I Brake for....5 o'clock!

It is 5 o’clock somewhere, right? At least in theory. 

Hannah here, from Fanciful Spaces! Today I’m sharing another card from the Carmen Madlin Designs stamps that I Brake for Stamps carries. This one is from her MECH-ANIMALS SET 1! (I personally own most of both sets!) You can buy a whole sheet of the rubber stamps, either on EZ-Mount or unmounted, OR buy individual stamps! This allows for a lot of flexibility both in personal style and for financial reasons if need be.

There are two reasons I chose to make this stamp set into a card, 1) I wanted to paint a parrot, and 2) I liked the sentiment. I’m a Parrot Head at heart, my father raised me to be a good and proper Jimmy Buffett fan.  I may turn this card into his birthday card. 

I actually performed stamp surgery on this stamp, the sentiment, and the cocktail drink umbrella came as one stamp. I wanted to some reverse embossing with the drink, but I thought that leaving it attached to the sentiment would be too much when it came to stamping the sentiment out. Because I ONLY wanted the umbrella in the background, and because I was going to use it so much, I carefully cut it off using a sharp pair of scissors and an Exacto knife.

I have never done a card with layered panels that didn’t have all design elements centered, because of this I practiced my layout on several pieces of scratch cardstock until I figured out how to do what I wanted.

Then I stamped the image using StazOn as I wanted to use my Zig Clean Color Brushes. I had SO MUCH fun coloring this little guy! I also made sure to have a reference image of a parrot thanks to a quick Google search in order to make sure I didn’t go too crazy in coloring him.

When the image was colored, I stamped the sentiment using Momento Tuxedo Black. I have a video HERE where you can see my trick for lining up rubber stamps, but I also snapped a picture in action:

To make the background I first stamped the umbrella in VersaMark Watermark Ink, then I heat embossed it after having covered the ink with WOW! clear gloss embossing powder. You can see in one of the images above that I got Versamark outside of the umbrella when I stamped it. This wasn’t an issue though. Before heat embossing, I used a paint brush to remove the extraneous powder. You could still slightly see where the VersaMark was, but because I had intended an uneven look with my Distress Inks I knew no one would notice it.

I ran all of my panels through my die cutting machine to stitch the edges and then adhered using my Tombow Tape Runner. The result is a fun and bright card that I think any Parrot Head or tropical drink loving person would enjoy!

I used the Special Delivery set from I Brake for Stamps, and you can use it too! Make sure to use my discount code when you purchase! SAVE10HANNAH will get you 10% off most of your purchase!

Thank you so much for reading, I hope that I have inspired you today!