Stamping with Leaves

Today I want to show you how fun leaves can be! And how much learning how to stitch can really add to your designing arsenal.

For the simple, no fuss card maker — here is a simple and clean design. The leaf is from the stamp set Floating Leaves. You can stitch your cards with a pen. It doesn’t really matter if the lines aren’t perfect, heck, I can’t stitch straight myself! But, the faux stitching really adds pop to the card!

Here I stamped the leaf, also from the Floating Leaves set, onto a tear out of a book and colored it in with prismacolor pencils and baby oil.

Yes, baby oil! I did try to search for gamsol or odorless mineral spirits at my LSS, but I gave up and tried baby oil instead since I have heard that it achieves the same results. I’ve been hooked ever since! When you color with your pencils, start light. Color in circular strokes over your entire image with the lightest color first. Then, choose a darker color and only color in the outer edges and in towards the center but not all the way. Finally, choose a darker accent color and just color the outlines. Now comes the fun part, take your blender and dip it into your baby oil, in small circular motions, blend all the colors together. The baby oil will smooth out any hard edges and make the colors flow right into each other! My lightest color here was yellow. I did a reverse and colored the middle with red and the outer with a dark olive color… then blend, blend, blend. It looks like any old Autumn leaf in New York!

I stitched a frame around the leaf and went over it verrrry lightly with a green pencil to make it more visible.

Last but not least is this fun collage with the leaf from All Year Round. I wanted to try a different, but hot color combo – grey, yellow, and blue! Funny, this started off as the traditional 9 squares lined up perfectly lay out, but Audrey kept sneaking her tiny little fingers into my workspace and messing things up. I got annoyed and just jumbled it up together and it looked even more interesting that way! (Thanks Audrey!) I did some random stitching and I think it came out great — and very different!

Hope you enjoyed these leafy creations!

Kryssi