Ahoy Mate, it’s your Birthday!

March 16, 2016 0 Comments

Hi Dare 2B Artzy friends!

I’m so happy to be here today to share another adorable stamp set from the 2016 new releases. Today, my project features the Ahoy Mate set.

I’ve got to tell you,  this little fox is so stinkin’ cute – I just want to hug him in his little sailor outfit! LOL! This stamp set features 8 stamps and has a coordinating die set as well. I knew this set would be perfect to make a masculine birthday card.

To create my card, I started by making some black bars in a stripe pattern on my laser printer. I tried to get them as evenly spaced as possible-though I didn’t actually measure the distance between them, I just kind of eyeballed it. Once I printed them onto some cardstock I cut it down to a 5 ½ inch square and ran it through my Minc machine with some red foil to get the red stripes.

Next I used a bit of embossing talc in the white areas (to keep the stray embossing powder from sticking to other areas and the foil) and then stamped the Ahoy stamp from the set in those white areas with some Versamark. Once stamped, I was able to emboss it with some opaque blue embossing powder. I wasn’t sure if it would be better to emboss first or foil first. I chose to foil first and I did notice that the heat embossing afterwards did change the texture of the foil as it didn’t have as smooth a finish to it. That might be something to consider if you’re going to try something similar. I’m not sure how the embossing would have reacted to the foiling process if I’d reversed the order in creating the background.

With my background finished I began working on painting the wooden anchor I found at a local craft store. It was a layered piece so I decided to paint it a couple of different shades to give it some depth. I used some Gesso as a primer and then I used a darker grey for the background and metallic silver paint on the front. I did a couple coats of both to get even coverage.

I colored the adorable little sailor fox with my Copics, I kept him very neutral colored as I knew that the background would be bold. It would be fun to color him in some fun colors though and have fun with that. Rather than fussy cut him, I used my Scan-n-cut machine which left a nice border all the way around the fox.

Finally I heat embossed the “Happy Birthday” sentiment and die cut it with a fishtail flag die and added a small enamel dot to the flag.

I put all the layers together, adding some dimensional foam on the sentiment and fox; and used a piece of the navy blue Artzy Doodles paper which paired nicely with some plain red paper.

This was a fun to work on and I love how all the elements came together in the finished card. I hope you enjoyed it. Please take a peek at the Dare 2B Artzy store for the Ahoy Mate set and many, many other great stamps in the 2016 release as well as some beautiful, colorful (double-sided) papers and inks that are also available in the store.

Have a wonderful day!

Tonya

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