5 Alive!

The theme over on the Simon Says Stamp Monday Challenge this week is "5" - what a great idea for a theme!  There are so many ways you can go with this - use 5 brads, 5 stamps, 5 patterned papers, make a card for a 5 year old, it's totally up to you!  Get thinking and come up with a piece of your own for the Challenge - you could be the winner of a $50 voucher to shop at Simon Says Stamp.

I decided that I was going to make 5 stamped impressions on my card for this challenge.  Can you see what they were?  It's not as straightforward as you may think at first glance.  As I explain how I made this card it'll be come clearer :)

I started out with a panel from the Laboratorie card stack and blended distress inks onto it - Fired Brick, Mustard Seed, Wild Honey (plus one more colour, I forget what it was but to honest, that patch is behind the face so you can't see it anyway!)

Next, I stamped the face (#1 - counting the stamps with me?).  I used gesso to paint over it and then stamped again on top (#2).  You're never gonna be able to line the over-stamping up exactly but that's part of the fun of this technique (which I call "painted mask").  You can see that I have a white edge down the side of her face but it looks like a glow of light and I think it's cool!

Next I masked off the face and stamped the numbers in red (#3).  I inked the stamp again with archival black and used a q-tip (or cotton bud) to remove most of the ink from the stamp, leaving the edges of the numbers a little darker.  I stamped again in the same place to give more definition and dimension to my red numbers.

Finally I stamped the Telegram stamp across the card (leaving the face masked, to make the words appear behind the face).  I matted the panel onto black cardstock and fixed it to my card blank.

Join us in the challenge, we can't wait to see what you come up with!

Supplies I used included:  (no full supplies list again this week, gremlins in the internet are still messing it up, hopefully restored soon!)



Our ever-generous sponsor Simon Says Stamp is offering a $50 gift voucher as the prize again this week, just make something for the challenge and you could the winner! The winner will be chosen at random from those who enter the challenge, so why not give it a try? At the very least why not head over to the Challenge Blog to see how the other members of the design team have interpreted this weeks theme! :)

Don't forget, Simon Says Stamp have a great Facebook page too!  Check them out here!