It's Raining Letters & Hearts!

I recently found out about a little girl named Katy who is going through a serious illness. She had had a heart transplant, and her body is now rejecting the heart. She is back on the transplant list, but as of now is still waiting. You can read more about her here. The woman who does that blog put out a call for handmade cards to be sent in to give to Katy. So I made this one for her.

My inspiration came from a card Kelly Marie Alvarez made as a lesson for Online Card Classes' "Stretch Your Stamps 2" class. Day 4 emphasized alphabet and sentiment stamps. The idea of her card was for the letters to look like they were raining. My card is a pretty close CASE of hers.

I die cut the umbrella first from a piece of patterned paper that I had in my voluminous scrap stash. Then I colored the handle and along the rib lines with a blue glitter gel pen. I die cut the umbrella 5 more times from white cardstock, and glued all those together, adding the patterned paper piece on top. This gave it dimension when I glued it to the card, while still proving support for the handle, which I could not have done with foam tape.

Detail shot of umbrella, showing dimension

I used Lawn Fawn's Milo's ABCs stamp set for my letters. I spelled out "Thinking of You" on an acrylic block, and stamped that with a black dye ink pad by Stampabilities. Then, after temporarily adhering the umbrella to the panel, came the hard part--arranging my random letters around the card front panel. I say hard because these particular stamps are very skinny and fiddly, and thus hard to position face down without them tipping over. But I persevered, and finally got them all placed. Then I picked them all up at once with my Fiskars stamp press. I stamped them using Tumbled Glass Distress ink. I finished that part by filling in the blank spots with a small heart stamp from a set by The Paper Studio and Stampabilities Bright Pink ink.

After I had stamped all the letters and hearts, I permanently glued my umbrella to the card front. For the borders on either side, I first used a pair of decorative-edge scissors to cut a piece of pearlescent blue cardstock. I went along the cut edges with some Tumbled Glass Distress ink on a mini ink blending tool, just to mask the white core of the cardstock. After adding a narrow strip of yellow cardstock to either side of the focal panel, I glued my blue pieces peeking out from the yellow, and finally mounted it on a piece of pink patterned paper cut to 4.25x5.5". Finally, I mounted the whole front panel to an A2 card base.

As a couple of finishing touches, I added a coat of Glossy Accents to the canopy of the umbrella, and used my clear Wink of Stella glitter brush marker to add some shimmer to the hearts.