Janurary 2018 Papertrey Ink Blog Hop (And Make It Monday)

Very unusual, but this is the second post of the day because today is the monthly blog hop hosted by Papertrey Ink. I wasn’t sure I’d find the time to participate, but then a meeting I had yesterday had to be rescheduled, and the afternoon opened up. I have two cards to share. Only one can be posted for the blog hop, but the other I’ll post for the Make It Monday challenge which was to create a shadow sentiment. Both cards started, however, with the gorgeous inspiration piece posted for the blog hop.

For the first card, I focused on the pink floral arrangements on the table. I was also influenced by the design Lizzie Jones used on her card for Make It Monday.

I chose “Gran’s Garden” for the card. It’s a stamp set I don’t use often enough. The frame for the sentiment is an old favorite, “Fillable Frames 10,” and the sentiment is from another favorite and well-used set “Birthday Bash Sentiments.:

Here you can see the shadow sentiment. I tried a variety of things before I settled on second generation stamping to create the shadow. If you’re unfamiliar with that term it means I stamped the original sentiment, then moved the stamp just a bit, and stamped it again without cleaning off the stamp. You can also see the embossed background created with the Papertrey Ink “Rustic Burlap” Impression Plate.

I thought this would be the only card I created, and that I would post it on both challenges, but still having some time to play, I pulled out a stamp set I purchased on a whim. It’s a $5 set meant to work with a larger set of paper doll kinds of stamps called “Dress Up Dolls: Birthday.” I thought the images would go well with a variety of animal stamp sets I use when creating cards for my grandchildren. The new technique for me was to create a background of randomly stamped images. I’ve seen a variety of these recently, most often on Yana Smakula’s blog.

She suggested that solid images would work best for this technique, but I’m pretty happy with the way the outline images worked here. It makes for a bit cleaner look, which I always like. Rather than a large center-stage sentiment, I opted to die cut the balloons from the set for the focal image.

I did take Yana’s suggestion to assign each stamp a given color which I took from the inspiration photo, as well as the birthday party theme shown in the inspiration piece. Since there were so many tiny images I laid out the stamps on the ink pads I used. I took the photo after dark with my iPhone, but thought I’d share it.

I chose four Copic markers to color the balloons, but decided they needed a coating of Glitter Glue as well. Glitter Glue always darkens the colors so the darker pink ended up looking more red that I would have liked. I mounted the balloons with dimensional adhesive, and finally decided to add a sentiment to the focal image. It came from the “Initial Sentiments: Birthday” set.

It’s a bit easier to see the glitter here as well as the glitter added to the sentiment banner with a Spectrum Noir clear glitter pen. 

So I’ll post the top card to the Make It Monday challenge, and this one to today’s blog hop. It was a lot of fun to try a couple new techniques, and I was delighted to have an afternoon to play!