm going to speed it up for that reason. I have picked out a light and dark orange, a light and dark pink and a light and dark green and just thrown a little bit onto a tile from each color so I could use that as a palette just from Distress Inks. You could do this with watercolors, you could do it with re-inkers, you could do it with all different kinds of things and just paint a bunch of colors in here. Now I am not staying within the lines. That's part of the secret of making this look very, very loose and fresh and like you did labor over it. And I don't want it to look like I worked hard at it. I want it to look like it just fell off my brush. Isn't that the way that watercolors supposed to look? Mine doesn't always, but I've done this technique before with other stamps and it's just so gorgeous that I can't help but do it again. And just let the colors blend. I'm putting just the oranges and pinks in the flowers first and then letting it spill out, adding more color to my palette as needed and then I'll add some greens down in the bottom with maybe a little bit of pink hanging out down there with it as if there's maybe a tulip hiding behind or something, but I'm leaving plenty of white area and the embossing also helps to keep the white. So if you're somebody who always forgets to leave white and leave space for it, then this is a great technique for you. It also helps to remember to just wet the whole thing before you get started because that's gonna loosen things up anyway. Just give it a good spray across the whole thing and let all of this be super wet. If you have any hard edges that appear, if you see anything that strikes you as too strong in color, then take care of it right away because if it's distressing, it's not gonna lift very well, meaning it won't be able to be lightened. So you wanna make sure that you catch that early on so you can get more water in there and loosen it up. And mine, I wanted it to be even looser. So I mixed up a little bit of pigment on the palette and tapped it off of my brush so that I get little spatters on there, make it all artistic and sweet, right? Isn't that fun? I added on the hello sentiment that I die cut and then the hope your day is as delightful as you are, stamped it on a banner. And I did add some little sequined things after my dog chose which one. I didn't ask her to choose, but I found this in the living room and I figured, okay, she wants to have some of these on my card. So I put some on there. Tell me in a comment down below if your pets have ever helped you with your crafting because I would love to know if I'm the only one. There is more on my blog. You can see still pictures of all of my cards when they're released and links to everything as well as link to the Instagram hop with all the other designers on it so you can get more inspiration in case you might need some of these things in your house. There's good ideas out there for you. Thanks so much for stopping by my YouTube channel and I will see you again soon. Hit the like button before you go and I'll see you later. Bye.