With Heartfelt Sympathy

Recently, a family member of some friends of ours passed away after a long illness. So I made a few sympathy cards for them, including this one.

I'm not yet accustomed to making sympathy cards, so I turned to Pinterest to search for design ideas. I found a pin that Bianca Hobbyhoek had uploaded of (I assume) one of her cards. (Unfortunately, there is no way to link to it here.) So that was my inspiration for this card.

I first stamped the doily image using this Hero Arts rubber stamp in the lower left corner of a piece of watercolor paper I'd cut to slightly smaller than my card base. I let the image bleed off the panel, and heat-embossed it with clear embossing powder. Then I took four colors of Distress inks: Iced Spruce, Tumbled Glass, Faded Jeans, and Chipped Sapphire; and blended them from upper right to lower left across the watercolor paper, creating a gradient. Finally, I ironed off the clear embossing, leaving the doily image just basically white. I felt the contrast between it and the inked background was a little too stark, though. So I softened it by lightly blending Tumbled Glass ink over the doily.

I didn't have any ribbon the color I wanted, so I took some white satin ribbon and "dyed" it by running it across a Memento "Paris Dusk" dye ink pad. (I have tried this in the past with Distress inks, but unfortunately, the ink at best takes forever to dry--and possibly never really dries at all--and will rub off from the ribbon. So I've given up on using those for dyeing ribbon!) I adhered a piece of the dyed ribbon across the lower right corner of the watercolor paper, and tied more ribbon onto that in a bow.

I used a greeting from this free digital stamp set from Doodle Pantry, printing it directly onto the inked watercolor paper. When I held the finished panel against the white card base, again, the contrast seemed a bit too stark and graphic for a sympathy card. So I marked where the front panel would go, and then inked behind it with Iced Spruce Distress ink. I faded the inking out towards the edges of the card front, to give a soft-looking "mat." Finally I adhered the front panel to the card base.

I'm entering this card in the following challenges:

A Blog Named Hero Challenge #42: "Layer Cake"
Simon Says Stamp's Monday "Big Stamp" challenge