Mermaid Kisses, Starfish Wishes

Hi all! I’m keeping up with The Daily Marker 30 Day challenge and this time, I am trying to actually make cards with my colored images. I gave away a lot of my stash of cards, so now I’m hoping to get it built back up.

Today I have a shaker card with minimal bulk.

I love these little mermaids from Love, Cynthia. Just Keep Swimming has three mermaids, some sweet sea life friends and sentiments. This was actually two days worth of coloring for the coloring challenge. First, I created my background. I used the Dainty Scallop Cover Up from MFT (retired — a MASSIVE amount of my stash is now retired!) and created a stencil. I watercolored the scallops with my lone two Distress Oxide Inks — Wilted Violet and Broken China.

The next day, I stamped a pair of mermaids and some sea friends in VersaFine Onyx and embossed them with clear embossing powder. I used my Distress Oxide Inks to color the mermaids and some Zig Clean Color Markers to color the sea friends. I fussy cut them out and started on a shaker card. I knew I wanted to do this with minimal bulk.

I cut my window with the largest Stitched Rectangle Frame die {NOT retired!}. I selected Stardream Metallic cardstock that I’ve had in my stash since we were planning our wedding in 2004! I believe the color is Kunzite, which is a really soft and pretty purple. I added a piece of overhead transparency to the back of my frame die cut. To make everything match up perfectly, I used the frame from Blueprints 13 to cut my watercolored scallop background. I glued my background to a card base of the same color.

Ages ago, I won a jar of decorative confetti bits at a shoebox swap. You know how you can get sprinkles for your ice cream in a divided jar? Well, this is confetti bits — with loads of warnings that it is NOT food printed all over it. It contains stars, hearts, stars & moons, and bitty flowers. I’ve used it a few times, but there are enough sprinkles in there for a load of shaker cards! I poured some of the hearts onto my background. Then I added scor-tape on the inside of my frame. Given that all of my shaker bits were in the center, I should have been able to just glue it down, no problem. NOPE! Somehow a bunch of those little buggers got onto the adhesive before it was completely flat. So I just added more scor-tape to those areas and pressed down firmly.

I then added my mermaids and sea friends to the front of the card. I wasn’t about to stamp on the transparency and didn’t want to add a sentiment strip. So I stamped Mermaid Kisses and Starfish Wishes on a panel for the inside. I can say that embossing on the Stardream Metallic is not 100% — things can get a bit dodgy there.

There you have it! A sweet shaker card!

Thanks so much for stopping by today! Hope to see you again soon!

~Cammy