Seaside Themed Birthday

Hi there everybody.  It was DH's birthday a couple of weeks ago and the usual dilemma is what am I going to make as I'm sure most of us find it more difficult to make masculine cards.  He does like to get out into the countryside or down by the sea, and in the past we have done a fair bit of walking, not so much these days though, but we do try to get out and about, and he has taken up photography in a bigger way since he retired.  Well,  I do have some seaside themed stamps and I decided to stick with them.

I found a snippet of white card about 5" square and started with the background to the image.  When looking on Pinterest recently I found some cards where the background had been applied using the sticky side of masking tape which gives it a rougher more textured appearance, so I thought I would give it a try.  I used Sunshine Yellow and Stonewashed Adirondack ink and Faded Jeans Distress ink.  It did say you should use shiny card so that the glue would not stick firmly to and damage the surface.  Well I wanted to use ordinary white card so I ran the tape over my trousers a few times to remove some of the tack and then inked up a piece cut a bit shorter than the card.  To ink I just ran the pad straight over it and then pressed it down firmly on to the card and worked my way up from yellow to light blue to the darker blue.  If it didn't seem dark enough I inked and went over it again.  When I changed colour I used a fresh piece of  tape.

I used my Sheena Douglass stamps for the plant, I think it's called Thrift (I didn't ink quite all of the stamp), and the Puffin, and a set from Crafty Individuals for the Seashells, and I stamped these using Espresso Adirondack ink.  I then coloured these images with my Spectrum Noir pencils.  I did think that the brown was a little dark but decided to go with it, and I also used a white gel pen to whiten the feathers on the Puffin a bit.  I also used the pencils to add a litle extra shading and to darken the horizon.  I layered the topper on to a snippet of blue card.

The background was made using another slightly larger snippet of white card and a NBUS stencil from That Special Touch called Wavy which I bought for using with sea related cards and I inked it very lightly with the same two blue inks and a very little Peacock Feathers DI as well.  I applied it using some blending foam and I moved the stencil over a bit to fill up the gaps for a bit more coverage.

Before putting the card together I ran off the personal sentiments from the computer on to the inkjet paper I use for inserts and cut them out using a stitched circle die and punched a hole in each one using a screw punch.  I then wrapped three pieces of baker's twine round the image mat and fixed the tags in place with a bit more baker's twine, and to keep them in place I adhered them to the card as they tended to twist.

I finished with the die cut sentiment which I cut from a snippet of dark blue card.

I wasn't quite sure if he would like it but he has said several times how much he loves it so was relieved that I made the right choice. 

Thank you for stopping here today.

Pat x

Pixie's Crafty Workshop - Week 188 where we use up our left over stuff/snippets.
Simon Says Wednesday Challenge - Anything Goes.
Stamping Sensations  - Anything Goes with a Stamp and a Die.
Artistic Stamper Challenge - Anything Goes.