You Light up My Life

This past weekend our son James graduated high school. We threw him a big party that included 33 family members and 5 friends. The party theme was patriotic because, James early enlisted into the Army several months ago. We were celebrating his graduation and his future military service all at one time.  And it was a lot of fun!

I made all of the decorations for the party by hand. We had red, white and blue tissue paper puff balls hanging from the ceiling and paper towel rolls decked out as star spangled rockets. And I printed off some WWI and WWII Army recruiting signs as well.  With all of the prep work and decorating  and then the after party clean up, I haven’t spent much time in the craft room making cards.

So yesterday after the last of our family had headed home I carved out some time to spend in my craft room. I worked on a few more Captain cards and I made a couple of Lighthouse cards as well. If you want to see where to buy these digital stamps follow this link Birdie Brown’s Etsy.

The first card is a daytime scene that features Tim Holtz Broken China Distress Ink for the sky and Stampin Up’s River Rock for the sand. I overlaid the sand with some T.H. Vintage Photo Distress Ink that I dabbed on with a paper towel. The seagulls are hand doodled and the sentiment is computer generated in a Word document.

The sky in this card was a bit of a happy accident. I started applying the Broken China distress ink and it wasn’t really soaking into the cardstock. So I used a piece of sandpaper to rough up the cardstock a bit and then applied a second coat of darker ink (Dusty Concord). The sky still seemed kind of speckled but, I thought I would just layer everything together and see how it looked.  Once I added the pearl “stars” I was really happy with the sky. It reminds me of photographs of the sky over Montana; so soft and ethereal.

So there you have them, the two cards that I managed to eek out after a long, fun and utterly exhausting 3 day weekend.

Happy Stamping,

Mo