Birthday Fishes Card by Kerry Engel

A colleague at work was having a special birthday so I decided to make an extra large card that would accommodate numerous greeting from staff (it measured 6×12). I’ve been using my Ranger distress inks to make watercolor backgrounds for my hand lettering and thought it would make a great background for the fish stamps from Heartfelt Creations.

I got a bit carried away making fish one Saturday night but it resulted in a very impressive shoal. According to Wikipedia “any group of fish that stay together for social reasons are shoaling and if the group is swimming in the same direction in a coordinated manner, they are schooling”. My fish were swimming in every direction and they looked really social so I’m going with shoal.

When I was done I asked my husband, “now what do I do? How am I going to make an envelope to fit this huge card? To which he replied,  “Make a really big piece of paper.” So, that’s exactly what I did. It turned out to be a pretty impressive card.

“Birthday Fishes” Step-by-step

Create bubbles:

• Apply Ranger texture paste with the stencil to create raised bubbles.
• Spread Ranger perfect pearls on top and spritz with water.
• Paint the background for the fishes:
• Stamp the Ranger distress ink on a Ranger craft mat and spray with water to create a puddle of ink
• Lightly apply a layer of water to watercolor paper.
• Press the wet watercolor paper onto the watered down ink.
• Let paper dry.
• Repeat the process with another color adding layers of watered down ink till the paper is filled with color.

Create the Fish:

• Stamp the Heartfelt Creations fishes on top of the water colored paper.
• Emboss stamped fish with black embossing powder.
• Cut out fish.

Create the Title:

• Create the title with the Silhouette Cameo.
• Rub Ranger perfect pearls on title.
• Emboss

Build the card:

• Layer Heartfelt Creation patterned paper to build a base for the card.
• Attach the fish at different levels, use Scrapbook Adhesives by 3L foam squares to raise half of the fish.
• Attached enamel dots.
• Mount on Creative Scrapbooker Super Stock.

Envelope:

• Tape together several sheets of Heartfelt Creations patterned paper to make a very large piece of paper.
• Cut out a large envelop
• .

Supplies: Heartfelt Creations patterned paper and stamps, Ranger distress ink, perfect pearls, embossing powder, stencil and texture paste, Scrapbook Adhesives by 3L, Simple Scrapbooks enamel dots, StazOn ink, Silhoutte Cameo electronic die cutting machine, Canson water colour paper, Creative Scrapbooker Super Stock.

Have a wonderful day everyone!

Kerry

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