Lovely Fall

I spent a lot of time stamping today. I will upload some of my creations later this week or early next, but since I'm sending them to someone I want them to be a surprise. Fortunately, Bill reminded me tonight that we needed a Get Well card for a friend's dad, who I am very certain does not read this blog, so I am able to upload at least one card tonight.

I needed the card to be masculine, and Lovely as a Tree is the most masculine current stamp set I own. I really do love this set -- it's perfect for so many occasions! If it were up to me this set would be a permanent fixture in every stamp room in the country, if not the world! But I digress.

For my color combination I used chocolate chip, really rust and river rock along with naturals ivory. No, I didn't think of this color combo and, for a change, it did not come out of the Coldwater Creek catalog. This just happened to be the color challenge on SCS today. It was a fortuitous coincidence that it was the prefect color combination for this card.

I started by stamping the oak leaf image on the card base with chocolate chip ink. I added an unadorned strip of really rust over the middle of the card. I inked up the oak tree in river rock ink, then used my chocolate chip and really rust markers to add color to the stamp (the ability to use this technique and thus stamp a multi-color image is just one of the reasons why I love our stampin' write markers). After I stamped the tree I used my aquapainter and sole river rock ink to full in the tree and color the ground. I used my close to cocoa Stampin' Write marker to color the tree trunk and added the sentiment at the bottom in chocolate chip ink.

I sponged on some really rust ink over the edges of the natural ivory panel and I sponged river rock ink over the edges of the river rock panel. I like the very subtle textured effect created by tone-on-tone sponging! I adhered the image panel to the river rock card stock and added two really rust eyelets at the bottom. I adhered the river rock card stock to the card base and the card was done. And I'm happy to report that it received the DH stamp of approval! Yay!