I had a chance to use my Hearts & Roses set from Kitchen Sink Stamps again today. This was some of the most fun I’ve had stamping in…well…a while. You know how sometimes you feel like you’re really doing your own “thing”? Everything comes together without a hitch, moving along smoothly from one phase to the next as though you’ve made that same card dozens of times. I won’t say I didn’t make a heck of a mess in my room in the process but that was all from pulling out papers for the background. Sheesh! I had them everywhere! You wouldn’t think such an ordinary card base would cause that degree of upheaval but it sure did.
The green embossed paper is something from ProvoCraft I’ve had for a long time. I have it in several colors as well as many other embossed papers I rarely use. These papers are the reason I almost didn’t buy a Cuttlebug but, in the end, they’re the very reason I did buy a Cuttlebug — so I could have embossed papers in any color any time. The funny thing is, I use my Cuttlebug with about the same frequency as I use these papers — rarely. Isn’t the paper pretty, though? Gosh, I love it!
The dark brown card base is not Chocolate Chip. You’d think dark brown is dark brown but, no. I had to dig into the CTMH reserves in the spare room to find just the right shade of dark brown. This color is called Pepperwood. Combined with everything else overall, it was the only shade of brown that worked for me.
The main image was a breeze. I started with a So Saffron square and smudged it here and there with More Mustard — rubbed on with one of my most useful stamping tools, toilet paper. The smudging is not extremely apparent, rather it’s one of those subtle differences. The smudging around the edges was done last, directly from the ink pad to the paper.
The roses were stamped with ColorBox Fluid Chalk inks in three steps, laying down the lightest color first in this order: Rose Coral, Rouge and Warm Red. The colors are true in the photo. Oddly, their Warm Red is not red at all but more of a deep rose pink. I would have liked to have done the fourth step but didn’t have a suitable color for it.
The leaves are three steps, as well: Lime Pastel, Olive Pastel and Dark Moss. It’s a single leaf stamped several times. I cut one mask for the roses but did not mask the leaves. The opacity of the chalk inks allowed overlapping of the leaves without the underlayer showing through.
The shading around the image was done with a handy little brush point coloring tool called Fantastix by Tsukineko. It has no color of its own so you can use it for various mediums. I used it to pick up color from my chalk ink pad which I then brushed onto the image. It’s a soft and subtle effect very easy to achieve.
Lastly, I stamped over the whole panel with my Weathered background in More Mustard. I wanted the roses to appear painted on wood, in which case the grain of the wood should show through the painting. It’s more apparent in real life. As mentioned before, the final step was to smudge the edges of the panel with More Mustard ink.
Since this was supposed to appear to be a panel of wood, I didn’t mat the main image. I did, however, adhere it to a piece of cardboard to give it a firmer feel, like a sheet of veneer. The brads finish off the panel and the ribbon adds a little extra “pretty” to it.
And that’s the end of today’s stamping adventure. I surely did enjoy making this card and working with this incredible stamp set. Thank you for stopping by to spend time with me. Happy stamping and happy everything else, too!
