Miss You All the Time

The entry deadline for the sketch challenge at Hero Arts' blog is today(!), so I decided to do one more card to enter into that. I used their Sketch #1 for my card.

I cut 2 pieces of Core'dinations cardstock, and die cut the lower edge of the beige piece with the Simon Says Stamp A2 Curved Edge Die. I temporarily adhered the beige over the green, spritzed the cardstock lightly with water to help me get a better embossed impression, and ran them through my Grand Calibur with the "Gear" embossing folder by The Paper Studio. After that dried, with the cardstock still on the folder, I lightly sanded over the raised areas to get the tone-on-tone look. (Leaving the cardstock on the folder helps give support to the design when sanding.) I inked around the edges with Walnut Stain Distress ink, and matted it on a mid-tone cream cardstock.

For the greeting, I used a stamp from this Hero Arts set on light cream cardstock. I couldn't get the brown I wanted with my ink pads, so I ended up coloring the stamp with a dark brown marker. After stamping, I die cut it with a Spellbinders Classic Circles die, and inked the edges with Walnut Stain ink.

The Hero Arts sketch shows small branches coming out from either side of the greeting. Since I wanted this to be a more masculine card, and don't have any small "branch" dies to speak of, I chose one of the dies from Spellbinders' "Ironwork Accents" set, cutting those pieces from the same brown cardstock I used for the card front. I lightly marked where the greeting would go on the main panel with a pencil, and used that as a guide to glue my accents down. Finally, I adhered the greeting with foam tape and adhered the main panel to the card front; and another card for Operation Write Home is done!

I'm entering this card in the following challenges:

Hero Arts "A New Sketch"
A Blog Named Hero "You're the (em) Boss"