You are my happy

Hello there!  I'm sharing a card that I made for the Simon Says Stamp Monday Challenge (love is in the air + use red).

To make this card I used the Layers of Love stamp set and dies from Concord & 9th along with MFT's Watercolor Stripes background stamp.  That's the short of it, if you'd like to know how I made that background, the LONG version, I'll explain lol!  It was rather a comedy of errors ;)

So I was playing around with a technique I saw on the internet.  I started with a piece of Tim Holtz watercolor paper and I applied Worn Lipstick distress ink directly to the paper, quite heavily, so the whole sheet was solid pink.  Next I laid a heart stencil on top of the paper and sprayed it with water.  I let it sit for a bit and then laid a paper towel on top to remove excess water.  When I removed the stencil I was "supposed" to see the hearts appear on the paper.  Well even after drying with my heat tool the hearts were so faint I could barely see them.  Now this technique involved applying a second coat of ink in another color over the first, so I decided to cover the paper with Candied Apple distress ink just to see if anything happened.  It didn't.  Not wanting to waste a sheet of watercolor paper and all that ink I decided to carry on.  My next move was to use the Watercolor Stripe background stamp.  At first I was going to try and stamp with Versamark ink and apply white embossing powder but I was afraid that because the paper was SO saturated with inks that I wouldn't be able to get it dry enough to keep the white embossing powder from sticking everywhere.  So I decided instead to use SSS White Pigment Ink and stamp the stripes.  After doing that I put my heat tool to it but I knew that pigment ink was not going to dry no matter how much I heat it.  At that point I let it sit for a few hours to air dry.  When I came back to it it still wasn't completely dry, and even a day later it wasn't dry.  I still proceeded to make the card, I did like the way the paper looked.  When I die cut the heart I made sure to place a piece of typing paper over the card stock, and sure enough there was a nice print of those stripes that showed up on the typing paper lol!  I decided to make the card into a shaker, and I really do LOVE how it turned out, despite all the pitfalls!

Thanks for stopping by my blog today :)