The past week was especially busy, so I had to fit in the project in littler pieces. My first card to share represents several days of experimenting with two new stamps sets (loaned to me by a friend) as well as with two new techniques.
Both stamp sets are relatively new ones from Papertrey Ink: "Vogue Vases" and "Simple Stems." You'll eventually see more of the vases and the flowers as I stamped a few extras of both. The techniques were both from Betsy Veldman of the Papertrey Ink Design Team: creating translucent vases, and adding detail to the flowers with pens. I've owned a set of Staedtler Triplus Fineliners for years. I think I bought them at the Princeton book store when Sarah and Adam lived there 11 years ago. They worked perfectly for this and made so much difference in how the flowers looked. On the yellow flower, I used the finer tip of a Tombow marker since I didn't have a good contrasting pen for that color. The sentiment is from the Simple Stems set.
The translucent vases are created by stamping them on vellum in a relatively dark color (I used Tropical Teal as did Betsy), and then overstamping with watermark ink and embossing with clear embossing powder. A stamp positioner like the MISTI is invaluable for techniques like this.
I also went back to color blending again as well as watercoloring a lot of flowers from an old set by Simon Says, "Artful Flowers." I've always loved this set, but have never had much luck with it. A video by Nichol Sporh was the inspiration for these cards---you'll see I duplicated much of her design on the first card.
The new die cutting technique I played with last week came in handy for die cutting the stems and the flowers for these cards. I'm much happier with these than with any earlier attempts using this set.
One funny thing about this project is that I started it to work through the many techniques I'd pinned on my boards for Design and Techniques. What I'm finding is that I'm constantly adding to my list of things to try every week, so I am quite sure I won't run out of ideas before the challenge ends.
I'll be back later today with another post to celebrate a special birthday. Off now to take a walk before the rain moves in later today. We've been blessed with three glorious days of warmer temperatures and sunshine, and I don't want to waste a minute of it!
