World Map is one of the first stamp sets I bought. I intended to make a Father’s Day card with black embossing. It was a dismal failure because it was my first time at embossing and it was late evening and thus very hard to see whether the powder was melting. Plus, I had no idea what to expect. In the end, if I recall correctly, I just stamped the map in black ink. So I wanted to go back to my original plan and emboss the map.

I started with a piece of very vanilla and was reaching for the black embossing powder when I remembered that I have it in early espresso and my resolve to use more brown. So after using the embossing buddy and stamping the map image with versamark, I sprinkled on the early espresso embossing powder. It’s quite hard to see it melt, even in the middle of the day but this time, almost two years later, no powder fell off after I’d “finished” embossing. Next I used my aquapainter with no water and pressed my marina mist ink pad to get some ink on the list. I added one drop of water and started colouring in the water on the map. The reason for doing this almost dry was that I didn’t want to saturate the non-watercolor paper. Once the seas and oceans were completed, I coloured the land similarly, this time using crumb cake.

I used fast fuse to fix the piece of very vanilla to an early espresso card base and then pulled out Sunburst Sayings for a small and simple birthday greeting. Finally, I’ve found where this sentiment came from – I was looking for it a couple of days ago. I stamped it in early espresso on crumb cake – isn’t it interesting how the watered down crumb cake ink on very vanilla looks so different to the card? – and then popped it out with the 1.5 inch circle punch. I also had the 1 3/4 inch punch so I made a mat of early espresso for the greeting. I popped this up with dimensionals. I finished off the card by lining the envelope using the retired backgrounds DSP (there’s a replacement at the moment) and the envelope liner framelits. If you want the framelits, don’t forget that they are retiring at the end of the month.

Looking at the order information, I can see that my Paper Pumpkin for this month is likely to arrive on Monday as is my pre-order. I won’t know what to play with first!

See you tomorrow,

Liz