We belong together

On the eve of our 15 year wedding anniversary, I wanted to create a card for the current Paper Smooches challenge, using an older (but hardly used) border stamp set, Geo-Graphic. Although I did not plan it that way, I ended up creating an anniversary card for my DH, and I'm happy to say he loved it!

I repeatedly stamped the hexagon pattern and heat-embossed in clear embossing powder. After that I brushed Perfect pearls over it to create a Faux metal look, a technique I picked up from Jennifer McGuire's blog last week. Below you can see what the stamped pattern looks looks like lying flat, but when it catches the light, oh boy. Love it!

I found a sentiment (Clearly Besotte, Say it in style) that fitted perfectly within a row of hexagons. I heat-embossed it in white (SSS). I die cut my panel using a stitched rectangle die (SSS) and mounted it onto my card base using foam tape. The die cut heart was found lingering in my box with left-over die cuts. All I had to do was mount it onto my card using foam tape.

Challenges:
Paper Smooches - April challenge: black/white & pop of colour
The Challenge - Masculine photo inspiration (I focussed on the black and metal combo)
STAMPlorations - April theme and/or sketch (I followed the sketch; see below)
SSS Wednesday challenge - Anything goes
Uniko - Use metallics
ATSM - 191 Anything goes

You are a Work of Art

Just a quick post from me sharing a card that I made earlier today.

When I saw the inspiration over at the Tag You're It challenge, I knew I wanted to combine this challenge with the current challenge over at CAS Mix Up. I used stencilling (Prima), stamping (PTI), ink blending (Hero Arts), die cutting (Lil' Inker), vellum, texture paste (Ranger) and heat embossing (Ranger Detail gold). So many products and techniques, and I still managed to keep my design CAS lol.

When I was trying to determine how to place my stencil over my card base, I thought those large triangles at the bottom were perfect to stress the sentiment, so I added some texture paste through the stencil to accent the 2 triangles on the right, sprinkled with embossing powder and heat embossed after approximately 20 minutes. Because the embossing paste was still a little wet underneath, it puffed up, giving some wonderful texture. Call it beginner's luck...

 

With its uplifting sentiment, this card also fits the friend theme at Virginia's View link-up party, and the butterfly fits the theme of the very first challenge at Create With Stamps (my second entry).

MCV 40 revisited

I could not stop at one Christmas card using the layout of this week's MCV muse, Chris Blagrave. Love how you can create a different look and feel by using a different background, frame and embellishment.

Not sure if it's allowed to enter multiple cards, but I'm taking my chances, so I'm entering it in Muse: ChristmasVisions 40. As a refresher, here's the inspiration card by Chriss Blagrave again:

I'm also linking my card at:

CHNC - 277 Cute or anything Christmas goes

CHNC Extra - Always Anything Christmas goes