Stampin’ Up! Spooky, Batty Halloween Fun for the Happy Stampers Blog Hop

Mornin’, y’all –  welcome to another edition of the Happy Stampers Blog Hop. We have a sketch challenge this week – and it was a wild one – took me a minute to come up with an idea for this one, folks!  It’s our first hop with the Holiday Catalog LIVE – so everything that everyone uses today….you’ll be able to buy!  Holiday Catty or Annual….all of it’s up for grabs!  Be sure to check out all our hoppers today, okay?

Here’s the sketch we were all working from:

I might have gotten a little jiggy with our challenge this week! I wanted to do a Halloween card with new Holiday Catalog goodies, so I picked the Spooky Fun stamp set with its bundled Halloween Scenes Edgelits.  And I snagged a few batty images from Halloween Scares.  Take a look-see:

See?  I got the repeating shapes idea, don’t you think? 😉

My first task was to make the moonlit snowy background.  I cut a 1/2″ circle from the very top of a sticky note with my 1/2″ Circle Punch and adhered it in the top corner.  I also used a couple more sticky notes and freehand-cut a curve on the top of each one.  Those I laid down about 1/2 way down the card – they’d become my horizon and the start of the snow drifts.

I started sponging the sky with Marina Mist ink.  Then I came back with Night of Navy – leaving a “halo” around the moon.  Finally, I darkened it up with Elegant Eggplant.  The trick with this is to add the colors in layers – you can always add, but it’s pretty hard to take it away.  Take your time!

Then I moved my “hills” sticky notes down a little bit and offset them for the next set of hills.  I used my Elegant Eggplant sponge to ever-so-lightly “flick” some color above the sticky notes – that created my snowy drifts! 🙂

I pulled off the sticky notes and I had a dark and misty moonlit night, with snow drifts.  I matted the panel on Basic Black and then decided I needed some bats in the distance, so I added some with the little trio of bats from the Halloween Scares stamp set, in Smoky Slate ink.

The next step was to cut my tree silhouette in Basic Black, using the Edgelit die in the Halloween Scenes.  I used SNAIL on the large bottom portion and Multi-Purpose Liquid Glue under the branches and adhered it to the card front.

To make the smiling faces, I added all three pumpkin faces from the Spooky Fun stamp set to an acrylic block, inked them lightly with Whisper White Craft Ink and stamped them randomly all over the bottom of the tree panel.

The stamped bats on the top are stamped in Basic Black Archival Ink, using the bat-trio image in Halloween Scares.  I gave them all little tiny eyes with my Signo White Gel Pen.  I definitely needed some 3-d for the card, so…I cut out a bunch of the bats from Halloween Scenes.  I bent their little wings to look more bat-ish….up where they go into the body and down part way out the wing….

Using Liquid Glue, I adhered all but one bat to the card front.  As you can see, I gave them all white eyes, too.

Bats could have white eyes.

They could! 🙂

The last element to put together was the sentiment.  I stamped the sentiment from Spooky Fun in Elegant Eggplant on a piece of Whisper White and cut it with one of my Ovals Layering Framelits.  I sponged it all over – leaving it splotchy to match my misty-night feel and then stamped one little Basic Black Archival Ink bat – also from Spooky Fun.  Then I SNAILd it to a Silver Foil mat cut with a scalloped Ovals Framelits Die.

I wrapped some of the new Pumpkin Pie/Black Halloween Nights Baker’s Twine around the card front three times.  Then I popped the sentiment oval over the top with Stampin’ Dimensionals.  Then I tied a bow with two lengths of the Baker’s Twine and two of the Silver Metallic Thread and adhered it with some Liquid Glue.  Then I added that last bat.  Cuz he’s cute! 🙂  And that was it for the card front.

On the inside, I stamped a second Spooky Fun sentiment in Elegant Eggplant on a Whisper White panel.  Then I sponged all around the edges – very lightly! – with a little more of the Eggplant.  Some more Spooky Fun bats in Basic Black Archival ink finished it off.

I matted the panel on Basic Black and SNAILd it into my Pumpkin Pie card base.  Then I popped the card front on with Stampin’ Dimensionals and the card was done!

My Whisper White Medium Envelope got some Spooky Fun black bats on the front…

…and then I used a piece of the Halloween Night DSP to make an envelope flap.

Et Voila!  I sort of made this one up as I went along, but I…sort of love it!  The misty moon and the glowing (and highly realistic and life-like!!) white eyes of the bats really tickles me.  Have you ever been to the Congress Ave Bridge in Austin, TX in the early evening?  When the bats who live under the bridge head out for their night of mosquito hunting?  It’s an awful cool sight – go if you get the chance.  Until then, though, you can always make your own bat swarm with the fun Halloween sets in the 2016 Holiday Catalog!  Hope you like!

Card cuts and all the products you need to make this one for yourself are at the bottom of this post…

Now that you’ve seen my card, please take a little time to visit all the Happy Stampers Team blogs today!

If you click on the Next Blog button, you’ll go right to Jari Francis’ page.  And you can just click on the names below to go direct to all the blogs!

Amy Koenders

Mary Deatherage – YOU ARE HERE!

Jari Francis

Kristi Gray

Jaime Babarczy

Have fun on the Hop!

TTFN

Mary

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