Halloween | My Inky Paws

Have you used mini pizza boxes to create treat packaging with? While Stampin’ Up! recently discontinued theirs, I had a few packages left to play with and designed a cute windowed box for Halloween treats. These little boxes are very versatile, having both a glossy side and a matte side that let you customize your look, and at 3.5 inches square and 0.8 inches tall they are a great size for gifting to your special recipients. If you don’t have any on hand, you can find them easily with an online search.

The first thing I did was cut a scalloped circle window using the Circle Nesting Die set. Cut from the back (for me this was the glossy side) to avoid a little indentation from the edge of the die, unless you want that look as part of your design.

Next, grab your blending brushes, a Stampin’ Spritzer filled with water, the ink pads you want to use, and a little bit of a shimmery or metallic acrylic paint. With a toothpick, just pick up a bit of the shimmer paint and swirl it into the Spritzer and then shake. It might not look like much until you get it spritzed onto your project and then you’ll see lots of shimmery goodness!

Since we’re doing watercolor, we need to wet the matte side of the box (pre-wetting) to give our ink a buffer to slide across before depositing dye into the surface of the paper. Give your box a good spritz where you are going to begin, swirl some ink onto your blender brush, and add some color! Change colors (I use a different brush for different color families) and repeat, blending colors together as you wish. Even Memento black will work with watercolors so you can get some lovely depth of color that way, too. When you are done, place your box between some scrap paper and add a book or other weight to the top and let it dry.

While you’re waiting for the box to dry and flatten, cut a piece of window acetate to 3 inches square and set it aside. You can take this time to create any die cuts you wish to use for decoration and stamp your sentiment/name tags, too.

Once your box is ready, it’s time to flip it over and adhere the window pane to the back side of the scalloped hole. Then stamp your box as you wish, and add your die cuts, embellishments, sentiment bar as you wish! Once you are finished decorating then fold your box and fill it with a favorite candy. Treat boxes are always a hit when I gift them. I hope yours are too!!

The Live tutorial is up on My Inky Paws Facebook page and Supplies list is here. Thanks for hanging out with me! Happy Crafting to You and see you next week with a new project!!

This week we started exploring some Halloween cards with the Festive & Bright Bundle and also brought in the spider web as a guest star from Frightful Tag dies.

This is a card that combines a lot of fun techniques, looks like you spent hours on it, and comes together super quick so you can make several in one sitting. I love it when that happens!

Crumb Cake is what I chose as the card base, with Very Vanilla writing panel and card front. You can see I used a Basic White Envelope as I need to place an order and restock my Very Vanilla envelopes. whoops! It’s ok though as the spider web is white so coordinates just fine.

The hats die from Festive & Bright Bundle is stamped along one side of the card front. Affix the card front to the card base and then die cut both layers with the right side of the hat die from the Festive Finishes Dies. I love how thoughtful Stampin’ Up! was with these dies. You can use the right and left sides together to create a stand-alone die cut, or use use one to create an edge!

While I was die cutting the card edge I also cut a matching piece out of scrap paper to use as a mask. The edge of the writing panel on the inside was masked with this scrap and blending brush used with Cinnamon Cider and Cajun Craze to give some depth and shading to the edge before it was adhered to the inside of the card.

The spiderweb was cut from Basic White and I gave it a shimmer with some Wink of Stella. Alternately you could cut this piece from some shimmer card stock. Spooky is one of the sentiments in the Festive & Bright bundle and it’s stamped with Versamark on a piece of Basic Black cardstock from my scrap bin. I chose gold embossing powder, but it would also look great with any of our metallics or white. Affix the sentiment to the spider web and then a couple of dimensionals on the back side of the spider web hold it up off the card to give some shadow behind it.

I gave the hats and brooms a bit of color with Crumb Cake light and dark Stampin’ Blends and then added a few touches of shimmer with Wink of Stella (because isn’t everything better with WoS?)

That’s it! The Live tutorial is up on My Inky Paws Facebook page, and start to finish with me chatting is only about 27 minutes. Told you it was a quick card! Supplies list is here.

Thanks for hanging out with me! Happy Crafting to You!!