The Layered Poinsettia stencil I used for this card creates a lovely crisp background. However, I’m all for the watery, more distressed, abstract look and so I took to this background with all the splatter until edges were lost and the sweet flowers became mere hints of their former selves.  To finish, I stamped a little text here and there and then stitched around the edges.

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how to distress and change up a clean and simple design

I knew I was going to be using a lot of water with this card, and so I chose a watercolour card to handle it. I picked out a hot-pressed card because I wasn’t sure initially how distressed I wanted to go and the smoothness of the hot-pressed card would give a clearer impression for the stencil.

The key thing with this card was to use water-reactive inks and so I picked out a palette of Lumberjack Plaid, Tattered Rose, Bundled Sage, Speckled Egg and Fossilized Amber Distress Inks. I used Simon Says Stamp blender brushes and blended each colour through the various layers of the stencil until I had a clean, crisp and beautiful stencilled poinsettia background. But, clean and crisp aren’t for me so much these days. So, I started by splattering with water, then white ink, then a solution of perfect pearls, and then gold paint! It was a good job I started out with watercolour card because I was having so much fun and the inks were moving and blending in all the watery goodness.

Here you can see a little of the shine from the perfect pearls and the gold paint. Although I had used Fossilized Amber for the Poinsettia centres, all the splattering had moved the ink around so much that you couldn’t see that layer and so I used more of the gold paint to give a hint of where the centre of the flowers were.

You can also see here the hints of text; I used Tim Holtz Ledger Script and Walnut Stain Distress ink. I’ve been wanting to get some of Tim’s text stamps because I’m finding adding a hint of lettering here and there adds that extra layer of detail and interest to a background.

For the sentiment, I chose a greeting from the Holiday Florals set and stamped it in Versamark ink on Black card and white heat embossed before trimming out and attaching to the background panel.

I accented with a few gold sequins and Duck Egg droplets held in place with Gina K Connect Glue. I turned the left over piece of background into a wee bookmark with a velvet trim. I have a lot of books on my Christmas wish list and will need a few bookmarks to keep track of where I am.

supplies

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