Special Guest - Julee Tilman

Happy Thursday, Whimsy friends!

Today we welcome the lovely Julee Tilman to the blog!

Hi crafty friends! I'm super excited to be a Special Guest at Whimsy Stamps this month. They have so many wonderful stamps and dies and I have had so much fun creating with them! November is one of those months where I kind of naturally flip back and forth between autumn and Christmas in my creating, so today I'm going to focus on fall cards and I'll bring you some winter inspiration in my next guest post.

Gnomes and coffee are two of my favorite things in the stamp world right now. So for today's cards I chose to use the Gnome So Thankful and Pumpkin Spice Pandas sets.

These little gnomes make me smile, so for my first card I decided to create a scene card with the mushroom house, sign, apple barrel, and leaning gnome images in Gnome So Thankful.  I started by stamping the mushroom house on a panel of cardstock, then free handing a little path coming from the door and extending the hill line as needed with a black detail pen. When this was finished, I colored in the trail with Copic markers and then stamped and colored the other images and fussy cut to determine placement. Once I decided how to lay them out, I masked off the hill area and the house and blended the autumn sky with candied apple, spiced marmalade, and  fossilized amber distress inks. To finish off, I colored in the grassy hill and added a few little details with Copic markers.  

To put it all together, I layered the gnome on top of the sign, then stamped the welcome and gnome sentiments. Then it was a matter of gluing down my additional images and popping up the gnome and  sign he's laying on with dimensional tape. I finished off with some glossy accents on the apples.

I had so much fun ink blending on that card that  I decided to do another ink blended background for my background. This time I blended squeezed lemonade, mustard seed, crackling campfire, and ground espresso distress inks, then flicked a bit of water on just the ground espresso layer to give a little texture to the "dirt". I pulled the pumpkin image from the Gnome So Thankful set and stamped directly on my blended background, then again on cardstock. I colored the stamp and leaves and fussy cut just those parts, then layered onto the stamped image on my background.

The panda and cup are separate images from the Pumpkin Spice Pandas set. I didn't want a jack-o-lantern look, so I stamped the cup image a second time in no line coloring ink then colored in the pumpkin portion with Copics and fussy cut to piece on top of the cup image. Then I colored the sweet little pumpkin head panda and layered on top of the cup, covering up any lines from the panda on the other image.  I finished by popping up the panda and cup with foam tape and then adding the Everything Pumpkin Spice sentiment to the blended background.

Thanks so much for stopping by today! I hope you've enjoyed these autumn creations as much as I enjoyed creating them! I'll be back next week with a little Whimsy Stamps winter flair.

Thank you, Julee, for this adorable inspiration!

To see more of Julee's work, visit her on Instagram and her blog.