Alot of Firsts Here

Well I just celebrated a birthday so I thought I would like to make some thank-you cards. I also just discovered digital stamps. I found a great site Free Digital Stamps which lists all the free digital stamps offered by different people each day. From there I found Meljen's Designs. She has some of the most beautiful, FREE designs I have seen. She really doesn't distinguish between what she offers in her store and what she gives away free each week and I really admire that. Her weekly blog challenge was to use only cardstock on your card and no patterned paper. I cut out a circle on white cardstock using my Silhouette then printed a sized down Happy Fall image on my printer. Taped the circle on top of my printed image and ran it through my printer again. That's how I got the image on my circle. Then I taped orange cardstock over the pumpkin and printed again, red over the leaf and printed again, and brown over the stem and printed again. I then cut out each piece. I wasn't able to color the image using Paint, so I chose to paper piece it instead. I also cut out the scalloped circle out of beige cardstock. Here's where I did something really new....I used Tim Holtz Distress Inks in Walnut Stain on the scallop and Pine Needles on the circle. I also have an ink blending tool, which happens to come with 2 starter blending foams, which works out perfectly since I only have 2 inks (so far). After rubbing the stain on the scallop I sprayed it with water and dried it with my hairdryer. I used quite a bit of water and it ran, which I think gives it a great 'stained' look. For the green on the circle I used less water because I didn't want my printer ink to run (and it didn't). I then glued each cut out piece of cardstock on to the image. I felt it needed something so I added the little punched oak leaves down the sides (which means I can also enter my card in Cute Card Thursday's challenge Cute Card Thursday I love them). I ran the cardstock through my xyron then punched the leaves out of the already adhesive backed paper, that way I didn't have to try to glue each little leaf.

My lessons learned: put a paper towel under your paper before spraying with water, the ink runs right through. Sometimes when drying my paper, the paper would curl up, so I flipped it over and applied heat to the backside of the paper and that seemed to flatten it out. Kind of worked like an iron. It was kind of scary fun trying all this new stuff. Thanks for looking!