Stained Glass Mother's Day Card

I saw the video featured in this post by Kristina Werner recently, and wanted to try this "stained glass" technique myself. While I didn't have the specific stamp set she used, I did CASE (Copy Another Scrapbooker's Efforts) her design pretty closely.

I used stamps from 2 sets: I don't know the manufacturer of the flower stamp set; the leaves are from the "Vine Flourish" stamp by Scrappy Cat. I first stamped the flowers on vellum, using Versamark ink, then stamped the leaves to fill in among the flowers. I heat embossed them with Recollections "Snow" embossing powder. I set that aside to cool while I picked out my marker colors.

In Kristina's video, she used Copic markers to color the images. Since I don't have Copics, I pulled out several colors of Marvy LePlume II water-based markers. I colored the red flowers on the back of the vellum, using Kristina's technique of not blending and alternating colors in the different sections of the flowers (she was not able to blend the Copics on the vellum). I also colored the green leaves using just one marker and no blending. For the purple flowers, I first colored the centers yellow. I started the petals on the first flower by coloring them with a light purple. Then I came in with a darker purple for the petal sections close to the center, trying to feather the color out towards the lighter. It didn't really feather, though, so I tried going back in with the lighter purple, and found the color really blended well that way! So I continued with the other 2 flowers, blending the darker color by going over the "seam" with the lighter purple.

Following Kristina's design, I used Fiskars' "Scalloped Sentiment" border punch to punch the top strip from white cardstock, which I then glued to the top of the vellum panel. I punched both long sides of another piece of white cardstock, and printed the greeting from this digital stamp set by Sweet 'n Sassy Stamps on it.

Since I made this card for Operation Write Home, I wanted to make sure the vellum panel was securely adhered to the card front. Kristina had used small dots of Tombo Mono Multi glue, strategically placed behind the embossed areas and the top border strip so the glue wouldn't show through the vellum. But with all the handling my card may get, I was afraid that wouldn't do for my purposes, so I ran the whole panel through my Xyron 5.5" Creative Station to apply adhesive to the back. Then I VERY carefully stuck the panel to a piece of light beige cardstock, making sure not to get any wrinkles or bubbles, since the Xyron adhesive is very strong and very permanent!

I did use liquid glue to adhere the greeting strip, which I had trimmed to the width of the vellum panel; then adhered the whole card front panel to a card base. And that finished this card off.

I'm entering this in Simon Says Stamp's Monday "Transparent" challenge.