Winter

Good evening, and welcome to Carolina Cards. It's been a lovely afternoon...bit coolish, but the sun was warm. Perfect Fall weather. Now about the card: There is a wonderful blog called Bits & Pieces by Heather Telford http://cardz.wordpress.com/. She's a designer for Penny Black, and does the most gorgeous sponging techniques. If you haven't seen this blog, I encourage you to do so...you won't be disappointed. So..bearing in mind I've been seeing these marvelous sponged pieces, once again I tried to capture just a tiny bit of that look.

I've tried this technique before, and results were terrible! This one is my best effort to date, and I'm not real happy with it. This one is going to be my benchmark!. I used a die template from My Favorite Things to sponge Summer Blue Memento ink along the template(recently realized I've been mispelling that ink brand..sorry) . Heather has some excellent tutorials plus Youtube videos. She's a good teacher, I'm just not as good at following her directions! But I'll improve. Moved the die along at different places to get the snowdrift look. This was a snippet of white paper, by the way. LOL. Just sayin'. I sponged the sky with Summer Blue & Teal Memento using daubers. Diecut the Memory Box birch tree - used copic gray along the trees, to get a look of the white birch trees I see up in New England. Once the trees were placed along the snowdrifts, that didn't look just right, so I used another snippet of white, a little more sponging. Then tore this paper, used the glue pen along the torn edge, and put some Hero Arts Sparkly glitter on the glue. Adhered this to cover the base of the trees so that it looks as though they were deep in the snowdrift.  Used a S/B die for the sentiment, which is an older stamp, that came 3 to a set. Stamped with versamark, heatset with Judikens Aegean Silver EP. Decided it needed a bit more glitter at the top of the sentiment...not sure I liked that after I did it. The snowflake at the top is a MS snowflake punch in the holograph paper. This punch didn't like this thicker paper, so next time will use the I.O. snowflake die with this paper.  I adhered the card to a light blue moire paper, then onto a white cardbase.You will be seeing more (maybe!) of my sponging attempts because I think this is a really neat look & I want to improve with the technique.

So thanks to Heather for her great tutorials, and I hope one of these days, I'll be able to do them justice. Truly, if you have time, take a look at some of her cards on Bits & Pieces. They are simply wonderful. As always, thanks for visiting. Have a Blessed weekend.