We have a great giveaway and because it was my birthday last Sunday I add an extra personal giveaway to the event. OH-MY, are you lucky today!

I bet you are curious to see what those giveaways include so before I take you to the small tutorial I created for you, here’s what you can win.

One lucky commenter will win Jessica’s Cascading Leaves stencil and Tree of Life stamp. All comments on all the blog hop participants count – so make sure to visit everyone and leave some kind words. The list and links of the blog hop team members is at the end of this post.

And then there’s my personal birthday-giveaway: a packet of Autumn/Halloween related papers, ephemera & embellishments. I also include 10 of my art-postcards and a little notebook.
This giveaway goes to one commenter on this blog.

Jessica gave us the title “Frightful Fall” to work with for this bloghop… eeeckkk. I understand where the ‘frightful’ comes from, I have a lot of American friends and bloggers among my followers, but we don’t celebrate Halloween in The Netherlands so this theme was quite a challenge for me! I decided to throw my birthday in the mix and make a card that you can use to send to someone who celebrates a birthday at Halloween. Or, when you alter the sentiment, this could be a card to invite your friends to a Halloween party. Are you in the mood yet?

Well, let’s move on to the tutorial then:

• Cut a heavy white paper or cardstock to card size (this example is approx. 5″ x 7.5″)
• Paint the background with orange acrylic paint. You could also take a piece of orange card stock for the basics, but I like the texture of the paint strokes on the background.

• Next, stamp with Versamark and Jessica Sporn’s stamp Krishna
• Emboss the image with black embossing powder.

The Shiva image does not look frightful or scary at all, and because I want this to be some sort of ‘scary’ card I looked for images of ‘scary eyes’… After flipping through many (many!) magazines, cutting out all sorts of eyes, I still had not found what I was looking for so I went online and found some drawings that I could use the eyes from.

• Give the face a different, more scary look by gluing different eyes over the stamped image.

• Next, take Jessica Sporn’s Hand stencil and find the first hand you want to use. Cover the surrounding openings/hands with paper so that you cannot accidentally stamp onto these also.

• Stamp and emboss the image of the hand, coming from the edge, with black embossing powder. You could also use black acrylic paint or paint spray, but I like the glossy shine that the heated embossing powder shows.
• Repeat the above step, using different images of hands.

• Write a text/sentiment on your card (alternative: print and cut strips of the texts, use alphabet stickers etc.) I found the following texts that you could use:
  – Have a frightful & delightful birthday.
  – (You’re invited to) a trick or treat BOO-thday.
  – Have a SPOOKtacular birthday.
  – May your Halloween birthday be less terrifying than aging.
• Ink the edges of the card (hold your paper at an upright angle and run it against the edge of your inkpad)
• Splattering some black ink or paint on the card makes for a more scary/spooky look and finishes the card off.

I hope you enjoyed my Halloween birthday tutorial.
Now, make sure you leave me a comment if you like to be in the draw for both giveaways and visit the other members and comment there to enlarge your chance to win the Cascading Leaves stencil and the Tree of Life stamp.

Marit Barentsen (you’re here)
Lizzy Wurmann
Sherry Canino
Kristin Van Valkenburgh
Denise Alloca
Jessica Sporn

The giveaway closes on Monday (October 10) at 9 PM EST (for the Dutchies that’s 3 AM on Tuesday)  Jessica announces her winners in her Tuesday blog post (October 11) and I will post the name of the winner of my extra giveaway in my blog post on Wednesday, October 12.