Oh Happy Day

Hey stampers, Anni here!

This card came with a lot of mistakes and troubles but in the end I like how it turned out. I think the cute elephants by Mama Elephant (the set is called Fly With Me) are having a fun summer party by floating in the air.

I started by stamping the elephants. I wanted to do an one layer card (in the end it didn't work out but about that I will tell you later), so I had to do a whole lot of masking. For the stamping itself I would have needed just a few masks. But I wanted to do some ink blending on the background so I had to cut masks for all the images.

The first mistake happened during stamping. One stamp fell out of my hand and landed on my card. Luckily I could save it with a sand eraser.

When all the masks were cut and temporarly adhered to the images I added the ink blending. And that was my second mistake - a mistake I seem to make often with masks. I apllied too much ink to my background, it got much to dark. In the moment I lift up all the masks I realized I didn't like it at all.

Again I had some saving to do. I decided (believe me it was a hard decision) to fussy cut the image. The whole masking and stamping process had already taken up too much time to throw it in the trash.
But there was a problem with the fussy cutting: Obviously I couldn't leave a border around the image because of the ink blending. But there were strings from the balloons!!! What to do? I cut them apart from the image and drew them later with a fine black pen onto the panel - not perfect but it worked out in the end.

I created a new background with watercolours. For that I die cut the biggest rectangle from Waffle Flowers Lacy Layers from watercolour cardstock, added a lot of water and a little bit of colour.

All there was left to do then was to stamp the sentiment and assemble the card.

Thanks for stopping by and have a crafty weekend.
Anni