One seed can start a garden, one candle can light a room, one step can begin a journey, one conversation can start a friendship, one smile from a handmade card can lift one's SPIRIT!

Tuesday, January 24, 2012

Applying a simple and clean card for Valentines

It is possible to teach an old dog new tricks...it just takes a smack in the forehead!...my forehead to be exact!  So I have three elderly aunts and I send them a card about once a month to let them know that I am thinking of them and to bring them news from the family.  I know they love to get cards and especially ones that have some hand written notes inside.  I pulled out the PTI Year of Flower Collection and decided to use the rose stamp (to be honest this collection has not seen a lot of love from me).  I stamped it with versamark and heat embossed with white embossing powder.  Now I saw that Amber had used this fun technique when stamping on paper with ink, to use a little bit of colored pencils to highlight some area of the image.  GREAT!  I am still learning about shading and such, so this seemed like a great way to add depth to my rose.  I cut a strip of raspberry fizz paper and stamped my image then proceeded to color in a bit with some prisma pencils.  Now I have to be honest, I don't really plan my lay outs ahead of time, so I just grab this and that and lay it out and think...what am I doing?  I just took a "Clean and Simple Card Class"...why don't I just keep this clean and simple?  And you know what, I like it!  I did sew around my strip of paper, I thought it needed that little touch...and then I also thought it needed a little bit of shading around the edge of the card, so I used some sweet blush ink...and now I call it done and good!

2 comments:

José said...

Oooooh your story cracks me up Colleen. You wrote that in a very funny manner :-)
Your card is great! You really got the hang of clean and simple. Great stitching!

Linda said...

Good job. And great idea to use Amber's technique to highlight with color pencils. She really is an artist isn't she.