Heart to Heart Challenge - Create background paper to use on a Father's Day card

As I mentioned in the previous post, I've been excited about the possibilities of creating my own background paper, and have been experimenting with it this past week. My upline emailed me yesterday to tell me about this week's H2H challenge. You have to create your own background paper and then use to make a Father's Day card.

I had already been kicking around a plan for how to use the 'Something Splendid' stamp set my upline had given me. It's a really pretty set with large flowers where you build the flower by stamping the flower petals, then details, the center of the flower, and also includes some leaves/leaf vein stamps. I used the smallest leave, stamping it in a circle to form the flower/starburst images. Then I used the center of the large flower as the large circle and the center of the small flowers in clusters. It took a couple tries to get the spacing right, but I was really pleased with how this came out. It's pretty abstract but organic at the same time.

I used the paper to make a 5x7 card, accenting it with kraft borders sponged with Garnet (same as the large circles on the paper, also used Garden Green and Desert Sand). The other stamps were from The Works alphabet and the Lucky workshop set.

Experimenting with Random Stamping

Random stamping has been on my list of things I want to try for a while. I love the idea of being able to create your own paper. Let me start off by saying that I think 'random' is a misnomer. It's actually not random and requires one to think ahead. For someone who is a little, shall we say, particular like myself, it's a challenge to be random and yet intentional, but, I did enjoy this little experiment.

I used the 'Bless this Nest stamp set. I had ulterior motives as this is one of the stamp sets I am thinking about using for home gatherings. I wanted to create a visual representation of how versatile the stamps are. The Bless this Nest set comes with several different birdhouse bodies, bases, and roofs. I used a different color for each discrete combination to create the random stamping (note I did not use every variation possible).