Hi friends, have you heard about the Lasting Hearts card drive? One of my favorite crafters, Jennifer McGuire first introduced me to this and since them several folks from this crafting community have come forward to help with the cause. You can read all about it here and here.

 

I decided to send a few cards myself to help with this cause. Being a mom of two sweet princesses, I cannot even dare to imaging what these women have experienced. My heart aches for them and if there is something, albeit small and insignificant, that I can do to touch their lives with kindness, I will surely do it. So here I am with my cards.

 

 

I used my new favorite flower stamp set from wplus9 – pretty little peonies – on these cards. This is a layering stamp set. It has images that can be stamped on top of each other, with same or different inks, to created a very painted kind of look. Each of these flower images has 4 layer stamps, including one outline layer. Each leaf image has two layers – outline and the filled-in image. It also has a few tiny bloooms stamps which also have multiple stamps for the stem and the blooms themselves. There is also a coordinating die set that goes with this stamp set, but for today’s cards, I did not use those dies.

 

Let me be honest with you – in the beginning, I did have a learning curve with these layering images. I think mainly because I started with the smaller images, tried to use all four layers and wanted them to line up perfectly. I did not like the look I was getting. But as I kept practising, I realized, I could ease up a little bit and get so much better results.

In these cards, I have used mostly 2 layers and occasionally 3, never 4. I have also not forced myself to line them up oh-so-perfectly. The crafting diva, Dawn who designed these stamps, did a video of a similar stamp set – the Pretty Peonies stamp set. This has some larger flowers but is also a layering stamp set. I highly encourage you to watch her video here. You will learn so many tips. She is just fabulous!

 

Anyways, I discovered that my favorite look with these stamps was to go with an intense ink for the outline and use a much lighter / brighter ink for the inside filler stamp. I love how these yellow-black ones turned out. 

 

 

 

I also fell completely in love with these leaves. I have used them on so many cards now and I don’t think I have explored enough of them yet. Yes, you will see more of them in this space for sure! :-)

 

For all my cards today, the highlight was learning to stamp the layered peonies. I stamped directly onto my card front panel. While stamping the leaves, I inked the whole stamp and then wiped the ink away from the bottom area using a baby wipe. I did not do any masking for these cards. Once I had stamped all images and sentiment, I die cut the panel using the largest rectangle from Simon Says Stamp Stitched rectangle dies and adhered to my card base. I did play with the card base itself, trying to do tone-on-tone stamping, but I did not like the result, so went ahead and covered almost all of the area with my floral stamped panel.

 

Finally as embellishments, I added a few sequins and called these done!

 

Hope you liked today’s cards and are inspired to try something like this!

 

Big hugs,
~Varada