Hi there! Each month, Pinkfresh Studio hosts a challenge with a different theme, providing everybody with the opportunity to link your projects inspired by the challenge for a chance to win a Pinkfresh Studio shopping spree! This month, the challenge is Beautiful Backgrounds, and Pinkfresh Studio has such a wide variety of options for creating gorgeous backgrounds: hot foil, cover plates, stamps, stencils. I have a cool, crisp project featuring some of the beautiful colors in the inspiration graphic and one of my favorite ways to add interest to the background of floral cards: Dotted Scallops! Let’s get started on the details for my card.
I began by stamping the Cosmos Bunch stamp set that I illustrated for Pinkfresh last year twice onto some alcohol marker-friendly cardstock using black pigment ink. I then covered the sticky ink with some white pearl embossing powder to create my favorite pearlescent charcoal embossing. I colored the images using OLO markers, coloring the foliage and small bunches of flowers around the larger Cosmos first, then using some very light lavender and gray markers with the “colorless” marker to add shadows to the large Cosmos images. I also colored around the edges very lightly with a super pale aqua marker, the combination of which I think helps to create contrast for the bright white Cosmos flowers. I cut the finished colored images with the coordinating dies.
For the background, I used the beautiful Dotted Scallops cover plate to create subtle texture on my white slimline card base. This die is originally formatted to fit an A2 card front, but I ran it through my die cut machine twice, shifting it the second time to cover the bottom portion of my slimline card front. The seam of the two die cuts was slightly visible, but I was able to cover it up later. To coordinate with the blue filler flowers, I added a couple of strips of coordinating blue cardstock, one thin glitter and one textured blue cardstock, die cut using the Slim Lacy Edgers die set.
For the greeting, I used the Sentiment Suite: Hello Hot Foil Plate and coordinating die. I hot foiled the greeting using some metallic graphite colored foil to coordinate with my pearlescent charcoal embossing. I added the floral die cuts with foam adhesive, making sure to partially cover the seam of the background, then added the foiled greeting using a double layer of foam tape, covering the remainder of the background seam. The final touch was to add a few Sky Blue jewels for one final pop of blue on the card front.
Well, that’s all for my project today! The Beautiful Background theme for this month covers so much ground, with so many beautiful options for interesting backgrounds from Pinkfresh Studio. I hope you’ll check out the challenge and enter a project! Thanks so much for stopping by today, and have a marvelous day.
Gorgeous!!!! I Love the blue strip, and how it ties them together!