Barnyard Babies - Cow

Hello, Crafters.

Yesterday I had so much catching up to do after my week in Barcelona, I felt I was treading water at times. I persevered and caught up with the most important jobs and will work on the rest gradually during the week.

When I finally made it into my studio I decided to have a play with the Barnyard Babies Stamp Set. It's not one of the new stamp sets but it's new to me. I must confess, I struggled to get my mojo going.  So much so that I now have a pile of fussy cut ducks, goats, pigs and cows sitting on my desk!

I eventually settled on the cow as I like the sentiment "have an award winning day!" My idea was that the image would look like a framed photograph of an award-winning cow but I think I lost the plot somewhere along the line!

To make this card I started with a card base of Smokey Slate Card Stock with a layer of Whisper White and a top layer of Smokey Slate. Using Smokey Slate Ink, stamped off once, I stamped the splatter stamp from the Gorgeous Grunge Stamp Set on the top three fifths of the top Smokey Grey layer. I punched out a 2" hole in a central position on this stamped section. I then punched a 2" circle from a piece of Silver Foil Card Stock and then punched around this with the 2 3/8" Scalloped Circle Punch, thereby creating a scalloped frame. If I had used squares or oblongs, the image would have looked more like a photograph than using circles! I pierced holes in each of the scallops.

To create the image, I stamped it on a piece of Whisper White Card Stock using Basic Black Archival Ink. To colour the body patches, the hooves, tail and top of his ears, I used a Smokey Slate Marker Pen. For the inner part of the ears and the nose, I used the retired Blush Blossoms Marker Pen. This is a great colour for skin tones and I really wish Stampin' Up! would keep it as a core product. The leaves were coloured with Cucumber Crush.

I made a mask of the cow using a Post It Note so I could stamp some grass around him. There is a grass stamp in the stamp set but I chose to use the grass stamp that's in the In the Meadow Stamp Set. I stamped sufficient grass so that there wasn't any visible white area around the bottom half of the image. I also used the butterflies from that stamp set and coloured them using pink and purple. Finally I stamped the rosette from Barnyard Babies and coloured it with Watermelon Wonder Marker pen before fussy cutting it.

I adhered the image in position behind the punched 2" circle using a little bit of Tombow to hold it in place. Then I adhered the whole layer onto the Whisper White layer. I adhered some silver writing design Designer Series Paper (DSP) from the Neutrals DSP Stack.

In my studio I have a plastic box which measures approximately 6" x 7" x 9" that I keep my ribbon offcuts in - see last photograph. When I need just a small piece of ribbon, I check this box first. I knew I had some scraps of our 1/8" Silver Ribbon in there and I thought I'd take a couple of pieces and adhere then across where the DSP meets the Gorgeous Grunge stamped area. While I was looking for the second piece I noticed a strip of 1/4" white ribbon and I wondered if I could lay the silver ribbon on top of this white piece. I decided to give it a try and have to say I'm pleased with the result!

Both the sentiments I've used on this card are from Barnyard Babies. I adhered the top layers to the card base using Dimensionals. Finally I added three Smokey Slate Candy Dots to the top left hand corner and three to the bottom right hand corner of the stamped top section.

That's about it for today. Happy crafting.

JanB.