 Hi everybody! It's Sandy! Welcome to my YouTube channel where today I'm going to be doing a tutorial on some super simple holiday cards and they're really easy and quick to make and I also want to share some news with you so I'll meet you back here after the tutorial. I'm going to be using primarily Hero Arts products on this card today. I've got the ombre inks out and these are beautiful three toned inks that you can use for the holidays. They have red and green now. Piece and Joy sentiment which I bought several times. Apparently I really liked it a lot and VersaMark ink because I'll do some embossing. I'm going to do this on letterpress paper because I like the texture of it. It comes in cream and white but I'm going to use the white today and I'm first preparing the surface with a powder tool. This will help to keep the static cling down so that embossing powder doesn't stick to the paper in places I don't want it to and then I'll ink it up in VersaMark which is a kind of sticky ink that will allow the powder to stick to that only and I'm going to stamp it in the lower right hand corner because the middle would be expected and I like to do unexpected things. I have my clear embossing powder in a container and I like to buy a whole bunch of it at once and then put all the dump all the containers into one so that I have just lots and lots of powder to work with. It's the color I use the most because it's the least messy in terms of it doesn't have much of a chance of leaving stray marks all over because it's clear so it will usually be hidden if I end up doing some embossing over a color ink. So I've got my piece taped down and I put the tape on the left and right underneath because I want the color to go all the way out to the edge of my front of my card. I'm going to take the ombre inks which have three inks on them and just wipe it across the surface. I'm pressing pretty good to try to get good coverage. I'll go back and forth a couple times. You can see the different colors and then I'll turn it so that I get another stripe but then it starts with the dark green and moves out to the light green and then turn it again so I get it to go the other direction. I do need to press a little bit harder around the embossing because it's raised so I need to add a little bit of extra color in there to try to make sure I get good ink in there. I'm using the corner of the ink pad to fill in a few areas that I may have missed but for the most part these shadow inks smooth out really beautifully when they're all finished and when they're all dried up. So the next step is going to be to remove the embossing. You could leave it there alternatively and just use a damp paper towel to wipe off the color but I think it looks really special when you remove the embossing and people think it's magic how you got those letters to appear out of that ink. I think it came out really gorgeous. So next I'm going to take some Hero Arts unicorn spray and add some snow to it and this is a really wonderful spray. I like how it looks like real snow on a card like this. The whole scene here in the background makes me feel like I'm looking out a window at snow and I really love how this came out. So I was hoping that I could just take this and use it as a flat postcard. Unfortunately it did go through to the back so if I were to use it as a postcard I'd have to just mount it on something but you could do a simple one layer card that way very very easily that you could use for your holiday cards. Isn't that super simple and done? So I'm going to do the same thing with the reds and just turn the ink pad again because it's got three different reds, a dark, a medium, and a light and here's the finished card that I ended up doing. I put it on a card base just to have a regular card rather than a postcard and I added a little bit of Hero Arts bling to it because bling always makes everything better don't you think? And here are both of the cards so you can see they came out very much looking like that looking out that window that that glassy window. I think the the way that the inks mesh on the paper and kind of mush together along with that spray really really beautiful. Hero Arts has a new website as of today they've been working on it for quite some time my friend Lisa is a big part of that congratulations to her and the whole team for all the work that they have done on getting that up and ready. If you have any issues with the site then make sure you email them but I got to kick the tires on it yesterday and it seemed to work pretty darn smoothly I was very excited with how easy it is to find things. On my blog today I share with you the entire list of all the stuff I bought because I could find things now and it's a long list so if you want to see some of the things that I will be using in the coming months yeah you can go check that out. I also wanted to remind you of my Bob Ross happy trees video which was so popular that you guys went and bought them all out of all the stores and they ran out well they've been slowly starting to be restocked in the different stores if you want to go check those but you can also get them right now in the hero arts store because they are available there so shop away have an awesome time I'm going to be using these for spring and summer cards too so these are very versatile trees you can click on the link in the description or in the upper left to go watch this one if you missed it. Another bit of news I'm going to be taking a break from teaching at stores for a little while I've got so many things juggling in the air right now I just can't focus on things like travel arrangements and kidding and all that sort of thing so after my trip to Boston that's coming up later in September I will be taking I don't know how long the break but it'll be a little while so hang tight if you're waiting for me to come to your store and teach classes and we'll see when that starts up again because I've got a lot of things I want to get done and in weather news it is finally cooled off it's been raining outside we've had all kinds of cool weather here in the Seattle area I'm hoping that it's raining in eastern Washington where all those fires are but I'm happy for me that I get to sit here in a shawl and snuggle in and do all of my computer work so I will see you guys later have fun shopping at the new hero arts site and make sure you check out my blog because there are lots of links there to all the stuff I bought I'll see you guys later bye