Sending Big Hugs

I really enjoyed making this card. I’d had the rough idea for it at the beginning of the week, and yesterday it finally solidified into a definite plan which I went ahead and made!

I started out by making myself a card base from some light blue pearlised cardstock. I then picked out the paper for my main panel.

I ran my main panel through my Big Shot with the rain die from Memory Box’s Come Rain or Shine die set. It took quite a while to get the whole thing cut as the die does just four rows at a time.

Next I created my clouds. I used Lawn Fawn’s Simple Puffy Clouds dies and cut them from some white glitter cardstock. I cut one of the largest cloud, two of the medium, and then multiple little ones. I also cut a circle from the same white glitter cardstock.

Then I stamped the hearts onto my circle. They come from CAS-ual Fridays’ Calm & Loving set. I’d purposefully cut the circle to fit them exactly. I heat embossed them in gold. It was a little tricky to emboss on because the embossing powder caught in the crevices of the glitter cardstock, but I managed to get it to work!

I moved on to creating my umbrella. The dies are again from Come Rain or Shine. I used a snippet of pink for the top part of the umbrella, and then gold mirror card stock for the handle. The handles from these dies are very delicate!

At this point I started assembling. I played around with the clouds to get an idea of how I wanted to lay them out. Once I had it worked out I was about to glue them down when I realised that, of course, the glue would go through the rain drop holes. So I glued down the backing panel to the card base before adding the clouds. I used tape runner around the edges and then used my glue pen to add a little liquid glue here and there between the raindrops.

I added the clouds on with Tombow Multi Mono Liquid glue. I considered using foam tape for them but decided just having them overlapping gives enough dimension anyway. I did use foam tape for the back of my circle. I used my glue pen to add the umbrella handle, and then a bit more foam tape to attach the top of the umbrella over that. I positioned it so that the top of the handle would peek up from the back of the pink, leaving the little ‘spike’ that some umbrellas have.

At this point I realised that the embossed lines on the umbrella weren’t showing very well. I carefully went in with a pink colouring pencil and added a little bit of shading along the lines. It would have been much easier to do before I’d adhered it with the foam tape!

Finally I decided I wanted to add a sentiment. I used one from the same CAS-ual Fridays set, heat embossing it in gold on another snippet of the pink. I realised after stamping that the paper wasn’t actually straight, and my attempts at trimming it to straighten it just made the whole thing worse so I gave up. I probably should have restamped it… I used foam tape again to adhere the sentiment in place.

I’m really happy with how this turned out. It’s pretty much exactly what I had in mind. I love how the rain drop background turned out, and the clouds work brilliantly with it. I am annoyed at myself for not redoing the sentiment, but I can probably fix that later…

Love,

Lady Joyful

Challenges included:

CAS-ual Fridays – Everything Turns To Gold

Cupcake Inspirations – Colours: Slate, Ballet and Gold (edit – this card was a sweet select!)

Mod Squad – Get Well Soon  (I think this is a very suitable card for someone who is ‘under the weather’!)

Seven Hills Crafts – Sketch/Layout (I changed it up a little and got a bit interpretive – I flipped the sketch around to be landscape and kept the strips going along horizontally. I used the clouds to be representative of those strips.)

TGIF – With Love