Papertrey Ink 5th Anniversary Challenge #1

Papertrey Ink is kicking off its 5th Anniversary with an amazing challenge. Nichole has asked her design team to list their top five favorite products and their favorite post(s) of the last year. Then, she challenged us to take a look at them and pick one that inspired us to create something of our own.

I have been a stamper and paper-crafter for a while, but I haven’t really posted a lot about things I make. I’m not an expert and I don’t know a lot of techniques. I kinda get inspired by the celebrations at hand plus the daily emails of some of my favorite designers.

So today I looked at the inspiration posts and saw some great stuff – Nichole has some amazing ladies on her team! And while I liked many of them, one of them stood out as a post I had wanted to remember and do myself. The designer is Betsy Veldman and you can click HERE to see her original project. It’s basically a collage of sentiments, using various fonts and colors. I really liked the way they turned out!

With Valentine’s Day approaching I thought I would use this as an inspiration for a Love card. The card base is a 5×5 square made out of a deep red piece of cardstock; and the matting is a sheet of white paper with pink hearts (4.5×4.5).  Both papers are from Creative Memories. Next I took a piece of pink card stock and cut it into a 4×4 square. In the center, I stamped “It’s Your Day” from Think Big Sentiments #2 with an embossing pad and covered it with white embossing powder. Before I heat embossed the image, I scraped the letter ‘Y’ off the word your so that it became ‘our.’ Since the card was about ‘our love’ I thought it was more appropriate that way. However, it didn’t all come off like I had hoped. I will stamp over it later.

Then I used two pieces from the Love Birds set: a pair of doves and a trio of hearts. I stamped them with Versamark Dazzle Ink randomly over the entire square. In retrospect, I probably would have skipped this step. In the end, I think it turns out a little too over-crowded.

Then I added a couple of sentiments, similar to Betsy’s idea. I added “Love Birds” from the Love Birds set and “love you” from the Tag-Its #5 set. And my last stamp is a pair of hearts from the Tag-Its #4 set in the space where the ‘Y’ used to be. Then I attached all the pieces together with adhesive.

While I like the card in general, there are some things I would do differently – the versamark background and the pair of hearts in place of the ‘Y’ because they don’t give the polished look I wanted. Also, it would have been helpful if I hadn’t run out of my usual adhesive – it would look more professional if it was sealed all the way around. I am hoping to remedy that as soon as I can get to the store this week!

All-in-all it was nice to sit down and craft before the Super Bowl comes on tonight. I don’t really care about the outcome as I don’t really care about either team. However, I am Boston Red Sox fan, so perhaps I should cheer for the Pats, but they did beat my Ravens so…