Friday, April 14, 2017

Sweet Friend's Milestone Birthday!

A very dear friend is celebrating a milestone birthday this week.  Several really good gal friends are getting together to celebrate her and take her to lunch.  I wanted to make her a special card, and since I seem to be loving my new Stampin' Up Beautiful You stamp set, and also seem to have another card idea floating around in my gray matter, I thought I'd see what I came up with.

I found a lovely piece of patterned paper from the Watercolor DCWV Stack that looks like a watercolored paper with gold foil embossing.  I decided to make a salt watercolored background incorporating the colors from this paper to use as the layer upon which I would stamp my dancing lady image.  Though I had only done one other card with watercolors and never used the salt technique, I decided to be brave and give it a go.

I wanted my stamped dancing lady to have pink arms and legs, so I started my watercoloring with pink where I planned to stamp my image.  I used blues in the sky area along with a bit of pink and orange to give the allusion of the beginning of a sunset, and I used greens and yellow at the bottom to represent grass and a carpet of yellow flowers.  


After my watercolor application was complete and while the paper was still fairly wet, I sprinkled a good amount of regular table salt onto my paper and let it set for about 10 minutes.  I then helped the drying process along with my embossing heat tool.  I brushed and rubbed off all the dried salt so the paper was once again smooth and salt-free.  With salt, my understanding is that the larger the salt crystals and varied their sizes, you achieve a more dramatic effect.  Since table salt is much finer and more uniform, it creates a more subtle effect, but I was pleased with how it turned out and excited to try something new.


Since my patterned paper was gold foil embossed, I stamped my dancing lady onto my watercolor background with Encore Gold Metallic ink.  I stamped the patterned paper as well with the dancing lady stamp and the umbrella from another image in the stamp set.  I then fussy-cut them to adhere over the top of the image already stamped on the watercolor background to give her a patterned dress and matching umbrella.

For my layout, I found a Sketch Layout #SC639 on SplitcoastStampers' April 5th Sketch Challenge that I thought I would use.  See below:






For my #6 top left, I added an umbrella for my stamped lady, and for the #6 lower right, I added a butterfly to my double fishtail flag sentiment.   Below is my finished card, that I think Sandy will really like for her birthday!




Ingredients:  Stampin' Up products:  Cardstock--Island Indigo, Watercolor Paper; Stamps: Beautiful You; Inks: Pool Party, Soft Sky, Pink Pirouette, Sweet SugarPlum, Calypso Coral, Daffodil Delight, Mint Macaron, Pear Pizzazz.  Other:  DCWV Watercolor Stack (gold foil pattern).  DCWV Foil Stack (Aqua).  Recollections:  Cardstock--Cool Breeze 5-Color Pack; Gold Metallic pearls.  Encore: Gold Metallic Ink pad.  Wink of Stella: Gold.  Martha Stewart 3-in-1 Petite Butterflies punch.  Papertrey Ink stamp: Tea for Two Additions (sentiment). Technique: Salted Watercolor Wash.  Size: 4-3/4" x 6".

1 comment:

Thank you for visiting my blog. If you leave a comment, it is much appreciated! Have a GREAT day! Carlene (aka Chatterbox)