 Well, hi there. I am Sandy Almak, and I am here celebrating Ellen Hudson's 11th birthday anniversary for her company by using distress oxide inks to make a Christmas thistle wreath We were asked to use some of our favorite products This just happens to be one I hadn't used yet But I'm going to use some other favorite Ellen Hudson products with a couple of these stamps These are just some solid stamps that we can use to make a Christmas wreath card But this is one of my favorite Ellen Hudson products. This is the craft assistant. It's 12 by 12 and it's metal And it's so easy to clean up. It's like way easier than anything I've ever used So I'm going to grab some arches watercolor paper cut squares To do these because you're going to be able to make something round a little bit easier If you have a square if you want to make a rectangular card draw yourself a line So you know where your your square is I'm going to throw some distress oxide peeled paint onto the craft assistant And I'm going to spray half of it So part of it is going to be watery mushy and part of it is not and I'll show you why So that bottom half is kind of wet and soupy and the top half is not So I've got my stamp here. You can see how much water there is underneath that stamp And I'm just going to stamp it someplace on here To start off my wreath and look at how beautiful and watercolor that looks I can take a brush my silver brush number eight and Finish off the leaf but not perfectly no need to make it absolutely perfect Because it's all going to blend into a bunch of other leaves anyway This distress oxide ink. I've been doing a little research. I'm slow to the game This is my I have only bought two pads of it So I don't know much about them, but it's partially Acrylic and partially distress ink. So it's a little little properties of both and it does some really interesting mixing things So here I'm stamping part of like that bottom part that I just did I wanted to create that inside edge of the wreath So I just pushed part of that leaf stamp down And then I can join it all up with a little bit of water and just mush it around a little bit with a brush I'm gonna turn it and this is where the square comes in handy because you can start to Create that roundness by keeping all of those outside edges around the same distance away from the edge of That square card if you were to do a rectangle I'm just gonna tell you I tried it on a rectangle This is why I'm telling you to do it in the square tried it in a rectangle and I ended up with Oval's instead of round wreaths. So there you go. It's a little bit easier if you do it as a square So I'm just stamping now a couple times over a Little bit more of the ink so that I can then finish my painting Along here and just create some fun edges for my wreath There are a number of stamps in this thistle set that you can do this with and of course You can paint that thistle is the same way if I had thistle colors in the Distress oxide inks I might try a thistle But since I do not have a purple or a blue or anything other than red or green Because I got these as a treat for myself to practice with Christmas guards Yeah, then I can't do thistles. So here I'm gonna use a little bit more solid ink because I want a hard edge See that inside edge that it created It's just a little bit more detail when you don't use as much of the water with it so keep part of that ink as the just the thick ink and part of it as mushy and Have that water in it and you have the option then to do both so I'm gonna go around my My wreath with just stamping a little bit of the edge. I'm only pushing on that outside edge so that I get that little delicate kind of Contour to my wreath And if you have some areas that don't look perfect just throw some water on them Otherwise just do a little bit of stamping to create that beautiful outside edge I'm gonna throw a little bit more in here because I was noticing I was looking a little oval and not as roundy and I think the wreath is just about done now I've got this like I said I've got my my red got my fired brick and I'm gonna toss a little bit of this in here if you Like the look of what I'm doing here. It's going to melt into it a little bit I'm just doing a dab just a little tiny dots to make little berries Do it while it's wet if you want them to be rounder and harder lined Then wait till it's dry, and then it won't mush in as much. You could also do your berries with Stickles with all different kinds of products So I set that aside to dry so I can finish the card later but I'm going to show you a different stamp from the thistle set and this is one of the little fissile heads and This one I was skeptical that I could get this to work But when I did I thought this this is even a better stamp than that leaf to make a wreath and Once you start doing these you're going to be thinking okay How many colors could I do this with because I could I do a spring wreath a spring wreath Would be really pretty in some bright spring colors. There's just so much you can do. There's swags you can make with just a thistle stamp set Because look at these delicate edges. I can get with this little thistle head Isn't that beautiful and I can alternate using the the thicker pigment and The watered-down pigment to give myself hard edges and softer edges As I go around my wreath and I mean this is this is just highly addictive I can't tell you how many of these cards that I made already and I'm probably going to make a lot more because there's so much fun I might even do a whole bunch of them Like for one of my church groups or something because I want to have excuse to make more of them But I don't like giving everybody the same card. I know a lot of you guys love to make Like a hundred of the same thing and that's your Christmas card of the year I like having all of them different But for this particular thing I think I'd love to just sit and play with these stamps and see what kinds of wreath shapes I can get out of this set and some of the other Ellen Hudson sets too. She's got lots of different flower type things and That would be just a wonderful way to spend an afternoon. I could see myself wilding away way too much time But doing it with the craft assistant is of course super helpful. Sorry the colors getting all of a sudden really light here on the screen Maybe because my hand is moving so fast. I'm having so much fun doing all this crazy wild stamping So now I'm gonna take the brush and move some of that color around Just mush up a few areas and leave some of that outer edge. Ah now the colors coming back. Thank you camera and Soften up some of it, but leave some of those feathery feathery feathery areas So that I have a different kind of wreath edge And I like these distress inks or these distressed oxides because look at the different kinds of greens that you get There's that really light pale green and then that kind of thicker heavier darker green all out of peeled paint Which is one of my favorite distress colors, by the way And so again, I'm gonna drop some red little dots into the wet pigment So they're gonna be real soft and mushy and feel really Loose on top of all of this beautiful green pigment. I Have a feeling I might have to ask Santa Claus for some more distress oxides Yeah, because who doesn't need more of this in their life, right? So for my sentiment I pulled out this other set called modern Christmas It has a to and from that you could use but it also has these beautiful simple Merry Christmas and holiday cheer that are outlines of the words And I thought that would be a really classy thing to put on top of these panels And then I've got a really thin layer of black around each one of them And then I have that on a red card base to just accent that color And I think they're beautiful. I think they're just gorgeous Now since we are also talking about our other favorite Ellen Hudson products I have to tell you I could not live right now without these storage envelopes They're nice and thick and they now come in four sizes if you did not know that they have this teeny ones Little itty-bitties for small sets They have the regular size ones which they've had for a long time and all the Ellen Hudson products come in her envelopes And then there's these tall skinny ones that work for all my MFT sets because I'm getting a growing collection of them And then this one is from Winnie and Walter and it's a huge set and They have these really giant ones as well So there's four sizes to store all of your lovely stamps and I could not live without them So thank you for joining me for my lovely beautiful wreath cards today Be sure to go to my blog so you can pick up the link to the next stop on the hop celebrating Ellen Hudson's 11th birthday Yay for Ellen Hudson LLC could not do what I do without Ellen and all of the goodies That she has in the store that I have to buy talk to you guys later. Bye. Bye. Have a really awesome day