Snarky Cats

Happy Tuesday!  Today’s word for our Random Acts of Cardness Challenge is ‘Snarky’ and of course I had to pull out the instant classic stamp set, Tim Holtz’s Snarky Cats!  Life has had a lot of distractions lately, so I’ve been struggling with inspiration and went looking for a sketch to inspire my card layout.  For this card, I found an older one I had saved by Freshly Made Sketches. I was looking for one that featured a large circle, since I knew the cats would fit nicely on a stitched circle die cut.

Initially, I had planned on simple black & white (or vanilla) for my focal point and a colorful background.  As you can see I strayed from that a tiny bit… inky fun will get me every time 😉

I love working with rainbows this time of year, and chose to create mine with Distress Spray Stain for these backgrounds.  I chose watercolor cardstock  for this because I knew it would be messy & wet!  I have limited colors of spray stains, so my simple rainbow included Peacock Feathers, Cracked Pistachio, Abandoned Coral & Wild Honey. (Side note- I have a wider variety of colors of the original Distress Stain Dabbers, some of which are still available in the SNS online store.  These are the same product in different bottles, one with a dabber top and the other in a spray bottle.  Both work great for this technique and I used a mix of both since that is what I had!)

For my first card, I sprayed/dabbed the ink directly onto my card stock and misted it with water to encourage blending, then lifted the paper to move the ink around a bit before drying it with a heat tool.  I’m impatient… you could totally let yours air dry if you aren’t in a hurry!

For my second card, I dipped my card stock in the puddles of ink that were left on my craft sheet.  Again, I added water to encourage blending.  I dried with the heat tool, then dipped it again (even added a bit more of some of the colors where there wasn’t much to pick up on my surface).  As you can see, this gives a lot more texture to the background and can give a more splotchy/messy effect.

Both card were finished the same way- with a sentiment that was stamped & embossed on black Cardstock with Wow’s Vanilla White Embossing Powder (my fave with an off-white card stock).  I finished up with a few dots of White Nuvo Crystal Drops.  Since Distress products are water based, products like crystal drops often pick up some color from the medium they are applied over.

Funny story…  as I was assembling the ‘slightly distracted friend’ sentiment, I got distracted.  Like right after I removed the foam backing from the sentiment I noticed I still had some ink puddles on my craft sheet and decided to add a bit of color to my cats.  So I inked up the simple black cats a bit (I had added a bit of ink around the edges of the circles earlier) and went to assemble my cards and I could not find my sentiment anywhere.  If you’ve crafted with me, you know I’m not exactly known for a tidy work space (ha!) but seriously, I JUST had it in my hand a few minutes earlier. After a bit of hunting and grumbling at myself I finally found it… stuck to the back of my card. LOL.  Some days it’s a miracle I get anything done!

Hope you have a creative day!

Inky hugs,

Tara