Grapeful for Your Friendship Card by Ilda

Hello sweet Friends, Ilda here with you today! I have been dying to play around with this gorgeous Citrus Trimmings stamp set for the longest time and today I finally get to share my results. As you may know already if you have been following my work, I love all things rainbow so I thought I would use that as my color inspiration for this slimline citrus card. Gahhh, isn’t it so pretty and yummy looking!?! Summer can’t get here soon enough!

To start, I began by cutting a watercolor piece of paper 9 X 5 inches. I then stamped out one of the Citrus Trimmings stamps along the bottom of the panel using watermark ink and then heat set it with gold embossing powder. I then took the other citrus stamp and slightly overlapped the image with the previous one and stamped it out again with the watermark ink and sprinkled on the gold embossing powder. This time before I heat set the powder I took a small paintbrush and brushed off any of the overlapped embossing powder that transferred on to the previously stamped image. This just avoided masking the first image.

Next, I used Mijello Mission Gold watercolors to paint in all the images in. Since they were heat embossed it made adding water in the wells super easy to color in as it prevented color bleeding to occur. I began with the purply pink color on the left which I like to think looks like a blood orange fruit and then ended the watercolored citrus edge with the limes. As you can see I added quite a few layers of color to the images to add dimension and texture to the fruit. To do that I simply allowed each layer of color to dry before adding more color.

Once the images were all colored in and dry, I added some splatters of color using the same colors I painted with. I then trimmed the card panel to fit on to an 8.5 x 4-inch slimline card.

On a piece of black cardstock, I stamped out the sentiment in white pigment ink and heat set it with white embossing powder. I then used the small frame die from the Dotted Patterns Set 2 to die cut the sentiment. Since I wanted the sentiment strip to cut smaller than the die itself I lined it up with the top of the sentiment first and then die cut it again lining it up with the bottom ensuring that the dots all lined up before running it through the die cutting machine again. This is a great way to stretch out your dies and add that extra dotted detail around sentiment strips.