Inspiration: Colour Inkspiration #134
I wanted to try out my Damask stencil and decided to do it using the Colour Inkspiration combo so that I could incorporate the piece in my design afterwards. It worked out well, because I could use Bermuda Bay ink on Coastal Cabana cardstock to get a tone-on-tone design.
One of my resolution this year is to purge some of my ever-growing stash. I have those big stippling brushes that I purchased years ago with the promise that they were great to get a soft inked background, but I never took on to them and now that we have blender brushes, those have definitely become obsolete for me. I tried them out here to do my stenciling, just to double-check that I did want to get rid of them and while the result looks good, it took three times the time that inking with a blender brush would have taken, so those went in the destash box.
I was loving the bright colours of the challenge and decided they could work great on a card for my niece's birthday, which will be coming up soon. The Anya Combo stamp set has an image of Anya sitting with a pile of books, which is perfect because Arielle loves nothing more than coming back from the library with a big stack of books. I had not watercolored with inks for a long time, so I stamped the image on watercolor paper using Lawn Fawn's Jet Black ink and I picked up inks from my Stampin' Up! ink pads' lids with an Aquapainter brush.
I based my design on an older Mojo Monday sketch. I matted my stenciled piece with Calypso Coral cardstock and I glued the piece on Pale Papaya cardstock with temporary adhesive to die-cut it with the scalloped rectangle from the Foundation 4 dies. The reason I used temporary adhesive was that so I could add dry embossing to the cardstock afterwards (which would have been flattened if die-cut afterwards). I looked at subtle embossing folders and picked up Scripty, as the text seemed appropriate to go with the books. I inked the embossing with a dauber and glued the cardstock back on with permanent adhesive.
On the initial sketch, this piece was going over a card base, but I was auditioning various cardstock colour and not loving the look so I decided the card would remain scalloped. I die-cut the same piece out of the Pale Papaya cardstock, scored the top at 3/4" and glued the top together with sticky strip. This gives me a card base that has the full scallops at the top.
I looked at sentiment options and picked out "you are one of the joys of my life". I wanted to incorporate the yellow from the combo, but using Daffodil Delight cardstock was a little too jarring, so I decided to emboss the sentiment with Calypso Coral embossing powder on white cardstock and then ink blend Daffodil Delight ink on it using a blender brush. I also used the matching Stampin' Write marker and the now-retired spritzer tool to add speckles. The sentiment was die-cut using another die from the Foundation 4 set and I punched horizontal slots on each sides. I tried out a few ribbons, but picked the Pale Papaya with white border one. I tied it around the card base, added the Anya image with dimensional adhesive and added three sparkly heart stickers (from the Dollar Store).
Since the card front did not have an actual birthday sentiment, I used the Biggest Wishes stamp set inside the card, stamping the large word in Pale Papaya ink and overstamping the scripty word in VersaMark and embossing it in Calypso Coral powder. I also included a small little Olaf sticker in the corner as I know my niece will like that.
I made a matching envelope using the leftover stenciled piece, punched into a banner, and a piece of Calypso Coral cardstock embossed with the same folder. Another heart sticker was added as well. As a final touch, I added Crystal Glaze to her glasses. I was out of Glossy Accents and picked some up from my local store. The owner mentioned she had heard good things about Nuvo's Crystal Glaze, in particular that it dried really clear (no yellow tone to it). I've used it on a couple of projects since buying it and the jury's still out, but so far I've noticed that it's more runny, which means that you have to be careful as soon as you turn the bottle around as it wants to flow out even before you actually squeeze the bottle. This also means that you have to leave your project perfectly flat while it dries. I tried moving my card after a good 5-10 minutes of the glaze having been applied and while the Glossy Accents would have started to dry around the edges at this point, the Crystal Glaze was still liquidy enough to want to drop down. Thankfully, I noticed and used the tip of my piercer to get the glaze where it dripped below the glasses. On the other project, the glaze also made the dye ink run. (I used it on lollypops on my gingerbread house and the white parts all became colored.) Considering the bottle is more expensive for less product (maybe because Nuvo is an European company and has to be imported in North America), I will probably go back to Glossy Accents once I'm done using this bottle. We'll see if my impression of it changes as I use it more, but this is what I've noticed so far.
(On a side note, there's no matching dies for this stamp set, so I had to get my craft knife out to gut the parts between her body and her pigtails.
Supplies
Stamps: Anya Combo (The Greeting Farm); Souhaits en grand, Bouquet de feuilles (Stampin' Up!)
Cardstock: Pale Papaya, Calypso Coral, Coastal Cabana, Basic White (Stampin' Up!)
Ink: Pale Papaya, Calypso Coral, Coastal Cabana, Bermuda Bay, Daffodil Delight,
Peekaboo Peach, Sahara Sand, Soft Suede, So Saffron, Blush Blossom (Stampin' Up!)
Dies: Foundation 4 (Queen & Co)
Accessories: Scripty Embossing Folder, Stampin' Dimensionals, Daffodil Delight Stampin' Write Marker,
Spritzer Tool, Triple Banner Punch, Banner Pick A Punch, Aquapainter Brush, Pale Papaya Ribbon,
Horizontal Slot Punch, Calypso Coral Stampin' Emboss Powder (Stampin' Up!);
Crystal Glaze (Nuvo); Damask Stencil (Paper Rose); Heart Puffy Stickers (Stickah - Dollarama);
A2 Lagoon Metallic Envelope (Envelopes.com)
