CASEplorations June

Hi Everyone,
It's a new month and that means a new round of CASEing starting over at the STAMPlorations Blog. CASE normally means copy and show everything, in our Playground however it is interpreted as take inspirations from. Each month you can take inspiration either from the card we, the STAMPlorations Girls, are CASEing or any of the cards posted by the Inspiration Design Team which you can find in the Inspiration Posts during any given month. This month we are featuring a card by Virginia Lu from Virginia Lu's Blog. Her post for our featured can can be found here ...

 ... and this is her beauty of a card ...

There is lots of inspiration to be had: layers, embossing, vellum, colouring, the colours themselves, kraft card, stripes, hearts, flowers ...

... I decided to work with The Birds And The Blooms set and this is the card I made ...

It is probably more of an anniversary than a wedding card and at first glance it doesn't look anything like Virginia's card, yet it has a lot of the elements she used; gold embossed flowers, colouring with markers, vellum, punched flowers and even some stripes.

I found it a little daunting doing all this gold embossing on vellum given that my vellum is very thin and light hence it tends to fly about a lot when I get the heat tool on it. I had to have a re-think and decided to gold emboss my flowers as a background. Virginia's card has a lace like quality which I tried to bring in through using a strip of vellum with a partially die-cut and embossed frame. The stripes from the Mixed Media Grunge set are partially covered by the vellum and in reality a little more visible than in the photograph. Given that I already had flowers for the background, I went for the hummingbird as my focal image. I stamped the hummingbird and my sentiment on a die cut piece of shrink plastic using black StazOn ink and coloured it from the reverse using Promarkers before heating it up with my heat tool to shrink. I had to keep my cool as at some point it looked as if I had to start again ... shrink plastic has its own mind as it crinkles and rolls up during the shrinking process, but it usually flattens out at the end ... Once it had cooled I run my gold Tinge Alcohol Marker along the edge to finish. I then punched a few daisies, layered as shown and finished off with some pearls.

Check out all the team's CASEs here on the STAMPlorations Blog. If you feel like getting your creative juices flowing and linking up with our Playground you can find a LINKY at the end of the post or at the end of any Inspiration Post. Linking up will close 5th July and there will be a random prize winner too.

That's it from me, back soon with more inspiration.

Have a lovely day!

hugs
Monika xxx

from STAMPlorations I used The Birds And The Blooms, which is our June/July STAMP CLUB set, and Mixed Media Grunge
  
dies used - Labels 28 and Imperial Gold Labels 28 by Spellbinders - Bic Warehouse via eBay
daisy Xcut palm punch by docrafts - local stockist
Tinge Alcohol Markers - The Works