Thankful Tree

I decided to make a card this evening! It’s been longer than I would like since the last time I made one. I ended up incorporating a fair few challenges into the creation of this card. The layout is based on Viva la Verve‘s first November sketch challenge. The colour scheme of orange, brown and kraft comes from CAS-ual Fridays. Several challenges gave the theme of being thankful – Time Out Challenges, Double “D” Challenges,  and AAA Cards. And finally, Cupcake Inspirations asked for trees.

I knew straight away that I wanted to use my new CAS-ual Fridays stamps, which are from the Calm and Loving stamp set. Initially I was thinking to stamp them in colour – brown for the trunk and orange for the heart-leaves. After testing the colours on a scrap piece of the kraft card though I didn’t like the way it looked. After a bit of thought I decided to stamp and heat emboss in black onto the kraft panel.

Once my heat embossing was complete I wanted to add some orange in behind the tree. I took Spiced Marmalade Distress Ink and sponged it on to give an orange glow behind the tree, adding a nice pop of colour to it. At this point I realised that the square panel didn’t seem quite right with the image, so I used my Crop-A-Dile to round off the corners. I then put the panel into my MISTI and stamped the sentiment using MFT Black Licorice hybrid ink.

I wanted to bring out the orange a bit more so I decided I would mat the kraft panel onto some orange paper. I found a suitable snippet which I trimmed to size and rounded the corners. The colour was a little bit off, so I went over it with my sponge and Spiced Marmalade to help tie the colour in with that of my tree.

I decided I would use brown for my background as I still hadn’t incorporated that colour into the card. I found a piece of chocolate coloured card stock that seemed like it would be perfect. I cut it to be just smaller than my card base. I then cut the brown card into two pieces, one being about half the size of the other. I ran the smaller strip through my Big Shot in a textured impressions folder from Sizzix’s Butterfly Lattice set. I then used Tombow Multi Mono Liquid glue to attach the two brown panels to my white card base.

For the little banner part of the sentiment I returned to the kraft card stock. I ran a snippet of it through my Big Shot twice using a Carta Bella die from the Forever die set. That gave me two small banner pieces. I used my Tombow liquid glue again to adhere the two little banners so that they would look like one very long banner coming down behind my focal panel. I shifted the banner along compared to the original sketch as I wanted to use the banners to help mask the line between the two brown panels.

Finally I just needed to adhere my focal panel. Originally I was planning on just mounting the kraft directly onto the orange but I decided I really liked how they looked slightly offset from one another so I did that instead.

I’m really quite happy with how this card turned out. It’s not exactly what I had in mind but did more or less live up to what I was hoping to make. I love the stamp set and think this tree has a lot of versatility to it, and I really like how it stands out with that black embossing against the orange-yellow glow of the distress ink. In hindsight it would probably have been best to heat emboss the sentiment as well, as it seems to fade away a bit beside the embossing otherwise.

Love,

Lady Joyful