Good morning everyone! Are you all shocked at my early morning post? 🙂 There’s a good reason for it – I’m today’s hostess for the Index Card A Day challenge at Daisy Yellow!

For those of you who frequent here to read my ramblings – welcome back, I love to have you here everyday! For those of you who are hopping over from Tammy’s blog – welcome! I hope you find this crazy insight into my process entertaining if nothing else, and that you find something here that inspires you a little!

Onto the card…

My prompt was alphabet stamps, can you tell? Yeah, me neither – it was a journey to get here, let me tell you!

When Tammy asked me to host a day and I chose alphabet stamps as my prompt, I was super excited! I love my alpha stamps, easy peasy…. or not. Pressure people, I felt pressure, and my mojo ran away, tail between its legs. Seriously, it was a bad scene – I won’t subject you to the initial reject cards, you might never come back and that would make me sad. 😦

Finally yesterday I said, “Enough! Pull up your big girl panties, Sara, and just do it already!” Ok, then.

And here’s how it started:

See, a great base of letters – awesome! And then a thin layer of gesso, smooshed around and scraped a bit for texture:

So far, so good! A bit of dimension, letters happening, I have a great quote in mind to stamp out, on a roll people, I was on a roll! I misted:

And tried a ghosting technique:

Hmmmmm….

Let’s do away with that! Mist and wipe:

OK, I’ll make it work. Add some more mist:

And blot:

Ok, I like the colours, you can still see the letters; better. Now, to add the quote:

My teeny, tiny alphas, then my favourite Lawn Fawn alphas:

Finish with my well-used $1.50 set:

Now the fun stuff – Twinkling H2O’s!

Paint the edges:

Still not working for me. Argh.

Tissue paper and multimedium to the rescue!

As you can tell, at this point I was determined to make this thing work, even if it ended up with 37 layers of stuff!

More twinkling H2O’s – lots of it! I love that shimmer!

Add some shimmery painted hearts:

We’re getting somewhere, and I can still see the alpha stamps under all those layers! This is good, my friends!

And then, I got “help”:

AKA: no more pictures!

I simply added the last line of the quote to my card, adhered the hearts and called it done! I love the texture:

…and in real life, you can see all the layers peeking through, including all those alpha stamps!

The moral of this story, the alphabet stamps were a prompt – and they prompted me to layer. Without them, I wouldn’t have the depth or texture I have on the finished card and so, I’m happy. The shimmer is a.maz.ing. And the colours are incredible – I couldn’t take a picture that did them justice. They are so vibrant it’s ridiculous!

And that quote? It’s Audrey Hepburn:

“Nothing is impossible, the word itself says ‘I’m Possible!'”

Meet me here tomorrow (at a more reasonable hour of the day!)  for the next instalment of the Tuesday Techniques – Stencil series. We’re playing with paint – yay!

S.