Introducing……Designed To Color – the magazine completely devoted to stampers & paper crafters that love to color!

Welcome to Designed To Color where we inspire creativity through coloring!

I am SO excited for today. Well, excited and I have butterflies in my stomach because I’m so nervous to see this little idea I’ve had for about a year finally launch!! I want to give you a little background about myself & how this venture came to fruition. I first heard about stamping through a home party (I’m sure you’ve heard of them, too and maybe have been invited to a few yourself!) and thought wow, this is pretty cool! See, I always loved stamping and paper crafting as a kid….. I had this old stamp turner of vintage rubber stamps for invoice, paid, etc and just LOVED them. There was something about hitting that rubber to the ink pad and to paper that gave me such pleasure as a kid. I never in my wildest dreams it would have evolved to what it has today for me.

See, a few years after I went to that party, I started looking for stamps again because I had 2 little babies and was looking for a hobby. That’s when I discovered stamped images that you could color any way imaginable! Oh my, that opened up an entirely new world, because you see, as much as I loved stamping as a kid, I LOVED my big box of newly sharpened crayons that much more and oh, a fresh coloring book was the best! I loved bringing those black and white pages to life with color. Big, beautiful, BOLD colors. And then…..as luck would have it, I was introduced to Copic Markers which have become my favorite medium to use when coloring. After that, there really was no turning back, I learned about new techniques, found adorable images that I just HAD.TO.HAVE, joined online communities to meet OTHER stampers, started my own blog for posting pictures of cards I made and eventually wound up on some pretty amazing Design Teams and even got published a couple of times. It’s a pretty amazing day when you get an email from someone saying they love your work and want to put it in a magazine! And as I started looking out to different magazines to submit to I realized, that the cute, adorable & colored images were not the ones getting picked up! After obsessing over this with a couple of my coloring friends, we all had the same conclusion there just really wasn’t one magazine that you could flip through and drool over the most adorable characters colored to perfection page after page. So, jokingly, I said we should start our own!!! And that was all it took. On the drive home, this idea grew, as the days passed I kept coming back to this idea of a magazine completely devoted to coloring, tips, tutorials, & most of all just bringing beautiful inspiration to card makers and paper crafters of all levels! It was one of those ideas that just made me excited every time I thought about it and finally I decided to go for it.

I could not have done this without the support of my family & friends, especially my hubby. It’s pretty amazing when your family sees how passionate you are about something and give you their unwavering support 100%. Each time I brought the idea up to someone new, I would get the same reaction of excitement and thrill. There are many people who have encouraged me to keep pursuing this and I wish I could list them all here, but I’m sure you will be seeing them around the blog & Facebook as well as in the pages of the magazine itself. I do have to thank Lizzie Oakely for giving me that final push and much needed support. She’s been my right hand for the past month, helping me get things lifted off the ground beyond the planning stage. She designed my logo and our very first sketch for our very first call. Thank you, Lizzie, I am eternally grateful & beyond excited to have you on board!!

Our first issue will be unveiled Feb 1! I’m so excited and I have been SUPER busy collecting cards and projects from MANY talented crafters from all over the world! You are going to LOVE this premiere – each time I make a new page with a new card with such beautiful coloring, I’m just in awe and feel incredibly blessed that so many people have jumped on board to make this issue what it is. I couldn’t have done it without the talent of so many! If you love to color, you will fall head over heels in love with Designed To Color! I hope you will follow us on our FB page and here on our blog where we will continue to bring you updates right up to the release of the first issue as well as bringing you the latest from CHA. I still can’t believe I will be traveling to CHA 1 week from today where I plan to get the latest scoop on coloring, stamps, tools & more to bring to you all!!!

If you are interested in being published in our 2nd issue, please take a look at our current calls above. I am so excited to be able to bring something new to the crafting community and would love to hear your feedback. You can leave me comments here on our blog, on our FB page or email me direct at carisa@designedtoclor.com

Colorfully yours,

~Carisa Zglobicki

Owner/Editor/Designer