Masculine Birthday Cards Inspired by Watercolor for Card Makers

I'm starting to actually put together cards from the myriad of playing I've done based upon the lessons from the onlinecardclasses.com class Watercolor for Card Makers.  So far, I'm really liking the background techniques and I love that I found something that will work for masculine cards.  I struggle with those the most.  For today's cards, I broke out a set from Impression Obsession called It's About Time.  I bought it a while back at Runaway Arts and Crafts (too close of a walk from work for my budget's liking, but budget smudget).  I haven't really had the time to play with it (ha!).  But when I ran out of background stamps to play with, I thought about making my own.  So stuck all the big stamps to my Fiskars press and made my own background.  For version one, I just stamped it with Versafine ink but I then heat embossed the second version.  I broke out my cheap watercolors from Michaels and went to town!   Once the background were dry, I cut them down to size and made a couple of banners.  I didn't want the cards to look exactly the same, so I matted one on black paper and then played with that angle look that is so popular right now (by played with I mean I put the paper on the angle and fought my natural instinct to straighten it).  Then it was just some taping it down.  But I still needed a sentiment.  I went with the traditional banner for one but on the angle card, I decided to balance out some of that white space that looked weird to be since it was such an angle.  I added a few sequins to the more traditional card (there can be sequins on a masculine card, right?  Of course!) but the angle card had finally grown on me so I left it alone and called it good.

Finally Satisfied

The third time is definitely the charm.  While I was happier with my second version, I had pieces for a third try on my desk simply calling my name:  "Try again ... try again ..."   So I played with a couple of different colors of Distress Ink on some scrap paper and decided to switch the embossing up with Tumbled Glass.  This time I also ended up with a more subtle streaking on the paper.  I'm not sure if was just working a little faster, the change in color or I used less or more pressure, or a combination of all those factors, but I really liked how the background came out this time. It's a nice subtle texture to the card.  Then I did pretty much all the same things I had done on version two, but I used shorter pieces of baker's twine so I had to do a lot less fiddling to bring it all together.  When I had it finally all together, I was finally very pleased with the result. 

Flying By Inspiration from the Lawn Fawn blog

I recently purchased the Flying By set and matching dies from Lawn Fawn.  Have I mentioned they are my absolute favorite?  So I did a Google search of images where I discovered the original video introducing the set when it first came out.  You can watch that here and a blog post on the Lawn Fawn blog with a post with a super clean looking card that you can find here. 

It inspired me to try may hand at it.  Well, it turned out to be a little trickier to do it in real life than it was in my head.  The airplanes were super fast and easy to stamp on three sheets of paper form the Jillibean Soup Blossom Soup 6x6 paper pad.  I ran into trouble, however, when I started building the background.  I chose not to cut the sentiment apart, but rather to selectively ink the stamp.  I couldn't seem to get my pressure even and I really had a hard time when it came time to stamp those little dotted lines.  I guess I haven't spent enough time in my craft room lately and my skills are a bit rusty.  But eventually I got a version I was willing to live with, even with it's imperfections (note I did not say a I was happy with it).  I used some yellow striped paper from the Snap Collection from Simple Stories to mat it and called it good.