Planning for a Tropical Get-Away

Hello friends~Kathy here with a little sneak peak and inspiration using a new and upcoming tropical themed clear stamp set from Itsy Bitsy for personalizing your planner/agenda/calendar. Where I live, decorating planners is very popular right now...so I thought I would give it a try...and guess what? I love doing it! Who knew that having a "to do" list could be so much fun, lol?!? Even though we are leaving summer behind here and heading into the cooler weather of the fall season, sometimes we all just need to dream of a relaxing tropical get-away, am I right?

For this project I started with 2 blank planer pages, the new stamp set you can see here, along with paper from the Happy Birthday paper pad, Black Chalk Ink, Green Pearl and Gold Pearl Pigment Inks, thin white card and some washi tapes.

I stamped the images out that I knew I wanted to use in the black and green inks on the thin card and applied the washi tape as borders directly to the pages.

By using the boxes on my planner pages as a guide to trace with permanent marker on a scrap sheet of acetate, I cut my own stencil using a craft knife and then used that stencil to keep my ink blending within the individual rectangles. I used Gold for the middle row and Green for the bottom row. The camera doesn't really capture the beautiful shimmer these inks have because of their Pearl quality, but they are gorgeous in person and blend oh so beautifully!!!

I fussy cut the tropical leaves that I stamped in the Green Pearl and adhered them along the top edge of the page, trimming off the overhang just like you would with a sticker.

I colored the rest of the images using Colored Pencils, but then decided that I needed one more image... so, using a large flat piece of blank red rubber as a mirror image stamp, I stamped and transferred the flamingo image so that is was reversed -that way I had one facing the right and one facing the left. Some of the fine detail gets lost when you do that, but I still like the way it turned out!

Using that same rectangle template from the ink blending step, I traced and cut the patterned paper into the perfect sized rectangle to fill the spaces between my ink blended blocks. Then I glued my stamped, colored and fussy cut out images on top.

I did some ink blending on the left panel, tore a tiny piece of tan paper to act as the sand under the palm tree and glued that on to help ground the image so it didn't look like it was floating. I also stamped and then colored the tiny hibiscus flowers directly on the page in the top squares as bullet points for my organizing my "to-do" list.

The two patterns I chose from the paper pack were perfect for matching with the inks.

And I think the pencil colors blended very nicely to achieve depth and dimension on the hand-made "stickers".

If ya gotta stay organized, why not personalize it and make it pretty all at the same time? Let me know if you try something similar to your daily paper agenda/planner or calendar! Until next time, happy crafting with Itsy Bitsy and be sure to check out all the crafty goodness available both in person or in their webstore online.