Tuesday 22 November 2016

A Snowflake Puzzle!

Hi everyone, I'm back after a week's break with my latest card.  Once again I used some of the jigsaw pieces to create a topper for a Christmas card with a contemporary colour scheme and theme; I hope that you like it.

 
I started with twice as many jigsaw pieces than I actually used; blending Tumbled Glass, Broken China and Salty Ocean distress inks over them.

Once I was happy, I stamped over the jigsaw with Archival ink in Forget-Me-Not and Manganese Blue using two stamps designed by Lisa Horton for Creative Expressions.  The star cluster comes from the Midnight Waltz stamp set and the grungy snowflakes from the Snowflake Kisses stamp set.  As you can see, the stamp on the top right slid a little on the shiny surface of the jigsaw, so when I decided to only use half the pieces I abandoned that side of the puzzle.
The purple background was created using Wilted Violet and Dusty Concord distress inks blended onto some Sheena Douglass stamping card.  I then used a wet blending tool through the Tim Holtz Snowflakes Stencil (THS050) to remove some of the colour.  In some places I was heavy handed with the water and the image became blurry; I decided therefore to try going back over those areas using a Versamark pad through the same stencil, having dried the card first.  I wasn't sure exactly what would happen, but I actually love the effect.
I wasn't so happy when I layered up the jigsaw over the background.  Somehow the colours didn't tie together and too much of the background detail was obscured by the jigsaw.  It was at this point that I decided to only use half the jigsaw pieces and stamp the base card around the edge to match in with the colour theme of the jigsaw.  I used the same two stamps and archival inks as I did on the jigsaw, alternating around the edge of an A5 card (made from an A4 sheet of stamping card folded in half).  I blended a little Tumbled Glass distress ink over the stamping to take the edge off the 'whiteness' of the card.  I liked this so much, that I decided to cut down the purple background piece to allow more of the stamped edge to be seen.
The purple background was trimmed to 17cm x 10.8cm and matted onto a piece of silver mirri card (17.5cm x 11.3cm).  Part of the off cut was used as a background for the Snowflake sentiment by Inkwell Stamps; stamped with Versamark ink and heat embossed using Cosmic Shimmer silver detail embossing powder.  This was also matted onto silver mirri card. 

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