A Quiet Night to Stamp

Aaahhh...a simple dinner and a tired husband are the secret ingredients to my having a quiet night to stamp. Unfortunately, the reason I need to stamp is that my dad's former secretary of 25 years had the very shocking experience yesterday of learning that her father had passed away suddenly. I jump started her interest in stamping early this year, and she's going gangbusters at it now, so I wanted to convey my sympathy with a card.

This week's Weekly Inkling on splitcoaststampers featured a tutorial for a brayered sky by renowned stamper Michelle Zindorf. This woman's work is AMAZING, and even though I had to do some of my own tweaking to her instructions, for a first attempt, I think my skyline of layered color turned out pretty good.

The color combination I wanted to use didn't work, so I went with Blush Blossom, Apricot Appeal, and Groovy Guava for my three layers. I used this website to determine what color would best serve as the silhouetted tree. The computer said Elegant Eggplant, and so that's what I used. I don't have any other trees, but I think this one worked fairly well. As you'll see in Michelle's tutorial, hers are more effective. But ya gotta make do sometimes, right?

The sky is stamped with tiny snow dots in Versamark, then dusted with a new product I picked up in my last order--heat and stick powder. You apply it like embossing powder, but when it turns glossy, you can then apply anything--glitter, in this case--that you want to stick to the surface of your card and it will stay there! The only problem was that the snow wasn't white at all, so I used my Signo white gel pen and added some white dots. I also gave the tree some "snow" on its branches.

Since I don't have a sympathy stamp, I used "Thinking of You" and used the same EE for that. The layers of paper include (from closest to the main image outward): Apricot Appeal, Elegant Eggplant, and Groovy Guava. I wanted the look of snow in some other design element on the card, so I went with the swirly mulberry paper, and I like the effect. The base is EE, a color I hadn't worked with before tonight. I like!

I repeated the brayered skyline--I needed the practice--on my short end envelope, and wasn't as pleased with the results. Oh well. I hope Pat is comforted by it.

My new Spring-Summer Collection catalog complimentary demonstrator copy came in the mail today, so I'm going to go peruse it and hope I'm not completely overwhelmed with urges to buy stuff!

Have a good night (or a good morning, if you don't get this in your inbox until then!). Hard to grasp that 144 hours from now, Christmas 2007 will be past. Make the most of the moments that remain--they're more plentiful than they appear!