Not Quite there

I confess, sometimes I'm a bit of a masochist, and in stamping this usually manifests itself by me signing up for really difficult swaps. This Leadership is no exception. And I really did it to myself this time, signing up for not just one but two groups of single layer swaps.

Now, I love single layer cards and, in theory, these cards would be really quick and simple to make. No muss, no fuss, right? But no. Not for me. I need my single layer cards to look like they're multi-layer cards, which results in countless complications.

This card, for example, was a contended for one of the final designs. It's made from a single 5.5x8.5" piece of Lovely Lilac card stock. The rest of the "look" was achieved using heat embossing and bleaching. I like the look of this prototype, but as I was making it I quickly realized that this was just too much work. Plus my bleach was a bit hard to control, so I wasn't getting the uniform look I was going for.

For those who are interested, here's how the card was made. I first applied sticky strip about 1/3 of the way over from the spine of the card. Before I peeled the red tape, I used the versamark ink pad to ink up the area between the sticky strip and the card spine. I heat embossed this with clear embossing powder. I then peeled off the red tape, used my heat tool to heat it slightly, covered it with black embossing powder and heat embossed the sticky strip. I love the nice crisp look this gave the card, almost as though there was a layer of elegant eggplant and basic black on the card.

I stamped the image with basic black craft ink and heat embossed with with clear embossing powder. I then covered the inside of the image with bleach, taking care not to let bleach get outside the circle. At first I also tried to keep the flowers and leaves lilac, and just bleach the spaces in between, but that was way too hard! So instead I bleached the whole thing, giving me the white on lilac look.

Again, not a bad concept, just too hard to do for the swap. Fortunately inspiration struck later and I did come up with two designs that I think are cool. You'll see those later in the week.