Miss Fancy Pants Designs

Fancy Friday Challenge: Cards

Welcome back to another Fancy Friday Challenge! Tomorrow is World Card Making Day and we want to celebrate! Join us in our challenge to create a greeting card. Here is what you need to do to enter.

Simply create a greeting card with any theme that you'd like—make sure to use at least some Fancy Pants products—and post it to our Facebook Wall between now and Oct. 8, 2011.

We will judge the cards and select three winners to each receive a prize package. The winners will also have their card featured on the blog.

*We will accept only one entry per person. Challenge is open to US and International residents. Entries are due by midnight MST, Saturday, October 8th, 2011. Cards posted to our wall prior to Sept. 30, 2011 do not qualify. We will post the three winners here on the blog on Tuesday, October 11, 2011, so be sure to check back then to see if you've won.

Sound good? Want some inspiration to get you started? Our Pocket Chicks have been busy creating just that. Check out these fun cards...

 

Thankful by Pamela Young

Thank You by Pamela Young

Potions Poisons by Yuki Shimada

Boo by Yuki Shimada

When Witches Go Riding by Yuki Shimada

Thank You Pam by Lisa Saunders

So Very Thankful by Lisa Saunders

Wishing You a Fab Birthday by Lisa Saunders

Just To Say Thank You by Lisa Saunders

 

New Arrival by Kim Watson

You Are My BFF by Kim Watson

Happy Birthday by Kim Watson

Merry Christmas To All by Kim Watson

You Rock Kiddo by Kim Watson

Friends by Rachel Tucker

Thankful by Rachel Tucker

Thanks You by Rachel Tucker

St. Nickolas by Suzanne Sergi

I Wish You A Mery Christmas by Suzanne Sergi

 

Okay, now are you feeling inspired? Ready to take the challenge? Happy creating and good luck! We can't wait to see what awesome Fancy cards you will create!

-Amy Peterman

Product Spotlight: Summer's End Rub-ons

I have to honestly say, I'm not really ready for summer to be over. Was the first day of Autumn last week already? I am definitely going to miss the warm days of summer, but I am thankful that there is beauty in the season of Fall and all that comes with it—sweaters, pumpkin lattes, snuggling with my sweetie in front of the fireplace—okay, maybe I am ready for Fall!

And speaking of Fall ... don't these rub-ons, from our Summer's End collection, just give you that vibe? Rub-ons can be so much fun to work with and when the designs are as cute as these, look out! Take a look at the fun Suzanne, Rachel and Guiseppa had with this week's Product Spotlight.

 

Friends by Suzanne Sergi
Suzanne explains, "On this page I used the Summer's End Printed Transparency as the overlay. The transparency is full of beautiful graphics, and I added just a few more details with the Summer's End rubons. The sweet brown bird in the lower right hand corner is actually a rubon. He made a cute addition to the ensemble in the corner. Also the yellow doily is a rubon as well.

The 'faux' stitches in the corner are also from this sheet. I adhered all of these images directly on top of the transparency. Super easy to adhere, and added some fun detail!  Lastly, I trimmed a portion from the Summer's End twill ribbon, and adhered the stitched rubon directly on top. So cute, and looks like it was stitched by hand!"

 

Jar of Hugs by Rachel Tucker
Rachel says, "I have used Fancy Pants rubons before in a mini album that was made from fabric. The Fancy Pants rubons are such great quality that they will transfer to just about anything, as you can see in this project, glass.
 
I want to share with you a project that I made for my husband for Fathers Day (here in New Zealand we celebrated Fathers day a few weeks ago). I called it a Jar of Hugs, because it is just that. I had the girls up early each morning for a week before school writing on little bits of paper what they love about their Daddy. My job was to then package them all up into little boxes and create the outside of the jar. I decided to use an old mason jar and leave the lid seal off so that my husband could just reach into the jar and pull out a hug. The Fancy Pants Summer's End range has beautiful neutral tones that are not too girly and therefore worked well for this project. The rubons were the perfect final touch. I cut the doily design in half and rubbed it directly onto the glass jar.  A couple of xxx were used as kisses by the hearts and the words, so much to be thankful for, were rubbed onto the paper surrounding the back of the jar."

 

Live Laugh Love by Guiseppa Gubler
Guiseppa says, "I love the versatility of rub ons and these Summer's End rub ons are so stinkin' cute ... very easy to use as well. I love layering, so that is what  I did on this layout. I applied rub ons directly to the background paper as well as rubbing them on patterned paper and cutting them out and using foam adhesive to raise them up.

As you can see, my layout has several dimensions to it. Using these rub ons have given my project the desired effect I wanted."

We hope you enjoyed our Pocket Chicks' creations today! Please come back again on Friday. We got another challenge that you won't want to miss!

-Amy Peterman

Fancy This: Blessing Canvas

Hello blog readers! I hope you all had a great weekend and are ready to get inspired:) I would like to show you today how to use all your leftover paper strips. I never throw any paper away because it could come in handy one day right? So after years of paper crafting I have naturally accumulated a LOT of paper that has been left over from previous projects.
I like to create small canvases for our home or to give as gifts to family and friends. The canvas today shows my mum with my then one year old son (he is nine now!) using one of my favorite collections, Summer's End. Let me step you through the creative process ...



Fancy Pants supplies:
Summer's End: Mother Earth paper
Summer's End: Windy Day paper
Summer's End: Growing paper
Summer's End: Cider paper
Summer's End: Fall Frames paper
Summer's End: Changing paper
Summer's End: Crisp paper
Summer's End: Strips paper
Summer's End: Glitter Cuts
Summer's End: Chipboard Elements
Beach Babe: Brads

Step 1:
Take lots of different leftover paper strips with different widths and use a border punch on a few of them (I have used several different punches). Ink the punched edges. (Excuse my desk with all the ink, paint and scribbles on it!)

Step 2:
Arrange all the strips on your background any way you like, alternating punched strips and straight strips. Glue down, turn your project to the back and with a craft knife cut off the overhanging sides.

Step 3:
Use some white paint and water to give the project a quick "white wash" to tie it all together. Embellish your project with photos, stickers, chipboard etc.

Tip: The flower on the project was also created with two punched paper strips. I simply glued the two strips together (offset the pattern), rolled the paper around a pencil, glued the ends together and folded the edges out. Put a brad or button in the middle and you have a flower!

I hope you enjoyed this tutorial and would love to see some projects posted on our facebook page using leftover paper!

-Katja Schneider

1 Product, 2 Ways: Summer's End Filter Embellishments

Hi All! I am so excited about today's post on the Fancy Pants Designs blog. I am always looking for various ways to stretch my products whether they are new to my stash or have been hanging around for way too long. So, when I learned that we were going to start doing a blog post dedicated to that very concept, I jumped on the chance to play along. Today we are going to get creative with the printed filter embellishments from our Summer's End line that debuted this past July.

I decided to create one layout with a more traditional usage of the filters and one layout that tries something a little bit different.

First up, a simple use of the filters.



In this layout I used the filters as mat pieces both behind the photo as well as layered with the coordinating design embellishment die cut pieces. Some filter pieces I left as they were, while with others, I layered buttons, die cuts, and stitching.



In my second layout, I wanted to create these little poms poms to hang from a banner.



The filter embellishment paper is nice and thin, which makes it easy to fold and manipulate. To make each pom pom, first choose which filter patterns you want to use. Then you will punch out 6 circles of the same size. For my pom poms, I used two different patterns, but you could also punch all 6 from a single pattern.





**note - to use punches with the filter papers, it's best to lay them on top of a piece of cardstock and punch through both the filter and cardstock together.**

Then you will take each circle and fold it in half.



Take one corner of the half-circle and fold it up to the middle of the arc, like this.

Flip the folded piece over and fold in the opposite corner so that you end up with a cone shape.





Here's what it looks like from the top of the cone.



After you have all six circles folded, adhere them to a punched circle (slightly smaller than the original size of each of the "petals" is best).





Decorate with buttons or brads in the center of the pom pom.



Once I finished all my pom poms, I decided to string them across my layout like a banner. I'm loving the variation on the banner concept this gave me!



The pom poms could be clustered, made with various sizes, or even created in a scalloped fashion by using a scalloped circle punch/die for the "petals." The possibilities are endless, as are the many ways you can create with Fancy Pants filter embellishments. I hope this has inspired you to go try something new with your filters today!

-Allison Landy

Product Spotlight: Summer's End Glitter Cuts

Do you know what I love about this week's Product Spotlight? Well, not only are these Summer's End Glitter Cuts, gorgeous (these die-cut shapes are printed on transparency and hit with a sparkly layer of glitter) ... they also make, creating a beautiful layout quickly, a snap! Take a look at Iris and Vicki's creations. You will ooo and ahhh over them!

 

So Very Thankful by Iris Babao Uy
Iris says, "Glitter cuts have always been one of my 'must have' items from Fancy Pants. It adds a beautiful luster and shine to your page like no other. I love the way it blended with the colors of my page. I also fell in-love the with doily patterns in this collection the moment I saw it. I cut up several small pieces of it and also cut up a border shape for it at the top portion of the layout."

So Very Thankful by Vicki Chrisman
Vicki says, "I absolutely love the "Summers End" line.. and the Summer's End Glitter Cuts are no exception! The Glitter Cuts made my layout design a breeze! When creating this layout, I only used small pieces of the patterned paper and minimal other elements, as my title and large glitter accents did all the work. They added texture and interest, and frame my photo without taking away from it.
I also love the fact that the spray ink, and glaze I added to my background paper, show through the Glitter Cuts in places. I also added a paper element to the center of the Glitter Cut piece in the (top left) with foam squares. Being able to see under the Glitter Cuts  in places, and also to be able embellish on top of them, really creates amazing dimension. It's a great effect."

We hope you come back again on Friday! We've got a brand new monthly post we've been dying to share with you!

-Amy Peterman

Fancy This: 2 Page Layout

Hi everyone. I’d like to show you a project that’ll give you the opportunity to put your photos all together—holiday ones for example—without having to create a mini album, but still with enough space to put many of them.



Fancy Pants supplies:
Off to School: Strips patterned paper
Off to School: Numbers patterned paper
Off to School: Alpha Sticker
Off to School: Element Sticker
Off to School: Tab Sticker
Off to School: Buttons
Off to School: Filter embellishments
Oct. 31: Shadows patterned paper
Oct. 31: Glitter Cuts
Oct. 31: Rub-ons
Summer's End: Fall Frames patterned paper
Summer's End: Design Embellishments
Summer's End: Canvas Trim
Saint Nick: Glitter Cuts

Other supplies:
Paint
Ink
Mask
Masking Tape
A punch

First of all, choose the photos you’d like to scrap and print them in black and white to get a more homogenous result. Select the papers’ colors —for my project, I chose blue, red and yellow papers. You can use papers from separate Fancy Pants’ collections if you want to. 

Vertically cut one paper in two and festoon them to create borders. Use your masking tape to stick these two pieces on the background paper.

If the printed paper doesn’t match your project’s subject or colors, paint it with some gesso first, and then with any other color you'd have chosen.

Arrange the photos: the biggest must be placed in the center so that it immediately draws the attention. The others must be smaller and arranged diagonally on the side pages—a group at the bottom of the page and the other one at the top of the opposite page, to get a visual effect. 



Embellish your layout and don’t hesitate to go beyond the collection you’re using to find your colors.



Decorate the first page with the title—here I took different alphabets: a rub on from Oct. 31’s collection and an alphabet from Summer's End.

Create a heart shape and fill it with various-colored buttons.

And filters embellishments will definitely look great as suns on this first page.

Thanks to this creation, you’ll be able to put together your most beautiful photos and to work on a single and dedicated theme: trip, birthday, portraits ... It also shows you that all Fancy Pants’ collections can be combined and perfectly match. 

Give free rein to your creativity!

-Bénédicte Raphalen

Inspiration from the Everyday: Magazine Design

While flipping though my September 2011 issue of Real Simple magazine, I came across a page that immediately caught my eye. Both the design of the page and the concept of telling a story by focusing on numbers caught my attention. I decided to create a layout using the layout of this magazine page as a foundation for my layout. I created a sketch in my mind based on the magazine page.

Plus, the most important part of the inspiration of my layout was sharing information about my family while using numbers as a starting point for each item. Coming up with the numbers was a nice exercise and I think this will be a fun layout to look back on in years to come.

When I was putting the layout together, I knew that I wanted to generally use the design of the magazine page to influence the design on my page. Rather than just draw straight lines to separate columns like the magazine page, I looked though the Fancy Pants Designs Summer's End stickers, rub-ons and chipboard embellishments to find elements that could be the dividing lines. There were several straight line embellishments that fit perfectly into the space. It was fun mixing a wide variety of embellishments on this layout.

Next time you are flipping through your favorite magazine, be on the lookout for a page design that may spark an idea for your next layout!

-Lisa Andrews

Product Spotlight: Summer's End Printed and Flocked Transparencies

Stumped on what to do with transparencies? Well, with today's Product Spotlight, you will be stumped no longer! We asked Pocket Chicks, Kim, Trish and Jen, to create with our Summer's End Flocked and Printed Transparencies, and look what they came up with!

Flocked Transparency

Printed Transparency

 

Gift Boxes by Kim Watson
Kim says, "Having a few thank you gifts on my to-do list at the moment, I thought I'd take advantage of this assignment using some of the cute flocked transparency from the Summers End line and try my hand at making some gift boxes. Having a die-cutting machine on hand made the process so easy for the first box where I used the transparency as the window on top of the box.

The flocked flowers on the transparency add such great texture & color and I love how my thank card slips so neatly into the slots on the back. 

For the second one I used the transparency for the four walls.

I scored the transparency & folded it with patterned paper ends, resulting in a gorgeous gift box. Unique, hand crafted packaging in a jiffy, an easy way to add special flair to any gift."

 

Just Around The Riverbend by Trish Harwick
Trish says, "I honestly cannot get enough of Summer 2011! This is the first year that I haven't been chomping at the bit for the kids to return to school (and me back to work!)—as I go out kicking and screaming, I am loving the fun colors and patterns in the Summer's End collection! The frame on the printed transparency inspired me to create a frame around my photos. Then I stitched it to give it some dimension! I love the off-color swirls on the dark background; the really pop out!"

Thankful by Jen Martakis
Jen explains. "For this layout I used my transparency to add visual interest to my background. Transparencies are so much fun to play with. You can use them as your background, or as a substitute for patterned paper (or even just over it for extra dimension!) and even to create elements and titles."

We hope this gives you lots of great ideas for using those transparencies in your stash. Come back again Friday for our newest post, Inspiration From The Everyday.

-Amy Peterman

Back To School Challenge Winner

Thanks to all of you who took our Fancy Friday Back To School Challenge! We have a winner!

Congrats to Carrie Walz!

That's Class by Carrie Walz

And, our random draw winner is ... Silvia D-I.

Carrie and Silvia please send an email to: [email protected] with the following information:

1. Name of Contest (Back To School Challenge)
2. Your name
3. Address where your prize should be sent

Thanks again to all who participated! And be sure to keep coming back. We'll have another challenge at the end of the month!

-Amy Peterman

Fancy This: Gardening Gift

   
Being the organized person that I am, I’m now thinking of Christmas gifts. I love making gifts and hate that last minute panic in December, so I like to start early. Today, I am going to show you this gardening gift I have made using products for the Saint Nick collection. This range is stunning but doesn’t just have to be kept for your Christmas projects.

Fancy Pants Supplies:
Saint Nick: Patterned Papers
Saint Nick: Embellishments Cards
Saint Nick: Design Embellishments
Saint Nick: Chipboard Elements
Saint Nick: Tab Stickers

Other Supplies:
Ink
Marker
Gardening Twine
Punches and Dies

Instructions:
I started off with taking a tin with a sealable lid. I keep all of these coffee bean tins when I’ve used the beans, but you could use another type of tin, jar or box to decorate. The gardeners journal was brand new and sealed in a thrift store and perfect to be altered as it has all the different sections and pockets inside, but a notebook or binder could also be used.



I covered the tin first. The paper was cut to size and stuck using double sided sticky tape.  I decided to tidy the edges up by adding a scalloped edge top and bottom.



I punched a large scalloped circle to decorate the lid. I always like to ink my edges. I just think is finishes it off and looks much nicer.



I made a tag next. I love these alpha stickers that come on the Tab Stickers. I’m a big fan of mini alphas. I wanted them to stand out a little more though so stuck them to the red patterned paper first and then cut them out to show a red border.
 


Here’s the finished tag. I’ve used embossing folders on the patterned papers for added texture. This then shows even better when you ink the embossed papers.



I found it best to stick the tag to the tin first. I used 3-d foam tape. I then tied the gardeners twine around the tin a couple of times and tied it to the tag.



Now the tin is made I move on to the journal. The journal is covered in patterned paper and I replaced the pink cord that keeps the file together with the same twine. The cover is then decorated to match the tin. And here you have a really nice gift. I bought some packets of seed to go in the tin so the gift is now complete.


 

Thanks for stopping by today.

-Lisa Saunders