Wednesday, July 29, 2015

Cantina Blog Hop - notebook for a fountain pen and cards

Thanks for joining me today on the Cantina blog hop which celebrates the July 2015 Club Scrap kit - Cantina!  I hope you enjoyed hopping over to my blog from Hetty - if you want to start at the beginning, check out the full list of bloggers over at Club Scrap.

The sunny orange in this kit is remarkably complementary to my new orange pen and notebook, so I decided to make this sweet little case to protect it and carry my pen with me.  It's hard to find a pre-made folio to hold these larger pens, so this is why I love that I can make my own!

When it's open, you can see the pen loop on the left hand side (since I'm a righty).  This is a very easy construction - just two pieces of book board separated by a 1/2 inch gutter. I decorated with a cutout from the Lite kit.

The notebook slides out of a pocket (my pocket tutorial is here - this pocket is 1/4 inch wider than the book height), and I glued a piece of ribbon behind the pocket first, so I would have a handy little place marker.

I've recently decided to dip into fountain pens (pun intended!), and the Lamy Al Star or Safari ones are my pen of choice for now, since they come in so many bright colors (orange, purple, blue/green, neon coral, and more!) and they are affordable.  Many also have matching ink colors, too.  The Clairefontaine notebooks are also reasonably priced, and work well with fountain pen inks.

At the end of the book project, I had some odd scraps left over, and decided to play with making some cards.  The Watercolor Blossoms stamp set from the 2013 retreat seemed perfect to try out Kay's watercolor technique with my gelatos.  I got out a big sheet of paper, and just started playing.  This image is under 4 inches tall, so you could cut your paper into strips to make it easier to work with.

As you can see, some turned out fabulous, and some did not.  There is a bit of a trick to making sure you have just enough water to activate the watercolors, but not so much that things get splotchy.  Some images are fixable - I used a brush after the fact to put some more color on the left hand blossom in this shot.

When all was said and done, I have a lot of floral panels to make sweet cards like this one for my neighbor.

Our next stop along the way is Dishing with Janet.  Hope you enjoyed my post and the entire hop!  Hope to see you next month.

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