...Safe Harbour Sentiments and Zig Zag Backgrounder

ED - lol, Deirdre, all I ask is enough notice to clean the house!! it's a little worse for wear this week!!!

Ahem...good evening....lol. I'm crawling in at this late hour with one of my samples. We took in a massive amount of stock yesterday and it was all hands to the pump and as a result I'm letting the team down badly with my lack of samples for Saturday's big release. Hope to catch up, starting with this one.

I have miss Renee Lynch to thank for seriously setting me off on the Nautical theme some time ago, Renee made the most wonderful suggestions about some stamps she was itching to have and I could not have been happier to try to fulfill her wishes! I loved drawing the stamps for this release and one of my very favourites was this little bunch of seafaring sentiments, Safe Harbour Sentiments. There are 4 sentiments in this set, each featuring some nautical graphics, this one borrows the tiny lantern from Little Lanterns to illustrate the point. If you take a gander at the close up - you can see I added some teeny weeny rays to the lamp.

 I'm a huge fan of detail, it's all about details for me, I think that is what give stamps their personality. I'm also hugely nosey about how folks do 'stuff', I love the behind the scenes shots that some folks take while card making and so I am making an attempt to take how-to pics of anything I make from now on...we'll see how long that lasts, but I have the bestest ever intentions!

The background zig zag of this card is one of our new backgrounders, also releasing on Saturday and I wanted to show you how i am using these, i might have posted about it before, but here's a refresher anyhow. In the pic below you can see that I have left the stamp on it's carrier sheet. I just set it down on my work surface, stamp side up and ink it up in the usual way.

I have my card front panel prepped and sitting to the side in this pic.

Once I have finished inking, three times round the stamp and one for luck...it's like waxing your legs, isn't it? you never quite know when you are ready...lol.

Anyhow, once inked, I set the piece of card down n top of the stamp and I add a sheet of white paper, just a scrap sheet over the top - this way I can rub my hands all over the sheet, pushing the card down on to the stamp nice and firmly and evenly without getting ink on my hands.

Next I carefully lift off the scrap sheet - which you can see in the pic, it has a little zig zag border on it and an impression of the sentiment where I was testing ink colours.

I am real careful when I lift the card panel off. A toothpick or some such pokey tool is handy for the initial peel. Et Voila the zig zag background nicely covers my card panel. I made it a slightly distressed Zig Zag finish as I love that softness and texture that you get with a distressed image.

Next up I assemble my bits and bobs - I'm using a little navy rope as an accent and with ropes they can unfurl badly so I wrap a little tape around the place where I think I am going to want to cut the rope, before I actually cut. That way, my ends are already bound once I have made the cut in the middle of the tape.

I added a little yellow glow to the mini lantern at this point. My little pieces of rope are threaded through holes on my sentiment panel that I punched and I threaded them through first, before securing the sentiment panel to the zig zag panel, that meant I could pull my little ropes around to the back of the zig zag panel and secure them with extra strong tape.

The finished card - simple! hope it tickles.

I will be back on the morrow with more, and just in case you did not see the ladies gorgeous samples from today, here is the link list!

Lynn Mercurio

Kelly Schirmer 

Jeanne Jachna

Renee Lynch 

Teresa Kline

Julia Aston 

Jennifer Holmes

Tosha Leyendekker 

Iwona Palamountain

Jean Martin 

Edna Morrisedie

Karin Akesdotter 

Sandie Dunne

Anya Schrier 

Jen Cuthbertson

Kim Duran 

Laurie Schmidlin