Using Your Invested Craft Supplies to Take a Card Making Class featuring Lawn Fawn’s Create With Us Classes

Ever since Covid, there's been a growing trend of virtual craft classes where people "gather together" to watch and participate in either pre-recorded/live classes. Create With Us classes feature Lawn Fawn products and are typically taught by Jenn Shurkus and Kelly Marie Alvarez.

This isn't my first time taking one of these FREE classes. I have previously participated in the Create With Us: Scent With Love class and Create With Us: Pool Party class. There are quite a few others on my list to complete as well, such as Wheely Great Day, Ugly and Bright, and Purrfectly Wicked. I'm pretty behind in taking virtual classes due to the limited spare time I have while balancing a household with a 9 month old! However, I'm slowly but surely making time to get through the classes one by one.

For the class I completed this weekend (Create with Us: Procu-pine for You), it featured the Porcu-pine for You stamp set from Lawn Fawn. They usually feature a stamp set from the most recent Lawn Fawn release. In this case, I didn't have the porcupine stamps that they were using in class, and I wasn't really interested in purchasing them either, so I did what crafters do best and improvised using supplies I already have... which doesn't say much because I have A LOT (too much) and if I don't have one supply for a class, I most likely have a similar supply that I can use for the class. I really just wanted to make Valentine's Day cards... didn't matter what critter I used, but I wanted to use similar techniques that were showcased in the class.

First, because I didn't have porcupine stamps, I decided to use Lawn Fawn's Scent with Love and Scent with Love Add-on stamp sets which included critters with very similar poses, sentiments and extras in their stamp sets. Referring to the PDF printout and video from the class, I designed my cards using the skunks in Scent with Love. Instead of including punny sentiments that worked for porcupines, I used punny sentiments that worked for skunks.

I began my cards by stamping and coloring the skunk images with copic markers. I'd recently invested in a few more copics from my favorite card makers including Jenn Shurkus, Taylor from Taylored Expressions, and Jennifer McGuire, so I was excited to finally use them. I used references from previous Create With Us and Jenn Shurkus classes to learn the best way to color in the skunks. This was the first technique I wanted to work on so I ended up making 10-12 skunks using trial and error with my coloring and using different black inks. Realizing I didn't have a great black ink for copic coloring, I followed Jenn's recommendation to get the Jet Black ink from Lawn Fawn which is used for Copics and watercolors. I had to wait to order and receive the ink before restarting with coloring my images... but once the ink arrived, I revisited the images I had tried coloring and recolored and corrected them so that I could use them.

Next, I began using an alphabet set that I already had from Lawn Fawn but decided to invest in the set Jenn was using for this class (Henry's ABCs) as she uses it pretty often in these classes, and the die set was a nice font that I liked, so that was worth the investment. I had this come with my ink order.

Using the skunk stamp sets and alphabet set, I created punny phrases to go with the skunks - I really just referred to the sentiments included on the Scent with Love stamp sets and decided which word in the sentiment would be the focus for the card to mimic Jenn's cards. A technique she used that I've enjoyed using is ink blending the alphabet letters using an ombré effect, as well as glittering the letters with some loose Prisma Glitter. Yes, I did have to invest in that glitter too, as well as the Quickie Glue Pen adhesive to adhere the glitter to the letters... I promise those 4 things were the only new investments I made to take this class! Otherwise, I used COPIC colors I already had, dye inks (Catherine Pooler) and brushes I already had, stamps and dies I already had, and cardstock I already had. There's no reason to have the EXACT same supplies a creator uses, but if there are supplies they use to complete certain techniques, those tend to be worth the investment.

So using a few new supplies mixed with supplies I already ownerd, as well as the written and video instructions from the class, I came up with the following cards to mimic the cards from the class!