Happy 4th of July

Happy Saturday Everyone!  Julie here, sharing another fun card using several stamps from the Artistic Outpost Spring 2016 Release (along with a previously released Artistic Outpost set, Hero). 

In the United States, we celebrate Independence Day on July 4^th and I decided to combine Harvest, Ice Cream Shoppe and Grunge Elements along with Hero and the Patriotic 6xx6Paper Collection from Our Daily Bread Designs.

I inked the girl image from Harvest with archival ink, fussy-cut the image and mounted her onto black cardstock for stability, fussy-cut around the edges again and used water-based markers to watercolor (FYI- sounds time consuming but I already had this image in my stash ready to go from my last post). 

I repeated the same steps above using the ice cream cone image from Ice Cream Shoppe to create three ice cream cones.

I used Tim Holtz® Walnut Stain and Tea Dye Distress Ink to repeatedly stamp the border image from Grunge Elements along the edge of a piece of the Patriotic Collection 6x6 paper for the background panel.

After stamping the borders, I decided to add more dimension to the background by embossing the paper with a star embossing folder, lightly sanding the embossing and adding a bit of white Gesso® with my fingers over the panel to "age" the paper. 

After I was satisfied with the "aging" process, I trimmed the panel and layered it onto white cardstock, trimmed again and layered onto cherry cardstock, trimmed once more to layer onto denim blue cardstock before mounting the entire panel onto the white card base.

To add a background strip for the sentiment and ice cream cones, I layered a piece of scrap piece of white cardstock onto denim blue cardstock and added a strip of cherry cardstock across the center.

I inked and repeatedly stamped the graph image from Grunge Elements with Tim Holtz® Tea Dye Stain on a diagonal across the entire strip before mounting it onto the card base.

I used denim blue and cherry markers to color the sentiment from the Hero stamp set, stamped onto a strip of white cardstock, trimmed close to the stamping and mounted the sentiment onto the card front.

At this point I added all of the stamped images with dimensional foam to finish off the first layout for this design.

I tend to be a vintage shabby chic designer so I decided to "step-up" the card a bit for version #2 :-)

For the "stepped-up" design, I added the partial paper doily under the sentiment and ice cream cones along with a few sequins.

So which version do you prefer- Design #1 without the extras or Design #2 with the doily and sequins?  Inquiring minds want to know :-)

Thanks again for stopping by- I hope all of you have a fabulous week and take time to celebrate (with ice cream of course)!

Designer- Julie Gearinger