Sending Sunshine

Sending a little uplifting sunshine. Nothing says sunshine quite like sunflowers. I had to have the new Sunflowers & Daisies Card Kit by Simon Says Stamp. Soo many fun supplies! If you missed out on the kit, many of the individual components are still available to order. This card was real close to the recycle bin….I did a little tweaking and feel it is worthy of mailing. This stamp set, Sunflower Fields, comes with a layering stencil. In theory this would make your coloring super simple and super quick! This is my first time inking up the stamp and I went for my Distress Oxides inks, as I felt their creamy smoothness would be great for blending. Upon completion, the image looked great and I sat it aside to dry. Coming back to the panel minutes later, my vivid image had drastically paled. That creamy smoothness, also lead to a creamy finish and I lost my brightness. Not the ray of sunshine I was looking for. Knowing that my shimmer brushes often slightly darken images, I grabbed my gold shimmer brush and went over the images and added some splatter. This helped bring the card back to life. It is still not quite as vibrant as I had hoped, but obviously not going to the recycle bin either!

Design Tip-If you happen to be splatter challenged (this is so me!) Shimmer brushes make almost perfect splatter! I just squeeze a bit of ink and tap the pen against basically anything to get the splatter effect. When I say anything, I just grab what is handy….a block, pen, scissors…you get the idea! I love that I get fairly uniform splatters and no big blobs!

It is hard to capture the shimmer on camera, but you can make out some of the shine on the shot above. I will certainly be trying my dye inks on the next version! To create my card, I die cut the stamped panel with a stitched panel die. Then layered my sentiment and punched holes in die cut shape to allow twine to be threaded through. The completed panel was then adhered to a yellow card base. I kept the embellishments minimal to allow for easy mailing.

All supplies by Close To My Heart, except where noted:

  • SSS October Kit of the Month, Sunflowers & Daisies
  • Z4189 Intense Black Exclusive Stamp Pad
  • Z3831 Peel Paint Distress Oxide Ink Pad
  • Z3832 Mowed Lawn Distress Oxide Ink Pad
  • Fossilized Amber Distress Oxide Ink Pad
  • Tea Dye Distress Ink Pad
  • Z3316 Gold Shimmer Brush
  • Z4292 Mocha Shimmer Brush
  • Stitched Panel DIe-MFT
  • Label Shapes Die-Unknown

I have entered my card in the following challenges:

Thanks so much for stopping by!

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