Cards By Carol: Grateful Heart

Thursday, May 14, 2020

Bright & Cheery Thanks! | Honey Bee Stamps

Hello my friends! I love bright colors, stenciling and texture paste and this cheerful card sure covers that! I've used Honey Bee Stamps awesome Flower Builder background stencils for my card, along with a few other stamp and die sets.

These are the steps for the stenciled background:

First, I sprayed the back of both stencils from the Flower Builder background stencil set with Pixie Spray. This makes stenciling SO easy!
I put the flower petal stencil onto a piece of Neenah Solar White card stock and blended Squeezed Lemonade Distress Oxide ink through it with a Background Blender brush.
Next I lined up the flower center stencil. These stencils have etched lines on them that are A2 sized and make it very easy to line up the layers. I inked Ground Espresso Oxide with a Blender Brush.
The next step is to put the flower petal stencil back over the flowers and then spread some clear glossy texture paste through the stencil. I used some that I've had in my stash forever!
Set this aside to dry.
When the piece was dry, I used a blender brush and green ink to color the background. How fun is it that the clear texture paste resists the ink?! Once I finished the inking, I used a dry clean towel to buff the green ink off of the flowers.

For the dimensional flowers I repeated the stenciling steps above with the Distress Oxide inks, but no texture paste this time. I lined up the Flower Petal Cover Plate die with the flowers and ran it through my die cutting machine. I picked out a few flowers to use and inked up the edges of them with Mustard Seed Distress Oxide for dimension. Then I used some flower shaping tools to form them into a cupped shape. I used a leafy branch die from the Spring Bouquets die set to die cut several branches from white card stock. I used my Copics to color them to coordinate and shaped them with the flower shaping tools. I found some brown sparkly stuff in my stash and added it to the centers for a touch of sparkle.

To assemble the card, I trimmed the stenciled piece to a 5-¼" x 4" and die cut a rectangle in the center of it with an A2 Double Stitched Frames die. Adhere this to a top folding card base. I die cut a sentiment from the Grateful Heart die set cutting the "thanks" three times and adhered the layers together. I die cut the shadow for it from black card stock and adhered the letters to it. I love this die and the beautiful font! Before I adhered the leaves, flowers and Thanks, I needed to position them all so I could decide where to stamp the rest of the sentiment. After I arranged them and the Thanks, without gluing, I took a photo of my arrangement to remember it. Then I did stamp surgery on the sentiment from the Grateful Hearts stamp set, and positioned those. I set the card into my MISTI, removed the floral pieces and picked up the stamps with the MISTI door. I used Versafine Onyx Black ink to stamp it.

Now it's just a matter of using the photo and adhering the flowers, leaves and Thanks into place--I could fiddle with this for a long time--LOL! I didn't need to since I had taken the photo and need to remember to do this more often!