Saving Myself From Myself

As most of you know by now, I stamp without a net. That means I don't always plan out a card, and what I start with usually morphs into something completely different. Or I paint myself into a corner, which is what happened today.

I thought I'd take this opportunity to show you how I squirmed out of that corner. I might also need a very large glass of wine.

First, here is one of the two finished cards:

This is a shaker card, and there are two layers of fun foam behind the front panel. Unfortunately, I stuck the acetate to the back of the panels (I made two) before I cut the foam layers, and since I needed to cut a hole in each of the foam pieces, I pretty much sat there and stared at my predicament for a few minutes. I should have used the aperture in the card front to mark the foam so I knew where to cut, but the acetate prevented that. What to do, what to do ...

The MISTI to the rescue! I don't know what that tool can't do!

Here is my attempt to show you what I did to save myself.

First, I lined up the card front in the corner of the MISTI, and then lined up the die over it:

Sorry about the glare and the worse-than-usual lighting. And yeah, my MISTI is hanging off the table. It's a little crowded in my world.

I put some adhesive on the back of the die, then picked it up with the MISTI lid, like you'd pick up a stamp:

Then, one at a time (I had four), I placed a piece of foam in the corner where the card front used to be:

Then closed the lid and pressed the die into the foam. This left an impression that I could later use to align the die and cut the circle in the foam. You can almost see part of the impression here:

If you click to embiggen, you can see it.

Warning if you ever try this yourself: The impression doesn't last very long. It's like self-healing foam. By the time I got to the fourth one to die-cut, I could barely see the impression. But it worked!

All I needed to do was trim the openings in the foam a bit so the aperture was larger than the one in the card stock (the better to not see the foam), stuck it all together, then proceeded to fill the opening with sequins (I probably should have used more sequins -- it's a big opening).

For the backing, I used another of my Gelli plate backgrounds from my UFO pile. I cut two, and here is the second card with the other half of the Gelli plate piece:

This one has less yellow. At first I thought I liked it more than the other one, but then I decided the yellow gives more contrast. I'm still kindof pleased the card stock matches the colors pretty well. It's Bazzill Sea Glass, and I almost forgot I had it, mixed in with all my other blue/green cache of card stock. It's textured, too, so I had to stamp the sentiment more than once with Delicata Gold using my MISTI so it stamped thoroughly into all the tiny crevices. Then I heat embossed it with clear embossing powder.

Speaking of the sentiment, it's part of a stamp set that will be released Nov 1st. I am such a tease. :)

Thanks for stopping by!