I wanted to make a special Christmas card for my sister and her husband and thought you could watch whenever you have the time.
I started by taking a retired Carolyn Shores Wright stamp called Holly House #90129 and stamping it on watercolor paper that was 4 3/4″ wide by 6 3/4″. Then I created a mask using Avery Removable Labels link https://tinyurl.com/ya7crvfr They are a full size sheet label so you can make a ton of masks where the entire back stays sticky (vs. a post-it-note). To make the mask, I stamped the bird stamp on it and cut it out as close to the inside of the lines as possible (so I don’t leave inked lines if my mask is too large, since you have to press over the masking paper.)
I laid the mask aside for now and used mostly Prismacolor watercolor pencils to color my image. I used the picture on the back of the stamp as my reference. I had Rich fast forward through the coloring…I used a Stampin’ Up blender pen for activating the watercolors. Here’s a link to a Stampin’ Up representative and his online ordering if you don’t have a representative. http://www.stampinup.com/ecweb/default.aspx?dbwsdemoid=2104107
blender pens: https://tinyurl.com/yafy5m93
After liquifying the watercolors with my blender pen, I laid the mask over my image and used Distress Inks Stormy Sky on a Stampin’ Up retired weathered background stamp and inking over the top portion of the cardstock. I tried to make a mark where my stamping ended and stamp the rest of the cardstock, but overlapped a little bit.. I took the 1″ chip brush in blue that I buy from Harbor Freight Liquidators, and put more of the Stormy Sky ink over the entire image to blend out some of the lines and make the entire background blue, then used Iced Spruce Distess Ink and my green brush on the bottom portion to make it look like grass. I removed the mask and then stamped a couple of small evergreen trees near the house with an old foam backed stamp that came in a nature set of inexpensive stamps…You can use any small evergreen tree stamp for this. I removed the mask and used my Kadomaru Pro corner rounder link https://tinyurl.com/yaql2lc5 to round the corners, then took a piece of red embossed cardstock 4 7/8 x 6 7/8″ with rounded corners, and glued it to a white card base that is 5 x 7″ with rounded corners. I added a layer of foam tape on the back of the house image, and used a matching blue ribbon to wrap around the top and glued to the back with AdTech fine line glue and washi tape, then added an old sentiment from Stampin’ Up that I’d first used an oval punch on (and the sentiment was too wide), so used a round paper punch to make the image smaller, then scissors to fix the rough spots. I stamped another sentiment inside the card and put my Made by Sandy Parker punch on the back and called it done.  My sister and her husband loved the card, and I hope you enjoyed the process.

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