Hugs & Prayers

My mom asked me yesterday if I had any get well cards lying around that I didn't know what to do with. I said no, and asked why. She said that a teacher she works with is in the hospital with pancreatitis, and she wanted to send her a card. I asked her later what kind of card she wanted, and after some prompting from me as far as what kind of styles I could do, she said elegant. So this is what I came up with.

After going through my "greeting" stamp sets, I chose two from Simon Says Stamp: "Prayers" & "Summer Garden." I began by cutting a piece of 140 lb. watercolor paper to 3.75x5". I used my MISTI to help with placing the greeting, and stamped it in Versamark. Then I heat embossed that with Ranger Liquid Platinum embossing powder.

I stamped the 3 flowers from "Summer Garden" around the perimeter of my panel, masking them as I went to make some look like they were behind others. Once I had filled the edges, I colored the flowers in with my Inktense pencils, using a damp paintbrush to pick up color from the pencils and paint in the images. I made sure not to have the same color next to itself as I painted. As you might imagine, stamping and coloring the flowers took the longest of any part of this card!

Once my panel was dry, I matted it with black, leaving a 1/16" border on all sides. For the outer mat, I inked a piece of white cardstock with Squeezed Lemonade, Tattered Rose, & Wild Honey Distress inks, trying to get kind of a blurry randomness in the colors. Finally, I mounted my panel on that piece, and adhered it to a white A2 card base.