Masking Florals

I’m busy making thankful cards these days. I’ve said this before but I think it’s worth repeating. I love surprising people with cards on Thanksgiving.  I know Christmas is right around the corner and of course I’ll send lots of hand-made cards out then. But, Thanksgiving is a great time to pause . . . reflect on the previous year. . . . before the hustle and bustle of the holiday season begins. Take time to think about the important people in your life. Then let them know how special they are by sending them a hand-made card. 

For my card, I did some masking and water coloring. Masking is a great way to create a one-layer card that has a little more depth. For masking on this card, I used Inkadinkado’s masking paper as well as a post-it note. Since I have the coordinating dies for the stamps, I then stamped all images onto masking paper and die-cut each of them. I keep the masked images to use later and store them with the coordinating stamps. 

To get started I pull out the stamps I plan to use and play around with them until I get a layout I like. 

You can see in the image below, the little bud stamps behind the other images. The masking paper is on the left and of course the pink post-it note is on the right. Now I can stamp the little bud behind the two larger images. The stem of the little bud doesn’t appear or stamp or over the larger floral stamp. 

For the card panel, I used Royal Sundance Felt Card Stock to stamp the floral images. It has a beautiful texture and the 80lb. cover can handle a little bit of water. Using Zig Clean Color Markers, I colored the images.  I started in the center of each petal with a darker color and worked my way out to lighter shades. Mostly did a dry on dry technique and only added a tiny bit of water to blend out the tips of the petals. I also touched the tip of the lightest marker to the darkest one and blended out that way. The finishing touches, included adding darker shading in the nooks where it would typically be darker. 

I created a color chart of all my Zig Markers to help me pick out colors that work well together. For this card, I used Orange, Bright Yellow, and Yellow markers for the petals. For the center of each flower, I used Lemon Yellow and Beige. 

The sentiment is stamped on Astrobright Eclipse Black Card Stock. It’s 80# cover and just a little heavier than the other Astrobrights. It works really well for sentiment strips like this. After treating the black paper with the anti-static powder bag, I stamped with Versamark ink and heat embossed with gold powder. It’s so important to treat black paper when heat embossing. If you don’t, you’ll get many stray specks of the powder heat embossed around your sentiment.

Since, I had die-cut all the images from the stamp set I decided to make additional panels. I’m thinking I’ll turn the rest into a gift card pack for someone. It was fun designing the different layouts. 

Marcia K.