Coffee Loving Papercrafters

Hello!  We’re so excited to meet our 2nd Guest Designer for December, Julee Tilman!

Hi friends old and new! My name is Julee Tilman and I’m so honored to be one of the December Guesties! (Happy dance!!!)  To say that coffee and I are besties is probably a bit of an understatement! My dad had me convinced as a child that if I drank coffee it would turn my blonde hair black. So my coffee loving life didn’t start until I left for college, right about the same time I was introduced to stamping. I remember buying a stylus and a bone folder (both of which I still have) at my first stamp party over 25 years ago. I was hooked and I’m beyond thrilled that there are now so many beautiful coffee loving stamps and this wonderful coffee loving community where I can combine my two passions!

I’ve been blogging since 2007 over on my blog Poetic Artistry and have had the honor of illustrating over 30 coffee, tea, and cocoa inspired clear and digital stamp sets over my 11 years as one woman wonder of Verve Stamps. I’ve taken a break from business, but still love to stamp and am keeping busy with my two adorable and EXTREMELY energetic 6 year olds (identical twin boys) and our new cat (Moka) who likes to be in the center of everything. I drink my coffee strong and black, with the occasional salted caramel or peppermint mocha that slips into the mix during the holidays.

Enough about me, let’s get to the coffee loving goodness! The projects I’m sharing today are some quick little gift calendars for coffee loving friends. I picked up a pack of 10 little calendars at the craft store this year for a couple bucks and thought it would be fun to make some calendars to give to friends. You could easily make these as cards to they would stand on a tabletop, but I went for a business card size magnet on the back.  Finished measurements for the calendars are 5.25 x 4.25″ for the larger and 3.5″ x 5.5″ for the narrower, so they could both fit in an A2 envelope.

Next I worked on the backgrounds. I used my new favorite color of cardstock in all the land. It’s the perfect light neutral. I then stamped the backgrounds using the Sweet ‘n Sassy Texture Tiles 1 background set. I stamped tone on tone in stone with the splatter background on the larger calendar and the script on the narrower one. This layer of cardstock is backed with chipboard to give it some durability.

Once I had this done, I pulled out the cut images again and arranged them with the calendars to decide where to add the sentiments. I stamped the rise and shine and refresh sentiments in black and just the steam portion of the mug stamp. Then it was just a matter of shaping the edges of my fussy cut images and adding them with some dimensional foam to create some depth.  I finished off with black mats and rounded corners for a finished look.

Thanks so much for having me here today! I puffy heart love this coffee loving community and am so happy to be able to share these projects with you. I’ll be back later in the month with some more coffee loving goodness. Cheers!

For more inspiration, please visit Julee’s:

Blog  |  Instagram