Hello crafters! The German stamp company Create A Smile is currently hosting a guest designer call for July. And since Christina didn’t specify how often we could enter, I decided to go a bit nuts (not completely out of the ordinary for me, I know).
Unfortunately, the reason for this card isn’t as happy as the card itself. A crafty friend of mine just lost her father-in-law and I decided to send her some warm thoughts and hugs (if you want to send her some love, go visit Sonja here and leave her a comment. I’m sure she would absolutely appreciate that). I’m not a fan of traditional cards, and I believe that if you lose somebody, we are already pretty sad and depressed. So I decided to make my card cheerful and happy to bring at least a little smile to her and her family in this difficult time.
I started out by cutting the front panels from some colored card stock using the Sunshine Layers dies by Wplus9. Then I die cut the circle with some Sizzix dies to have my Kraken peek through it.
I stamped the image itself with Memento Tuxedo Black ink, which is Copic friendly and doesn’t bleed. I used bright and cheerful colors for the Kraken so it would contrast nicely with the color of the front panel. I colored the background around the Kraken with some light blue Copics and then used the dotting technique to add some texture.
For the sentiment, I grabbed a stamp set up by Mama Elephant and aligned the letters to spell the word HUGS. I thought that was really appropriate considering the many arms of the Kraken. I put glue on the stamps and then stamped them onto my card stock. Then I grabbed my Gilding Flakes and — holding my breath — put them onto the glue. If you’re not sure how this works, check out my videos here. I repeated the same process with some of the bubbles from the same Create A Smile stamp set around the Kraken. I just wanted to tie in some of the sparkle.
I added some foam tape on the back of the front panel and adhered it to my card base. I used Copic friendly card stock, but it bled through to the inside of the card front. To fix this, I used my usual trick of cutting a piece of card stock a tiny bit smaller than 5.5 x 4.25″ and adhering to the inside of the card base. That covers up the bleeding and it still looks very clean both on the inside and outside.
I’m sending this card off the following challenges as well: Simon Says Anything Goes; Addicted to Stamps and More #164 Anything Goes; Creative Knockouts #28 Tic Tac Toe with the row “Stamp, Embossing, Die Cuts”.
Thanks for stopping by and having a look! See you again soon!
