Two Cards For The Price Of One

Hello!  Shirley here with my debut Design Team post.  Nervous?  Me too!!

For my first project, I wanted to use the Dina Wakley Collaged Hearts stamp set, and ended up making two similar cards.  Here's the first one:

I didn't like how this one started off - I'd stamped onto mixed media paper and of course the texture of the paper means that the stamped image isn't completely solid.  So I re-inked and stamped the same image onto ordinary card stock.  Not one to throw anything away if I can help it, I decided to press on with both images and see how they compared.

You can see that the mixed media paper is on the left, and the ordinary card stock on the right.  I sponged with Distress Ink minis and the mini ink blending tool (I love how you can store the sponges in the space under the ink bases!).

Using the TCW Harlequin stencil I added Distress Paints (Twisted Citron and Picked Raspberry), then stamped some circles from the Prima Finnabair 'Don't Forget To Fly' set.  I hand-wrote the sentiment in the corner, then doodled a frame around the panel before mounting it onto white card.

I used the TCW Harlequin stencil again on the second card, this time spritzing it with water and laying it on the panel to 'bleach' some of the colour away.  I added some Ruby Red Liquid Pearls.  Liquid Pearls are notorious for splatting just as you've started with them, and even though I 'burped' my bottle, I still got a blotch, so I decided to make the rest of the line grungy in keeping with the style of the heart image, thereby turning it into a Design Feature (ahem).

Here's a closer look.

So the moral of the story is don't throw away your 'mistakes' too soon.  After you've added layers, paints, embellishments etc.,  a defect may not look like a defect at all, but a Design Feature!