LOTV - Let's Celebrate

Good morning, all! There's a fun birthday challenge this month over at the LOTV Ideas to Inspire Challenge page. Lili of the Valley is turning 10 next month! I'll show you the birthday card I made soon, in a separate post. The challenge runs until the end of the month, and winners of three prizes will be announced May 1st. That gives you lots of time to enter...and remember, I have a link to the challenge page over on the right sidebar of this blog if you should ever need it.

In the meantime, I have a fun card that I made as a "congratulations" card, but after a bit of thinking, I guess you could also use it as a birthday card. In previous posts, I've used the LOTV background stamps in lieu of patterned papers...as I did on this card. This time, I wanted to make a patterned paper using a variety of different LOTV stamps. You may not have the same selection of stamps in your stash to use, but I wanted to show how using a combination of large and small stamps can make a fun one-of-a-kind background for your cards. Here's the end result of my play with some of my LOTV stamps...

On a piece of watercolor paper, I've used a stamp from Set 21, Grunge Corners in the upper left corner, and a smaller stamp from Set 68, Corners in the lower right corner. I filled in between the two along the lower edge with a text stamp from Set 66, Grunge Elements, and a Paris postmark from the same set in the upper right corner. The last piece of the background was a cancellation mark from Set 22, Love Sentiments over the Paris postmark. Here's what the piece looked like at the start, with only the stamps...

I placed the stamps just inside the paper edges because I knew I wanted to heavily distress them and didn't want to lose the edges of the stamps to the distressing. Originally I had planned to put only a large floral grouping in the diagonal open space, but then I found a piece of Antebellum patterned paper left from a previous project (if you're looking at the thumbnail of the paper pad on the LOTV site, it's the aqua, purple, and green piece in the lower right of all the small pictures). I cut that leftover piece of patterned paper to fit the opening, and used my Distress Inks to outline where the paper would go so I could "shade" the edges beneath the patterned paper to give it the illusion of dimension...you can see that I had started to "drag" the color down using my watercolor brush to darken the area around the paper...

Then I started adding the background color with Distress Inks and a watercolor brush...about halfway done in this photo...

Once the coloring was complete, I distressed the edges with an edge distresser, added a piece of palest aqua paper from the Timeless Victorian paper pad behind the watercolored paper, added some machine stitching and edge distressing on the aqua paper, and adhered the pieces to the deep purple card base. All that was left was to add the patterned paper to the center of the watercolored front, and embellish. 

But I wanted to play some more, so on the small diagonal piece of patterned paper, I added some stenciled crackled texture paste, then lightly rubbed in some violet metallic rub...you can see a closeup in this photo. (I die cut one of the new Tim Holtz Frameworks die from Grafix Stencil Film and used it to add the texture paste in the open areas). The sentiment on the banner is from Set 25, Handwritten Phrases ...

Here are a couple closeups of the floral clusters...I added little "dew drops" on the flowers using Viva Glass Effects Gel...

On the inside of the card, I added another "celebration" sentiment from Set 10, A5 Verses to complement the sentiment on the front of the card...

Supplies:

LOTV Stamps:   Set 21, Grunge Corners;   Set 68, Corners;   Set 66, Grunge Elements;   Set 22, Love Sentiments:   Set 25, Handwritten Phrases;   Set 10, A5 Verses

LOTV Patterned Papers:    Antebellum;   Timeless Victorian

Dies:   Tim Holtz Tattered Banners;   Tim Holtz Courtyard Frameworks;   Sizzix Flowers Branches & Leaves

Flowers and stamens:   Wild Orchid Crafts          Pearls:   Recollections

Miscellaneous:   Studio 490 Crackled Texture Paste;   Viva Inka Gold Metallic Rub-Violet;   Distress Inks;   cheesecloth;   Viva Glass Effects Gel

Thanks so much for stopping by today. I hope you'll join in on the birthday challenge fun and enter your birthday card to the LOTV challenge site!