Church Sympathy

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Church Sympathy is a beautiful rubber stamp set from Sparkle N Sprinkle and one of the new May reveal stamp sets.  However, I think it can be used for many other occasions as well.

I started out by stamping the image in StazOn onto watercolor paper and then colored it with a waterbrush and Distress markers.  I used an oval die as a barrier so I could add color to the background with Distress Inks (Chipped Sapphire, Wild Honey, Gathered Twig, Stormy Sky), keeping a white area around the image itself.  After I was happy with the colors, I flicked water on the background.  (Tim Holtz calls this the Spritz and Flick technique because you spritz water onto your fingers and then flick the water onto the inks.)

Since my background is pretty dark, I wanted to bring brightness around the focal image.  I die cut a piece of textured cardstock with a Spellbinders Opulent Oval die and then covered it with VersaMark and heat set it with Gold embossing powder.  This particular gold gives it a nice rich tone.

The sentiment was heat embossed, using the same Gold embossing powder onto some white cardstock that was die cut using the Banners Stacklets 2 from Taylored Expressions.  However, I gave it a twist and die cut the same piece twice, so both ends would be rounded.  I didn't want this to be a stark white, so I mixed some Distress Stains (Picket Fence and Tumbled Glass) onto my craft sheet with my finger, spritzed some water on it and ran my sentiment through the color.  Then I dried it with my heat tool.

I used the Distressed Embossing technique around the sentiment, the focal piece, and the card base.  All were done with VersaMark and the Gold embossing powder.

As a finishing touch, I applied some more Distress Stains (Spun Sugar and Picked Raspberry) to my craft sheet and ran some seam binding ribbon through it to give it color.  Then I tied a double loop bow and adhered it to the top of the oval.