Hi everyone!

Today’s card is my project submission for the Altenew Educator Certification Program (AECP) class “Irresistible Inking Techniques”. This was a fun class that taught interesting ways to use your inks beyond just stamping.

For this project, I thought I’d try using my inks with water and a brayer to create an interesting background. To start, I smooshed some dye ink directly to my glass craft mat and spritzed it with a bit of water. I rolled my brayer through the ink several times to make sure it was coated in ink, and then rolled it across my paper. I did this several times and created a fun, messy, water-colored background for my flowers.

When I was finished with the background, I had some ink-water left over so I did the same technique one more time on a piece of cardstock I later used to die cut some of the leaves for my flowers.

For the flowers, I used the Altenew Craft-a-Flower: Cosmos layering die set to cut the first 2 layers of the flowers with Simon Says Stamp Fog Gray and Neenah Solar White card stock. I die cut the centers from soft green and yellow cardstocks in my scraps. I then die cut the leaves from the left-over ink-water sheet and from another piece of soft green cardstock.

I used my Copic Markers to add a little shading to the flower petals, and then added a bit of shimmer using my Wink of Stella pen.

I trimmed down my background so that I could layer it on Simon Says Stamp Fog Gray card stock using fun foam and Elizabeth Craft’s Creative Tape.

I arranged my leaves and flowers and used Press-n-Seal to hold the arrangement while turned it over and applied liquid glue and then put in place on the background.

I die cut the “Hi” from Brutus Monroe’s Christopher’s Sentiments dies out of Tim Holz’s Metallic Kraft Stock in silver. I die cut the same sentiment two more times out of scrap white card stock and then layered them all together to give the sentiment a bit of dimension.

I added the sentiment to my card front and applied the card front to the card base.

Of course, I added few clear gems to add some additional sparkle.

This card ended up having a really soft look (seems to be a bit of a theme for me with my floral cards these days). But…I think the simplicity of the flowers helps to highlight the unique background and the inking technique I learned from the class.  I hope you enjoy it!

All the best,