April swaps

My upline, Jeanine, started a swap around the first of the year (I think that was the timeframe - how can it seem so long ago??). These are my contributions for the April swap which had a theme of feminine or Mother's day.

The first is on an Old Olive base with Petals & Paisley paper behind the main image which is mounted on Tempting Turquoise. The Turquoise has white pen doodles around the edge and 3 ribbon loops mounted behind. The idea for the loops came from Emily's blog.

It was so nice to use this stamp set again! I think that Petal Prints is the set that really made me fall in love with stamping. I'd never seen two-step stamping that layered outline stamps with solids. On this card I love the vibrant color combinations on the flowers of Rose Red (outline) and Regal Rose (solid). The stems are Certainly Celery and Old Olive. I think it's also been an interesting journey for me to enjoy the color pink in all its variety more because of stamping. [I write that as I sit here in my hot pink sweater...]

This is my second card for the swap. The barely-visible background is SU's Well-Worn Words in Apricot Appeal over the Certainly Celery cardstock.

The girl is colored with markers and the flowers are covered in Dazzling Diamonds glitter. I'm envious of the Amuse oval stamps that Amy uses on her projects to "ground" a focal point, but I don't have one. So I made a mask of the girl's feet and another mask using my large oval punch and post-its; I taped the two mask pieces together. Then I sponged over it with Creamy Caramel. The smaller picture is a detail shot (that you can click on to view larger) of the masks when they're stuck together (so I didn't have to keep compiling them for each card). This process worked really well and was easy to use while providing consistent results.