Taylor's Cupcakes & Piney-Swapp Snowflakes!

Hi everyone! I took yesterday off to finish my Dirty Dozen projects for next month so I've been hard at work creating stuff for next month's FUN theme! I haven't forgotten about the beano tree; I have one more beano ornament to post, then my xmas cards, and then I'll post the tree! I need to edit the pics, and then get them uploaded!

Tonite I'm back with a Taylored Expressions cupcake card; I borrowed friend Carol Halvorson's set (Thanks HB!) and had so much fun coloring in these little cupcake guys! I paired cupcakes from the "Home Sweet Home" & "Seasons Sweetings" sets up with some fun October Afternoon Christmas paper and a transparency snowflake, which I am officially calling "Piney Swapp" snowflakes. They remind me of the Heidi Swapp Ghost shapes, but I MADE them myself with Pine's (Heather Nichols) "Snowfall"Papertrey set & some heavy transparency sheets called "Crystal Clear" Cardstock from Flourishes. Tonite I have a fun tutorial for you on how to make these. I've meant to post this for a week now but had to re-do all my tutorial photos because I couldn't get good shots of the transparency snowflakes! I finally discovered that they photograph better on red cardstock, so snuggle in, I'm going to show you how I made these! It makes Pine's Snowfall set even a better value, since you can create cool, custom sized transparency embellishments with the different snowflakes from this set!

Here's what you'll need:

Flourishes Crystal Clear Cardstock

White Embossing powder

An embossing buddy (eliminates static)

Pinefeather Press's Papertrey "Snowfall" set

White Pigment Ink

A heat gun

A block to hold the stamp

Rub the embossing buddy all over your transparency sheet. It contains a powder that will eliminate static from the transparency.

Stamp your snowflake in white pigment ink. Here I chose the largest snowflake from the set.

Since pigment ink is sticky and slow to dry, you can dump white embossing powder on it and it will stick to your stamped image easily.

Dump the embossing powder off, and flick the back of the transparency a few times with your fingernail, to get all the excess embossing powder off the transparency. Any remaining embossing powder also be brushed away with a small paintbrush or wet q-tip.

Turn on your heat gun, let it warm up a bit, and then hold it over the snowflake so that the embossing powder melts. Your transparency will curl a bit from the heat...don't panic, it's okay! We can easily fix it later.

Take your scissors and cut around the snowflake points. Don't get too caught up in trimming perfectly; it won't really matter anyway. Cut quickly around the edges of the flake until it's all cut out.

After you've cut the whole flake out, run your heat gun over it again quickly. The flake will flatten out nicely!

Punch holes in the transparency flake and add it to your projects! Decorate with buttons or glitter, or rhinestones, or whatever your heart desires!

These are addicting to do; they add such a fun touch to your projects. I am going to make a bunch tomorrow and make Chrismas tags with them.

So that's my story for tonite. It's snowing like crazy here, so I thought this was an appropriate post for today!

Happy Saturday, all!

L.