Guest Designer at Crafting By Designs--Masculine Get Well Card

I am honored to be a guest designer over at Crafting By Designs.  It is fun to share my love of paper crafting with their wonderful team and blog readers.   The theme for the challenge this week is “Under the Weather” or “Get Well”.

My uncle recently had open-heart surgery and is still recovering in the hospital.  It seemed appropriate to make a masculine get-well-card that references his gears not working as well as they should.  I had a little fun with all of the gear related stamps and dies in my stash and played with a faux rust technique for the die cut gears.

 I started with light grey card stock trimmed to 6” x 8” for a card base which was folded in half and rounded at the corners.  I used dies from the Heartfelt Creations’ Cut Mat Create collection to create layers in the card.  Selected dies from HCD 1A and 2B were die cut from dark grey card stock and the two largest were stacked and the window was die cut through both layers at the same time.  The edges of the layers are inked in Tsukineko StazOn Saddle Brown. 

The sentiment is Sassafras Mini Robotics alpha along with a Scrappy Cat question mark and is stamped in Colorbox Deep Green.  The gear stamps are by:  Sassafras--I Hear Robots, Technique Tuesday--Borderline Industry, and Fiskars--Teresa Collins All Boy.  The card base layer is stamped in Tsukineko Encore Ultimate Metallic Champagne.  The dark grey layers are stamped in Tsukineko Memento Tuxedo Black.

The die cut gears are Spellbinders Sprightly Sprockets, Sizzix Tim Holtz Alterations Gadget Gears and Mini Gears.  I die cut lightweight chipboard and inked each with Tsukineko Encore Ultimate Metallic Champagne.  I used Suze Weinberg’s Ultra Thick Embossing Enamel (UTEE) in Gold and Bronze.  It is best if you sprinkle one color of UTEE on and tap off the excess, then add the second color of UTEE.  (I didn’t want to make a large amount of party mix.)  I purposely heated the UTEE just until is melted and did not try to get a smooth look on the gears.  To distress them a bit more I inked the edges with Tsukineko StazOn Saddle Brown.

The card was assembled with dimensional foam dots and glue dots to hold the gears in place between the various layers.