Birthday Card | My Favorite Things - Bold Blossoms & Wish Die-namics | BBB Challenge - Triple Stamping

Hi There!

Sending out BIG Birthday Wishes from this week's challenge over at the Back To Basics Challenge Blog! To be honest, I had never tried the technique we are highlighting, Triple Layered Stamping, so I had to do a bit of research and figure how to make this work for me! I determined that I wanted to make the background the star of the show and decided to create my own patterned paper using MFT's Bold Blossom Stamp Set. This set is now retired but is still a real gem because of all the geometric flowers & circular shaped stamps. 

I started by taping a piece of 110# Neenah Solar White card stock to my cutting board with painter's tape. You can create this simple watercoloring on the Neenah paper because you don't use too much water. If you get this paper really wet, the fibers pill from the surface, but if you watch how much moisture you add, this is the perfect substrate for creating patterned paper. I quickly drew sketchy circles of different sizes/colors over the entire area with my Caran d'Ache Neocolor Artist's Crayons. There was nothing special to the layout - the space was just filled in randomly but I did try to make the circles of the same color similar in size. Using a medium-sized brush l loaded with water, I used a circular motion to activate the watercolor for each area of color I had applied. Each color was painted  separately and it only took a couple of seconds for each dot. I sprayed the entire surface liberally with shimmer mist, flecked it with metallic watercolor and dried it briefly with my heat gun. Using the Bold Blossoms Stamps, I went back into the circles to add geometric details to the pattern with distress oxide inks to match my color palette (Wilted Violet, Wild Honey, Picked Raspberry & Carved Pumpkin). It was so much FUN to fill in the blanks with the smaller dot stamps and I was really happy with the way the paper turned out! I only needed 1/4 of the sheet for this card so I have lots of this background left to use on other cards. This whole process only took 30 minutes from start to finish! 

I drew a quick sketch of the way I needed the triple cuts to work on a piece of scrap paper and used these measurements as my template. I cut my patterned paper to 5' x 3.75", drew my template on the back and cut out my pieces. This would have been a lot easier if I had small shaped die cuts in all of the sizes I needed but instead I had to cut everything out by hand with my X-acto knife and straight edge! Each cut area needed a 1/8" margin on the outside in order to frame it with the dark pink card stock, which created the triple "layered" stamping effect. Once each of the four pieces were cut to size and adhered to the pink card stock, they were glued (in correct order) to the front of a side-folding A-2 card base.

I applied Wilted Violet Distress Oxide Ink directly onto a piece of purple card stock, spritzed it lightly with shimmer mist and flecked it with my gold paint. I cut this paper four times using MFT's Wish Die-namics die and glued/stacked the images together for dimension. Each letter was backed with foam tape, adhered into place and gold watercolor was applied to the candle's flame to finish the card.

Thanks for joining me today - head on over to the BBB Challenge to see what other great ideas the design team has come up with for this triple stamping technique!

This card was also entered into the following challenges:

My Favorite Things - The Birthday Project Challenge - Candles

Seize The Birthday Challenge #166

Simon Says Stamp Wednesday Challenge - Bright Colors Inspiration Moodboard

Crafty Cardmakers - #234 Birthdays

Rachelle ♥