Floral Birthday Card

Hello!  First of all, sorry this is so long but hopefully you don’t mind the photos 🙂  As I mentioned in my last post, last month my sister and I had our annual crafting retreat.  While shopping, she found a beautiful Hero Arts floral rubber stamp and I knew it would make a beautiful dimensional flower, so I got one, too.  We really didn’t have much time to play around with it because we were each making a Heartfelt Creations Flip-fold Mini Album (whew, what a workout that was!).  She’ll be here next month on her birthday so I decided to use that stamp for her birthday card.  Hopefully she likes it!

I stamped my image 4 times using archival ink and colored with distress inks – Rusty Hinge and I believe I added Spiced Marmalade, but I colored several layers and spritzed and dabbed color off and on…usually I take pics of the ink pads I use for this reason – I can’t remember and I just made it this past week!  I wanted to add a little more color to the top layer and used my red Wink of Stella.  I used clear Wink of Stella for the remaining layers.  I used my blending tool to color the backs of the layers with Rusty Hinge so the flowers wouldn’t be white underneath.  I watered down some white acrylic paint and splattered my flower, but I think I went a little overboard.  Oh well.  For the center, I glued down clear beads then painted with black acrylic paint (all I had was matte).

I thought I would do something different by stamping and coloring a scrap piece of embossed vellum I had, but didn’t like it so cut out 2 large layers on the Tattered Florals die using white tulle.  I do love tulle.  I then had to stamp and color another flower to add another layer.

For my background paper, I found the perfect size in my scrap pile but the color was too close to the color of my flower.  I added a thin layer of Gesso, then added some color back using Rusty Hinge.  It’s fun altering patterned paper to make it into what you need.  After that I used the Coffee Stage-it stencil (with white embossing paste) from Elizabeth Craft to add the top and bottom borders.

For my next layer, I used a square doily that I picked up some months ago at a local scrapbook store.  I wanted to dress it up a bit more, so I heat embossed gold microfine glitter (Elizabeth Craft) combined with clear embossing powder.  I think it’s 1 part glitter to 3 parts embossing powder, but I don’t completely remember since I made up a supply last year after seeing it done on Paper Wishes.  To finish it off, I added some gold peel-off border stickers.

It seems I can never do a card or tag without some kind of “adventure” (i.e., mistakes).  I had this nice wooden flourish from Riffraff Designs that I found in my stash (don’t you love when  you forget you have something?!) and I wanted to do a crackled finish on it.  I have a few crackle mediums – an old one I didn’t have luck with and a new one I picked up at Hobby Lobby.  To make a long story shorter, after covering it with acrylic paint I applied the new one and it didn’t work, either.  I fiddled and did this and that and had to turn it over and start all over.  I don’t know why I thought the old crackle medium would suddenly work, but after painting, I decided to apply a thin layer (as in not cover the width entirely).  LOL, it looked awful!  I didn’t want to throw it out because it was the right size and shape, etc.  As a last effort, I got out the Vintage Photo distress ink pad and added some of that.  Sometimes I think distress inks cure all with paper crafting because then it didn’t look so bad and kind of looked like that was what I intended to do all along!  Whew!

 For my sentiment, I used a stamp I already have, even though it’s too big.  I stamped it, reduced it to about 40%, then cut it out using Pinpoint Main Street Tags by Poppy.  It needed a little something else, so I embossed it using an Anna Griffin folder, inked with Vintage Photo distress ink, and added a ribbon.

I think that about covers it, but I still have photos of my flower that I’d like to share.  This is really the first flower I’ve made using a rubber stamp (with this many layers) and I’m happy with how it turned out.  Thanks for stopping by and please feel free to leave a comment!!

 

You can see the shimmer in the photo above.

 

I would like to enter the following challenges:

http://stampsandstencils.blogspot.co.uk/2016/06/floral-frenzy.html

Home

(add some shimmer)

http://www.happylittlestampers.com/2016/06/hls-june-mixed-media-challenge.html

(texture)

http://creativeartistemixedmedia.blogspot.co.il/2016/06/welcome-to-creative-artistes-challenge.html

(anything goes)

Home

(use patterned paper)