That's MISTER Cardmaker, to you!: Mr Cardmaker finds Coffee to be a Great Substitute for...well, ANYTHING, Really

Week FOUR of my guest designer spot at Coffee Loving Cardmakers! I'm having a great time, and I hope you're having fun, too!

For this week, I made this--

I love these warm colors, and they fit the message just perfectly. I love substituting images for letters, and a steaming coffee cup says "hot" just perfectly. I bet if I wanted to say "cool" instead, I could substitute a couple of popsicles for the Os. How fun would THAT be? So fun, and really effective.

I pulled the sentiment stamps from a Concord & 9th stamp set. The glittered letters are cut with Momenta dies, and the coffee cup die is from Li'l Inker Designs, which has sadly closed up shop.

This cup die is my go to.

Here, I pulled out my ancient paper crimper, and gave the die cut cup some texture. If you've been crafting for some years, you probably have a crimper collecting dust somewhere. I will often crimp a panel of cardstock to use as padding for a heavily embellished card to protect it in the mail, but other than that, this may be the first project to see a crimper in many a year. I was happy to find a use for the thing!

The stencil is from Tim Holtz, and I love it. Tim's stencils are more scaled to use on a tag, but because these circles are so rough around the edges, it's super easy to extend to bigger cardstock panels, like I did here. Man, I have really become quite the fan of stencils lately. They're inexpensive, and really versatile.

Putting the card together was quick and easy, until I got to the stamped sentiment strips. I did a bit of experimentation, and I was happy with what I finally landed on.