Boats and Travel

Here are some travel related cards for men. I am really digging the second one, because I tried my hardest to make the paper containing the compass look like a sail. I think I did the best I could with a stiff material like paper. I also use 100 lb weight cardstock, so it is thick and certainly doesn't help when you are trying to go for the "flowing" look! I also like how the linen thread looks when I wrapped it in a rope like way under the eyelets. For the first card, I sewed fabric onto my paper and inked up the boat stamp in matching colors using chalk inks. When doing this, it is so much easier to use the chalk inks because the ink pads themselves that I use have a teardrop shape and are small, so I can use the ink almost like a pen to get pretty exacting on the stamp. You always want to work with the lightest color first, so I actually inked up the middle of the stamp first and then hid my imperfections with the darker colors on the top and bottom of the sails. For the boat bottom itself, I used what is called a "kissing technique." This is when you have a solid image (the bottom of hte boat IS a solid image) and you take a clean stamp (in this case I took a stamp that looked like a rope) and after the solid image is inked, you go and actually stamp (using the rope stamp) on the already inked stamp (solid boat) to create a pattern on the solid image. It is really fun and I should honestly do it more often. Hope you all have a great day! Lancaster was so much fun. No pottery was bought, because the piece I wanted had some major glaze issues. Oh well, I bought a really nice shelf instead! Spent the whole day in NYC yesterday. You know what? Philly is SO much better than that city!