Emboss Resist Sympathy

Before everyone asks, I did not create this card with anyone specific in mind. I know there are two schools of thought when it comes to Sympathy cards. One school says that you should never have any of these on hand and should only stamp them on an as needed basis. The other says that when you need a sympathy card you may not be in any shape to stamp one, so you should stamp them in advance so they're there when you need them.

I'm not sure which camp I fall into. On the one hand, I can totally understand wanting to make this personal of a card from scratch for the recipient. On the other hand, I could also see potentially having a hard time summoning up the stampin' mojo at a sad time. So I guess this is a compromise. I stamped this sympathy card for sale at my December craft fair, but it will be in my stamp room until then, so if I do need it I will have it.

I don't know the name of the technique I used tonight. The effect is a bit like Joseph's coat, but the colors are very targeted. I suppose the technique is really emboss resist, although typically that technique is either done with plain versamark or just one color. So I'm not really sure.

In any case, to make this card I used two of my craft stampin' spots -- certainly celery and barely banana. I used the stampin' spots kind of like markers to ink up just certain portions of the stamps. After I was done adding both ink colors to the images, I stamped them on whisper white card stock and embossed them with clear embossing powder. Then I used my brayer to add perfect plum ink over the entire stamped image. After several passes in all directions the whisper white card stock was an ancient memory. As a final step I used a tissue to wipe off the ink from the embossed images. Pretty cool!

The rest was simple. I added a barely banana and certainly celery mats to the image and sentiment, punching four ticket corners on all layers. I positioned both on a mat of pale plum whose corners had also been punched with the ticket corner punch and adhered the pale plum mat to a perfect plum base. I wanted to accentuate the corners but I did not want to use brads, as the prongs would have been visible on the inside of the card. I could have used 1/8" or 1/4" punched circles, but I wanted more dimension. the beads seemed like a perfect compromise. Dimension with out prongs! I attached the beads to the perfect plum card base with tombow mono multi adhesive and I was all done.

I wouldn't exactly call this card "fun," but it did satisfy my urge to do something different after all those kid birthday cards.