A Sad Heart

It is with a heavy heart that I write this post tonight. A lone, evil person shot and killed a young soldier standing guard at the War Memorial in Ottawa and then hi-jacked a car and drove it into our Parliament building and started firing again. Luckily he didn’t kill anyone else there. He was shot and killed…one more evil person gone to the devil….but my heart breaks for the family and friends of the soldier killed. One of my daughters and her husband both work for the federal government but I’m happy to report that are both safe.

I wasn’t going to post anything today; however, we will never let evil rule our lives and our lives must go on so I’m posting some cards today.

I picked up a package of mixed crafting supplies at the thrift store several months ago and inside were a set of what I thought were small blank cards and envelopes in cream. Turns out the cards were the kind that brides use to print the RSVP on for people to send back so they were single pieces of embossed cardstock, not cards. Every once in awhile I would pick them up and think, I should do something with these but didn’t know what to do with them….other than move them from place to place. If I attached them to regular cards then they wouldn’t fit into the envelopes and there was no way to just add a piece to the back to make into a card because, well, that would be down right tacky looking. So, I decided the other day to stop moving them and to use the fronts and figure out what to do with the envelopes later…maybe I’ll make some smaller thank you cards or shower gift cards. Anyway, here are three cards I made with them.

The cardstock came with that embossed area about ½” in on all four sides.  I stamped and embossed the butterfly right in the middle and coloured one with alcohol markers, one with water colour pencils and one with water colour paint. Why you ask? Just felt like using all three to see which one I liked the best. I liked them all so not a huge difference….but they were all three a little dull looking so I used Distress Ink Mustard Seed and rubbed it over the top. It’s amazing how Mustard Seed brightens the colours but doesn’t turn it all completely yellow. 

Once everything was dry I took my plastic sheet and rubbed some distress inks onto it and spritzed them with water. I like to rub my finger through each colour to make sure there are no hard lines…but don’t mix the colours up or you get mud. Then I just laid the stamped piece into the distress inks, trying to avoid the butterfly, lifted them up and dried them. If they needed more colour, I just cleaned the plastic and started all over again until I liked it. For the areas close to the butterfly I used a paint brush and left over ink on the plastic to fill in that area and any other area that was missed.

For one I tied some bakers twine around it before gluing it to a card base and for the other two I added some washi tape. The sentiments are stickers but not sure if they are Dazzles from Paper Wishes or other brands.

That’s all for a sad Wednesday,

Cheers

Violet