Good Morning All, Hope your day is off to a great start. Yesterday I got up feeling like I was coming down with something and as the day wore on I just felt worse and worse. I was hopeful that a good night's sleep would leave me feeling better in the morning and I did wake up this morning feeling almost normal but now that I've been up for an hour an had breakfast and a little time to get woke up, I can tell that whatever it is it's still with me. I just feel like I have the flu all over my body and I haven't found any medicine to help it yet. Maybe today wont be as bad as yesterday was anyway. I've got to drive out of town today and will be on the road and in traffic for the larger part of the morning. I hate to drive knowing I'm feeling under the weather. I don't even think it's flu season, is it? Plus I've had my flu shot. I don't know what's going on but I hope it passes soon.
On with the card for today. How about I show you something crafty and stop whining OK. So Here's my card.
I made this fun card for a great Uncle of mine, goes by the name of Harvey. In the early stages, this didn't look like a card at all. I took a small piece of white watercolor paper and first added some distress inks with the ink blending tool, in shabby shutters and broken china. Then I got out my Heidi Swapp Color Shine in Amethyst and Mint Green and sprayed that in different areas of the water color paper. Now, mind you, at this point I was just having some creative play time and didn't have anything in particular in mind that I wanted my finished product to be. So, I continued to play. I used my heat tool to dry the Color Shine. Then I looked at what I had created and decided that I didn't really like it yet. I knew the distress inks would activate and move around if I sprayed it with water and I kinda thought I would be playing with water and that's why I used the water color paper. I didn't know what the color shine would do, if anything, with water so I thought I would try it and find out. Boy, was I surprised! You can see how much movement I got out of the Amethyst color and this was me spraying it with water AFTER I had dried it. It came right back to life and all that beautiful color moved all around the page. I just let it go where it wanted to go and moved and tilted my paper to keep them moving . I didn't have to use a ton of water either. It was totally meant to be. lol. I used a towel to blot up some of the bigger droplets of water and then used the heat tool again and just let it blow the color all around as it dried. It was like the color shine moved on top of the paper and distress ink. When you wet an area of distress ink. It reacts with water but it also kinda melts into the paper at the same time. Not the color shine, it just moved around the top of everything. That's how I got that wonderful swirlish pattern. When it was dry, I absolutely loved the look it gave. All that shimmer was still there and you have this wonderful water color effect that you normally don't get from a spray. I still had a Masculine card that I needed to make so I thought I would pair these colors with black to ground it some. I used the old car stamp from Prima and I tried for the first time some of my new embossing powder from Recollections called "Aged Black". I had no idea what "Aged" meant or how it would look but it sounded distressed so I embossed the car with it. When I started to heat it up to melt it alot of the bigger chunks of black in the embossing powder kinda blew all around the page or away all together. So I was thinking, "Okay, this must be like distress embossing powder from Ranger,. or something similar" But under the black I could also see a finer powder of gold and even finer powder of silver, but the black was really chunky. I thought before I was done with it it would look awful. Recollections usually makes pretty good products even tho they are the "House Brand" at Micheal's so I didn't know what to expect. When I was done melting all of it I was very pleasantly surprised. Well, You can see the final result. It looks SO COOL! I added a couple more stamps from a Close to My Heart stamp set called, "It's your Day", for the sentiments in Versa Fine black. Then added a few sequins and bling to match on top. I mounted it on black card stock and then again on a sheet of this metallic green paper I found in my stash. I thought one of our vintage bags would look great on this card so I cut one up and added strips to the top and bottom before I added the watercolor paper with its layers. The "Happy Birthday" stamp is another from Close to My Heart called, "Casual Expressions" and this stamp set also coordinates with the Circut Artiste cartridge. So I used it to cut out the oval. Then I wanted to heat emboss the sentiment and I didn't have the right color in green that I wanted to use and I wanted to pull in some of the other colors from the focal piece to tie it all together and not just focus on that purple. So I took my Pearl Ex in a green I thought would match and mixed a little bit in a small container (that I could put a lid on afterwards) and a little bit of Ultra fine clear embossing powder and mixed them all together and ta da, you have your own, custom made embossing powder! Isn't that great! I love it. One thing to note, if you try this technique out, is that when you sprinkle the new embossing mixture on your card stock, the mica powder in the Pearl ex will stick all over your paper. Not to worry, just flick off as much as you can and all the heaver embossing powder will fall off and just leave the mica powder left behind. Go ahead and heat emboss like usual and once it's cooled off take a fluffy brush and just dust the mica powder away. Oh, and make sure you use an embossing buddy or powder tool prior to stamping your embossing ink. That way you are sure not to have any stray embossing powder stuck to your project. Well, I hope you liked today's card. I know it was a long post and I hope you stayed till the end. I promise one day I will do some process pictures to show you how to do these techniques I keep telling you about lol. Well, I'm off to see the Doctor who lives so far away it may as well be the land of Oz, lol,. I hope you all have a wonderful day and I'll see you back here again tomorrow with another Masculine card. Till then, Hugs,
