Waltzingmouse Sketch challenge 54

Good evening crafters. Today I had a birthday card to make for a friend. Its not her birthday for a couple of weeks, but I'm really busy over the next couple of weeks, and we're away before her birthday so I need to get it sorted sooner rather than later! I have used the waltzingmouse sketch challenge as my inspiration, and was hugely excited to use my new set of stamps which I won in the July blog waltz!! I chose offbeat backgrounds and have been dying to play with it! Heres the sketch.

I started by embossing the A5 ivory card with swiss dots. Because the embossing folder is only A6 I had to emboss from both sides, but I left a gap in the middle for the ribbon. I had to overlap on the wider side, and when I had done it the original embossed dots were flattened on the last row, so I had to put the embossing folder back around by hand and gently press them back out.

I decided to try my offbeat background dots to compliment the swiss dots. I tried to do it with my distress inks, but they didn't stamp too well. I love distress inks for sponging, but for larger areas of stamping they don't work great, I think its because they're so watery. So instead I used my whispers ink, and it stamped lovely in sage. I also used my cuttlebug and labels 4 nesties to make a little sentiment, and stamped with a sentiment from Teeny trees.

I used a wild asparagus stamp to give some extra texture to the sentiment in the same sage colour which looked nice.

I wanted to distress all the elements a little, so I sponged some tea dye distress ink around the edges, including all around the card edge and also onto some little flowers I had put together.

The final thing was to use some lovely sage ribbon to tie it all together! I hope she will like it!