An Inked Background for this weeks challenge

 

Good Morning Ladies,

I was going to say 'Tuesday' but corrected myself in time, I will be in a muddle come the end of the week, I will be like last time where I hadn't even thought about setting a challenge until I had written a post and went to schedule it only to find that it couldn't be a 'Throwback Thursday' when it's supposed to be a 'Challenge Friday!!  Talk about 1st world problems.

Talking of problems you should have seen the state of the street this morning, the spent about four hours tidying the village yesterday, only to wake up and find that there was more litter than ever, bread wappers up trees, crisp packets in the gutters, we ended up with half a dozen loo roll holders rolling about the front garden, why why why do people put it out early evening when they can see it's going to get blown away, Paul gets up early and puts ours out on the morning of collection.  I picked up the bits around our area, lots of waitrose wrappers I noticed!!  The wind has died down a bit as I write this and the sun has popped out for a few minutes, I think that we are forecast more rain today though.  I guess it will be another craft day for me! YAY!!

Today's card took my a flippin' age, I started out thinking that this was a great idea but 2 hours in I was regretting my decision! I used 'Cracked Pistachio, Peacock Feathers, Blueprint Sketch & Tumbled Glass' Distress oxides to blend across a piece of Super Smooth White card, I then die cut this with a Card Making Magic Lattice style die and tried to keep all the pieces together.  I then used the same die to cut a white lattice panel and placed this on top of another piece of white card that I used the same outline die to cut to size, this time I covered it with a sheet of double sided adhesive.  Once my frame was in place I started paper piecing all of the 'Ombre' effect Distress Oxide blended pieces into the same position that they were originally in, only this time they are in a crisp white frame!  It took quite a while, I did end up losing a couple of pieces on the floor so Lucy very carefully picked through  pile of die cuts around my feet to find the tiniest piece of pale blue card, I let her have the joy of placing the last piece of the puzzle in place, I then took a piece of copy paper and smoothed over the whole surface to make sure that all the tiny pieces were attached to the adhesive backing, I have to admit it did look quite effective, I tried doing it a quick way by just laying the die cut lattice frame over the coloured background but it wasn't nearly as effective.  

To finish the card I took inspiration from a card in a recent magazine, I added a piece of parchment, I decided to go with a coloured piece that worked well with the background, I thought it would also showed up my 'Birthday' die cut better.  I stamped one of Julie Hickey's Banner Sentiments and used the matching die to cut it out,  the piece of card I stamped the sentiments on was coloured with the same DO's to match the background. I found a 'Happy' stamp to place above the Birthday to finish the look.  Tip: to hold the parchment in place I added glue behind the birthday and I used those sentiment banners to add some more glue towards each end.

I hope it has helped some of you that might be struggling, I wanted to show that messy doesn't really need to be that messy. 

Let's hope that the weather is calmer today and that you all have a good day,

Love and hugs to all of you,

Sandra                                                                                                                                                          xxxxxx