You Sweeten My Life

December 16, 2018 0 Comments

Hello and Happy Holidays!

I am Monico (that’s with an O) from ME Studio Designs and I am thrilled to be sharing a few projects with you as Guest Designer for this month with Dare 2B Artzy!

I reside in the Chicago area, having lived in or in the suburbs of Chicago all my life.  Scrapbooking, card making, and paper crafting have been my passion for the last 10 years.  I started scrapping with a group of ladies at my job and was introduced to a whole new world of friendship, fellowship, sisterhood… oh, and of course shopping.  In my professional life I am a learning and development administrator for a public child welfare system and have proudly served children, youth and their families for over 25 years.  I am constantly on the go, Go, GO, as are many of you.  I started scrapbooking and card making to express my artistic creativity and as a healthy outlet for stress relief and self-care, which is so needed when working in helping professions.  Although I am now responsible to ensure high quality training programs for front-line staff, supervisors, and foster parents to protect children and help them return home or achieve another type of permanency, I am truly a trainer at heart.  I love teaching, coaching and helping others achieve their goals.  I started a YouTube channel and in addition to posting tutorials I started posting product reviews, interview and demonstrations at craft shows.  This is how I met Cindy and Kendra when I asked if I could do a brief interview at the Dare 2B Artzy booth which has led to this great opportunity to be a Guest Designer.  Enough about me, let jump into the first project!

———-

Cindy was kind enough to give me the Cup of Cheer.  I loved it and purchased the matching die.  To complete this project, I decided to shop my stash (somedays I am not sure if I am a crafter or a hoarder! ?).  I used an 80 lb. pre-folded white card base and layered it with a teal scalloped mat that I first ran through my die cutter machine using a 3D embossing folder with a quilted pattern to give it some texture.

I then stamped the mug, the whipped cream and steam curls on 80 lb. card stock and colored them with alcohol markers.  I stamped the mug on silver glittered card stock fussy cut the handle and the upper and lower rims of the mug attached.  I then paper pieced the glittered onto the mug and secured it with a strong matte glue.

I assembled the whipped cream on top of the mug and adhered it to the teal embossed layer on the card with foam tape to pop them up, so they would stand out from the layer and card base.  Next, I adhered the steam curls and decided to cut the shape out again, this time in vellum, and slightly offset is to give the desired effect.

I raided my embellishment stash and added snowflakes and sequins of varied shapes and sizes in shades of blue and silver keeping with the December Dare 2B Artzy theme of Winter.  I adhered the sequins with a strong matte finishing liquid glue.  Then, I stamped the sentiment on lightweight white card stock and layered that with a scrap piece of the silver glittered cardstock and placed the sentiment on a slight angle to give a little more visual interest and adhered it to the teal layer with a tape runner.  Finally, I went over the mug and whipped cream with a shimmer pen.

This concludes my first post (yay ME!)

You can see my video here!

I look forward to sharing again with you later in the month.  Be blessed.

Monico Eskridge – ME Studio Designs

Also in dare2bartzy.com/blog