FINALLY

Yes, I FINALLY finished these cards. Yi yi yi. Stamping is HARD, people! This weekend I'd planned to CASE one of my Tweeps, Stephanie, who posted these fabby cards over on A Blog Named Hero. The idea was to use the same stamp different ways, and she used one of my new favorite background stamps: Lattice. It was going swimmingly until I got to the second card, and it took me ALL DAY to finish that one. /end-whine

Here's the first one I made:

 I started with a piece of textured white card stock and heat-embossed the Lattice stamp in white. I was going to color the shapes with Copics in a rainbow, but then I decided I didn't have the patience to stay in the lines. I know, I didn't have to stay inside the lines, but my brain had already moved on to option #2. I decided to water color with my Gelatos.

I scribbled the lightest color Gelato onto an acrylic block, spritzed it with some water, and painted it onto the bottom of the embossed card stock. I scribbled the next darker color onto the block (I didn't bother cleaning it since I was going light to dark), spritzed it, mixed the colors a little (living on the edge, here) and painted the next part of the card stock, overlapping the previous color a little. I repeated this until I had done the darkest color. I didn't even bother going all the way to the edge of the embossed piece, which is how I got that "worn" look around the edges.

I decided the Ranger Distress Ripe Persimmon was the perfect color to edge the white, then I declared SU Calypso Coral to be close enough for the mat.

One thing I wanted to point out -- this is not dirt:

No, I got a bug up my behind that I needed to color a few of the openings with Smooch Moonlight pearlized ink/paint. Bad decision, but I was NOT starting over.

Second card:

I used four 1" strips of paper from my Cosmo Cricket Clementine 6x6 pad. <3 I stuck them onto a 4x5.25" piece of card stock, then stamped the Lattice background stamp and heat-embossed it with white EP. (Stephanie said she put hers together like a puzzle -- she is much younger than I am. My head would have exploded.) I declared Calypso Coral to also be a match for these papers, so I matted it and ran a piece of ribbon across it. Then my world fell apart.

I tried most of Saturday night and most of the day Sunday to get the right sentiment in there, but it just. wasn't. happening. What you see here is the 3rd white die-cut piece, since I schmeared nope-not-dry-yet ink over the first two. The Love You was die-cut on my Silhouette using the Bender font. I'm not loving it, and it may not be the final-final version, but for now I am done done done.

So aside from my miserable experience with the sentiment, this background stamped over pretty paper remnants is DA BOMB. I always forget I can stamp on patterned paper!

Okay, I'm going back in for some more stamping. Thanks for stopping by!