Faith Bird at Dawn

Today I am using the Faith Bird image from the lovely Stamp-It Discovery collection.  And I decided to use it along with the watercolor background technique that I shared last week.

 

 My first step was to heat emboss the bird image onto a watercolor background, to simulate dawn as the beautiful words reference.  I used detail black embossing powder.  Can I tell you a story about the background?  I was stamping with friends a few weeks ago and we were all trying our hand at the watercolor technique.  One of the ladies, Carol, was frustrated and thought that hers did not turn out well.  She threw it away.  Well, being as frugal as I am, I fished it out of the trash can and said, at least some flowers or leaves could be punched from it.

Anyway, it sat on my craft table a few weeks.  Part of it had very nice color -- and the faith bird image is not that large -- so I used it!  I love how it turned out.  And I did use the sections where the color was not as nice to punch the accent leaves!  So the moral is, never throw anything away, LOL!

I then used my oval die cut to cut the image.  On a quarter sheet of moss green card stock, I used the Darice Leafy Branch embossing folder for more background texture. (Have you seen all embossing folders that Crafter's Companion carries now?  They have some amazing square sizes too!)  The oval image was adhered to the moss green background, and then on to a black mat, and finally on to a folded A2 cream card base.  You may have noticed that I use black mats a lot -- I think they really give great contrast and set off a design.

The final touch was to punch leaves from the watercolored 'discard' paper and arrange them in a gently falling pattern.  The hardest part of this card was getting those random falling leaves "just so"!  Hope you enjoyed this, and see you next week.

Tool Bookmark

Today I have a bookmark using sneak peek from the new Stamp It release from Crafter's Companion.

The original stamp had the tools in a diamond shape, surrounding the words 'Happy Father's Day'.  Sadly, my father has passed on, so the greeting wasn't appropriate, but I still wanted to use the images to make a masculine bookmark for my son Tom, who is an avid reader.

So, I simply colored them with my Spectrum Noir markers and cut them out!   These tool images are crisp and open, and lend themselves to coloring.

I used some paper from my stash that had a tone-on-tone gears design, rounded the edges with my corner punch, and layered it on grey card stock, also rounding the corners. Then I simply adhered the tools in a vertical fashion.  I snipped through the scissor blades to position the paint brush handle through it.

I added some alpha circles at the top to spell "READ".

The final touch was to use my 1/4 inch circle punch to punch the ribbon hole at the center top. I selected various ribbons from my stash - a very broad grosgrain red, a measuring-tape twill, and a thin seam binding to tie it and to thread some beads through.


Here are the marker colors I used.  Fun and functional, I think he'll like it!



 

Traveler's Wings and Encaustic Wax

Today I have a dreamy card made with Stamp-It's new "Hummingbird Wings" stamp. You know how the image really dictates the feel of the card?  Well this lovely quote just said "artsy" to me, so I pulled out my encaustic wax supplies to do a background with lots of motion and texture.  Not to worry, if you don't have encaustic wax, you can get a similar feel with the polished stone, shaving cream or heated pearls technique, among others.

After making the background, it was layered on black and then on a lavender base.  I stamped the main image in black ink, onto white card stock. I did a border embossed swirl on the right of the image, to reprise the swirly tail feathers.  I then sponged around it with lavender, blue, and amethyst inks. I layered it on black, adhered it with dimensionals, and added some tiny pearls as a finishing touch.

This card went together so quickly that I decided to make a custom envelope with Crafter's Companion Envelobox Creator.

For an A2 size card, I get good results starting with a 7 3/4 inch square of paper and scoring opposite corners on the E and H grooves.  I found this purple and blue paper in my stash that coordinated like a charm. I love making the envelopes special as the finishing touch for the recipient.

I think this would be a great Bon Voyage card or a Graduation card, with a sentiment about "exploring your world" inside.