Couple of cool stamp and ink techniques and Mojo Monday sketch

Hello again!  I needed to make a couple of congrats cards for two co-workers who are moving to bigger and better things within the organization.  I knew that I wanted to use resit embossing, just because I haven't used my heat embosser in such a long time, but I needed inspiration for the card.  I found it in the Mojo Monday #275 sketch!

Here's the card, then I'll tell you how I created it.

To create the panel that is the background of this card, I started with a piece of colonial white cardstock 1/4 inch smaller than the card front.  I then used a stamp from the Friends stamp set from CTMH and stamped/embossed with clear embossing powder.  This was just done with random stamping, making sure that some of them go off the edge of the paper.

I then used 4 ink colours, Honey, Sunset, Ruby and Barn Red and used wedges of sponge to randomly ink up the entire piece of paper, making sure to really rub it in around the embossing. Start with the lightest ink and move to the darkest for best results, and use a different sponge for each colour.  I have a baggie of sponge wedges, with a small piece of paper with the colour written on it stapled to each one, works great!

The other papers on the card are Autumn Taracotta, Ruby and Desert Sand.

The medallion with Congrats in it is the same stamp used on the background, but I masked the centre so that I would have a spot to stamp the word congrats.  To mask part of the stamp, stamp it on a scrap piece of paper and cut out the centre, then using removable adhesive, position the centre on the piece you are going to stamp.  Then the beauty of the clear stamps comes into play, you can line things up and stamp the image over that piece perfectly, then simply remove the scrap piece from the centre and then stamp the congrats.

I used the sponge wedge and Barn Red ink to ink the edges of all paper pieces and the card itself, just to finish things off.

Here is the inside of the card and below is how I did this:

Using one of the sentiment stamp sets from CTMH I placed all the words that I wanted to be part of this down on the page face down as they would be stamped, then once all arranged, simply press the block to the stamps and ta-da you have a custom made stamp to ink up and use :-)