Happy Mother's Day and Cure for the Monday Blues Challenge #10

This is my second post today, please scroll down to see my Sunday Stamper #300 card.

Happy Mother's Day to all the Mums and Grandmothers out there! I think that this is the first year that my daughter has been away from home for Mother's Day and I am missing her a lot! She is away at University in Kent, but was sweet enough to send me a beautiful card, a copy of "The Great British Sewing Bee" book and a pretty bunch of roses - I am a lucky Mum! We will probably Skype later on and catch up with all the news and I am very much looking forward to her coming home for Easter.

 

Over on Taheerah Atchia's blog http://littlemisst-papercraft.blogspot.com/2014/03/cure-for-monday-blues-challenge-10.html the current Cure for the Monday Blues challenge #10 is running. The inspiration photo this week is of a gorgeous blue and white bedroom with pops of bright pink and orange colours.

 

 

Source Pinterest.

 

I decided to make a card using some of my beloved Chocolate Baroque stamps, Papertrey Ink coloured card and ink and Memory Box dies. I probably have more Chocolate Baroque and Elusive Images stamps than any other brand, as I used to be on the Design Team for Elusive Images, before they became Chocolate Baroque. I love their designs and the grey rubber stamps are always really deeply etched and are wonderful to work with.

 

I loved the flowered wallpaper, the bright quilt and the textured rug in the inspiration photo, so that's what I went with.

 

 

Here is my finished card. As usual, you may click on any of the photos to enlarge them for a better view. This blog post is photo heavy, as I actually remembered to take step by step photos this time!

 

 

This is the gorgeous big stamp which I chose to use for the wallpaper background. I masked off the top of a white card blank and stamped directly onto the card using Papertrey Spring Rain ink.

 

Then I used an acrylic block as a palette, stamping the inkpad onto it and using a fine waterbush to pick up the colour and watercolour the flowers and leaves. I tried to shade the underside of the petals and leaves so that they would look a bit darker.

 

 

This was painstaking, but I was thrilled with the finished result! The photo below shows the background after I had finished watercolouring it.

 

 

The photo below shows the selection of bright Papertrey Ink card that I picked out (Spring Rain, Orange Zest and Hibiscus Burst), together with matching Zing embossing powders (Grapefruit and Apricot), Versamark ink, a Memory Box Tessatina border die and a small elephant stamp from a larger A4 Chocolate Baroque stamp set (UA4GW0157 - originally released in 2007 by Elusive Images).  

 

 

I used the Versamark ink to stamp two of the elephant images onto the Orange Zest card and very carefully applied the Grapefruit pink embossing powder to the decorative blankets on each of the elephants' backs. I then added the Apricot embossing powder to the remaining areas and heat set them.

 

 

Each elephant was then fussy cut out - I used a craft knife and cutting mat to cut out the area around the trunks.

 

 

 

I used my Grand Calibur to cut out the Tessatina dies twice - once from Spring Rain card and once from the same white card as my card blank base. I pushed out all of the small inner pieces from the white die cut, then added a strip of strong, red lined tape at the rear. Then I took the small inner pieces from the blue die cut and inserted them into the spaces on the white one, using tweezers. You can just see the red tape underneath in the above photo.

 

 

 

I cut a strip of Hibiscus Burst card (to represent the bright quilt in the inspiration photo), mounted it towards the bottom of my card blank, then added the embossed elephants using foam pads for added dimension. The Tessatina border die cut was added beneath this to mimic the rug - I think it looks like the elephants are strolling along a decorative path!  

 

 

 

I needed a sentiment and decided to use the same Hibiscus Burst card to cut some letters from a Memory Box alphabet die set, to spell out the word "hello". I adhered these letters to the top right of my card using small dabs of Ranger Glossy Accents. As there are some large letters hanging over the wallpaper in the inspiration photo I thought that these would be ideal.

 

 

 

Finally I used some more of the Glossy Accents to highlight each letter and give it a nice glossy, dimensional finish.

 

 

I must say that I am very pleased with how this turned out! Although it was very time consuming, I am looking forward to doing the same watercolouring technique on some more of the big background stamps as I think it looks really effective. Thanks for reading this far!