Mr Cardmaker Loves His Florals and a Homemade Stencil

Wow, I am so far behind on this blog, I just spent 20 minutes writing about I card I already posted about. ARGH.

Well, now that Spring has arrived (on most days, anyway) I decided to pull out some flower stamps and dies. I LOVE my Wplus9 Fresh Cut Floral stamps and dies. The color options, the layering, I just really can relax and stamp flowers and leaves and berries to my heart's content.

I knew I wanted to do several projects, and with the dies being solid backed (which means you can't see through it to line up something you've stamped beforehand), I felt it was best to just die cut a big pile of everything, and I could decide what I wanted to create afterwards.

Well, when I was cutting all these small dies over and over, I noticed that the cardstock piece I was using was looking really kind of cool. The dies were really pretty evenly spaced, and the dies are close to being the same size, so it was just pleasing to look at. I decided that there was a future for that card stock. And indeed, there was.

So I made three or four cards with the diecuts, and I will share those another time.  I really want you to see what I did with the negative today.

Now, I did a LOVELY card with this technique, and I put it in an envelope and mailed it-- BEFORE I thought to photograph it. I HATE doing that! My favorite cards manage seem to have a similar fate, I fear. I guess I get too excited about getting them off to someone. Either that, or I have waited to the last possible second to mail something, and it's a now-or-never situation. I think it's more often the latter, if I'm honest...sigh.

Ok, so I made these--

Ok, so this first one is cute, right? I just did simple inking on the background, and that was it.
But on this one--

Ok so two things here--No, three!
1)Multiple colors, 2)Stamping the images onto the stenciled images, and 3)background ink blending.

I LOVE this look!
(My other card was much more like the second one, but with softer colors. I REALLY wish I had taken a pic or two.....)

Check them out again--

Fun, right?

I have some Christmas dies from Papertrey Ink That I am looking forward to using for some holiday cards.
Oh, but wait!

I did one more!
Speaking of Christmas, I did a weird and I mean WEIRD color choice, and made this Christmas card using the same idea--

BAM! ORANGE for Christmas Baby! So weird. I was trying to go for the "warm" in "warm holiday hugs" I guess, but this is like a juicy, sassy citrus orange. I LOVE the color, but this is just ODD for Christmas.

Oh, but yeah, you can see where I stenciled the orange and then stamped inside the image to do the background.
I also embossed my focal image and sentiment in Liquid Platinum embossing powder, and all of the watercoloring is the ONE color of orange. I made different values of color by watering it down.
Clear Wink of Stella coats the image, and I did the dots with a white gel pen.

I love trying new things! This may be a pretty old thing to the world, but it's new to me, and I will probably do it over and over until I get good and sick of it, and then forget about it for a year or so...

Do you do that? Let me know I'm not totally off my rocker, will ya? (Or that I AM, if you feel the need to...)
I'm so happy you joined me today!

Thanks so much for stopping by!
All Best-
Richard