Glimmer Stars & Joy

Hello, Crafters.
 
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You can vote for your favourite craft shops - maybe STAMPIN' UP! ☺ - blogs, products, etc. You can show your support by voting and you'll also be entered into a Prize Draw*** to win a £100 Amazon voucher! To cast your vote, please go to www.britishcraftawards.com and click on PAPERCRAFT.

***Please note that anyone in the world can vote in the BRITISH CRAFT AWARDS, but the prize draw is only open to UK residents due to legal restrictions.

When I'm cardmaking, I don't like to see large areas of plain white cardstock! This is one of the reasons I love our Fancy Frost Specialty Designer Series Paper (DSP) as well as our Irresistibly Floral Specialty DSP.

There are various techniques and products that are available to us to create our own patterned backgrounds. Probably the most obvious method is dry embossing then followed by using background stamps with light coloured ink or ink that has been stamped off and also sponging. No doubt other methods have popped into your minds, too.

Yesterday, I used one of my favourite methods of decorating backgrounds for today's card and that's stamping "watermarks". This works beautifully on coloured cardstock, too, tone on tone.

To create today's card I started with a card base of Whisper White Cardstock (CS) with a layer of Dazzling Diamonds Glimmer Paper and a top layer of Whisper White CS. This is the layer I did the watermark stamping on.

I used the mini background stamp that's in the Christmas Pines Stamp Set. I inked it up using my Versamark Pad and carefully stamped all over the layer to make sure I wasn't left with any "clean" areas. It's very faint and can be seen a lot better in real life - if you look really closely, you can see it in the last photograph.

I adhered the two layers together using Tombow and then adhered them to the card base. Unfortunately, I was somewhat heavy handed with the Tombow. I put the card under a heavy weight to make sure the Tombow adhered the glitter surface to the Whisper White layer properly. While I was waiting  for that to dry, I carried on  with the rest of the card.

I took a large piece of the Dazzling Details Glimmer Paper and die cut the words JOY and NOEL using the dies from the Wonderful Wreath Framelits Dies.

I did one of each because I wasn't sure which one I was going to use. I knew I wanted to use JOY because I'd used NOEL so much lately with my Large Letters Framelits! LOL! I reasoned that whichever one I didn't use would be ready for a future project!

I also die cut the large plain star, the small fancy star, two of the larger small stars and five of the small smaller solid stars - I hope that makes sense!

Then I took the card base out from under the heavy weight and was really disappointed to see that the large amount of Tombow had made my top layer "bubble". I thought I'd try drying it using my Heat Tool first and it worked a dream! Phew! Lucky!!

I adhered the largest star onto the card base first with Tombow and then used Glue Dots to attach the smaller fancy die on top of it. Finally, I added one of the larger small stars using a small bit of a Dimensional. I laid the JOY  below the star, then the NOEL to see which one I liked best - I'm really pleased that JOY did so I adhered it in place using Tombow!

Then I adhered the other larger small solid stamp using a part of a dimensional in the top left-hand corner and added a small star to it using a glue dot. Finally, I added  the four remaining stars using Glue Dots.

That's about it for today. Until tomorrow, happy crafting.

JanB.