Sad times these days for several of my stamping friends…. so I have had the need to stamp several sympathy cards recently. I don't suppose I'm unusual, but sympathy cards are not the easiest cards for me to crank out. In fact they take me a LOT of searching & thinking time before I can get inspired to get started. And so to get started with these cards I went to my favorite source of inspiration – project ideas shared on a board exclusive to Stampin' Up! demonstrators.
There I pulled out several ideas that spoke to me, and ended up combining several elements of each into one card. From the start, I knew I wanted to work with a beach scene, but problem is that since I'm not personally much of a "beachy" person I discovered I didn't own a single beach-related rubber stamp! And not only that, but although I know I USED to own some nice "With Sympathy" stamps, apparently even those had gone away during retirement cycles.
So MDS to the rescue. This was obviously going to end up being a hybrid card. Within Stampin' Up!'s extensive collection of digital downloadable image sets I found a lovely set of beach images and also the "With Sympathy" sentiment. I purchased & downloaded 'em in just a couple minutes, and then got to work.
Probably the trickiest part of the entire process was figuring out the spacing on what would ultimately become my layout. I knew the sentiment would have to be already printed on the card front before I applied the inks, so I worked within MDS to get that positioned and sized just right to create my template. Once satisfied with sizing and spacing, I printed this page onto Whisper White cardstock (the images are all in Perfect Plum, btw), and then cut out the sea critter with paper snips. The white area within each purple border would eventually become a card front. (The border was only for my purposes while working…. so I'd know where to position my reverse mask circle and where to trim the white area later.)
Using one of the circles from the Circles Framelits set, I made a reverse mask from light cardboard (the stiffener sheet from Designer Series Paper packs) to place over the card front, then held it in place with a bunch of sticky notes, and masked off the sky/horizon area with yet more stickies.
Then I gathered all the "sand" colors and blue inks I have in my collection, along with several stamping sponge quarters, took a deep breath and jumped in. Building up layers of color very gently, I lightly swirled colors inside the circle mask in this order:
Sand: Sahara Sand, Crumb Cake, Baked Brown Sugar
Water: Soft Sky, Pool Party, Coastal Cabana, Bermuda Bay, Tempting Turquoise, Island Indigo, Marina Mist, Pacific Point, Night of Navy….. and then Elegant Eggplant.
Once the water area was colored, I removed the sticky note mask from the sky area and then lightly added these colors to the sky: Soft Sky, Pool Party, Marina Mist, Island Indigo, Pacific Point.
Using the corner of a quartered stamping sponge, I lightly swirled some Whisper White Craft ink (refill) where I wanted waves. I actually had to do this step several times, because the white seemed to fade out as each application layer dried. So it took several rounds of white, allowing dry time in between each application.
Finally, I trimmed the white layer of colored card front to size, added a narrow mat of Elegant Eggplant cardstock, and then mounted onto a Pool Party card. The sea critter was positioned up on Stampin' Dimensionals.
Now, the truth is I personally do not care for the common sentiment "With Sympathy". So the card I'm showing here is only a sample, and will not get sent to anyone. But the beauty of MDS is that it's soooo flexible, so for each card that I'm actually sending out, there is a personalized sentiment in its place. So although I made several cards with this same general layout, each one has a customized sentiment specifically for the recipient. Easy-peasy to do by just typing my sentiment in my choice of fonts within the alloted area on my MDS template before printing onto my white cardstock.
