Hello!

I’ve just come back from a holiday to the north of Japan, to the centre of the area where the tsunami hit in 2011. What a shock it is to see the areas of ground that are still bare, and to walk along the beach and find fragments of beautiful pottery that is still washing ashore. It was amazing to see the scale of the area that was washed away, and to see the heights that the water reached. It was also interesting to see the high tide mark on the supermarket doors several kms inland.

I have three cards to share with you today that all use the Thanks a Bunch stamp set from Paper Rose for both images and sentiments. This stamp set features a beautiful big bouquet, but as you may have realised by now, I really love to champion the small images in stamp sets, so I’ve made a card using one of the smaller sprigs in the stamp set too.

The first card is one that I coloured a few weeks ago during Kathy Racoosin’s ‘thedailymarker30day’ challenge. Just as I was finishing colouring the whole image, one of my markers spat onto my card. Here’s a picture of what happened!

This accident certainly helped decide the design of the card. I kept it simple, just adding a sentiment strip in exactly ‘the’ place where the problem occurred. It is slightly lower on the card than where I’d often put the sentiment, but I like the way it doesn’t cover too much of the bouquet. The I used only five Copic markers for this card, Y11, Y15, G43, B95 and E15. Kathy often talks about ‘colour plucking’ and I literally did just that before going on holidays. I reached in with my eyes closed and chose two markers from each family to take with me. This card is the result of not having my usual range of choices.

For my second card, I white heat embossed and watercoloured the image, and then cut carefully around the outside, sacrificing a few ‘fiddly bits’ (sorry bluegum leaves!)

I stencilled a background using the newly released Distressed Mesh stencil and Evergreen Bough Distress Ink. I popped the image up with some foam tape, and added a white heat embossed sentiment.

Finally, let’s hear it for the smaller images. I fell in love with the Evergreen Bough colour when I was blending it onto the card above, so I knew I wanted to use it in the final card. I stumbled on one of Kristina Werner’s colour combos that highlighted this colour, and still blended with my other two cards. (Call my fussy, but I’m happiest if my cards look like a set) The ink trio was Old Paper, Evergreen Bough and Black soot. I stamped and white heat embossed the sweet little sprigs all over the front of a card, then blended the three colours the card, overlapping them well, and going back and forth a few times.

You’ll notice that I’ve also spattered some white gouache. I love the snow like effect that it gives, but in fact the reason for the gouache is the Japanese monsoon season. Even with a powder tool, the page was still a little sticky and damp, so a little embossing powder stuck where I couldn’t remove it. my answer was to spatter white paint on the whole card to blend these in.

I hope you have enjoyed seeing these cards as much as I have enjoyed making them. This is a stamp set that I can see myself using over and over again.

If you’d like to see more of my cards, you can see them here.

Until next time,

Blessings,

Donna