We had another new hire this week and I wanted to make a card to welcome him. And I wanted to reuse the colours from the new challenge at CAS Colours & Sketches. Two blues sounded like sea and sky and the coral made me think of the Picture Perfect set and the starfish. I am also continuing to play with last week’s sketch challenge which apparently really grabbed me – thanks to Jane for these.

The banner for this challenge is:

It’s quite a tricky combination in my opinion and I played with it for a while before deciding on this design. Martin asked why a starfish on a welcome card; I decided it’s because work is hard, we’re trying to do a lot with not enough people (hence the hiring) so Rod will need extra arms and hands to get everything done. A stretch perhaps…

The starfish is stamped in watermelon wonder on watercolour paper – it’s a 2 step stamp and one was stamped off first once and the other is full strength. I then fussy cut this. Why watercolour paper? Well I intended to use watercolour paper for the background and I played with it a little but in the end, after also trying white shimmer paper, I ended up with ordinary whisper white. So the background has marina mist and night of navy washed on with an aquapainter and, once that dried, I actually used Gorgeous Grunge to add the night of navy spots. I must remember to warn my sister Caro about the use of Gorgeous Grunge. It’s not something I use much at all whereas she loves it. Next I cut a square of night of navy slightly larger for the mat. I kept the squares slightly smaller than the starfish – I like the overhanging look. Before adding anything to my base of thick whisper white, I stamped the sentiment from Welcome Words in night of navy. There’s not much worse than gluing elements to a card and then messing up the stamping. Once the stamping was done, I started construction.

I popped the starfish up with dimensionals and then coloured it in with some clear Wink of Stella. I know that this pen is on backorder and I can see why – I need to get a back up one because I’m using it a lot. I used some of the retired backgrounds DSP in night of navy to line the outside of the envelope flap.

I hope that you’ll pop over to the challenge site to see what the rest of the Design Team have created with these colours and have a go yourself.

See you tomorrow,

Liz