A 'self challenge'

 I wish you the warmest of greetings on this cold, bleak day here.

I am home again for a few days, and although I got my fingers inky on Sunday, I cannot showcase that effort as I have sent the cards off without taking a photograph of them :-(, so I have chosen to share a card I made some time ago. During the construction of it I 'challenged' myself to use only two colours of ink.

I started with tearing a piece of a page out of a dictionary - it's all right, the dictionary is very old and incomplete!  It was purpose bought at a garage sale for me by a friend who knew I was looking for one to recycle, and the texture of the pages is 'just right' for taking the ink when sponging and stamping.

I sponged the edges with Tim Holtz distress ink in tea stain.  Using the emboss resist technique I stamped in clear embossing ink and clear embossed an image from Layers of Color Acanthus set. This done I then sponged Memento Bamboo leaf ink over it.  The effect was not as dramatic as I would have liked, rather interesting would describe it.

The page was then mounted on a pale lime green base card which I had already sponged the edges of using the green ink, although it does not show well in the photograph.

I had some small pieces of metallic gold card on my desk, and I used this to stamp and gold emboss the large butterfly from the Layers of Color Flutterescent set, and also the sentiment, on.  The corners of the sentiment panel were rounded using a punch, and the edges run over the tea stain ink pad.

The butterfly was cut out and mounted on some foam dimensional tape, and  the trail added using gems from an un-named set. I deliberately positioned it low on the card to show the image on the background, but was not happy with the overall balance of this.

It was at this point I decided to limit my colours to those I already had on the card, so after selecting a smaller butterfly from the same set, I decided to use a variation of the 'rock and roll' technique to colour the stamp.

The inks were dye inks and I wanted to emboss the image, so I loaded the stamp with versamark ink, then touched the image on the small green pad and followed that by rolling the edges of the stamp onto the tea stain ink pad, then embossed using clear embossing powder.  I was very pleased with the results, and the butterflies balanced the card without distracting from the focal image.

I enjoyed experimenting and challenging myself with this card, and I hope you have enjoyed the results, if not the journey.

Thanks for calling by, and I wish you a blessed day.