A Day Filled With Happy with CAS-ual Fridays!

I'm up on the CAS-ual Fridays Blog today with my first post as a Design Team member for CAS-ual Fridays!  I just love to play with these products and am honored to be joining this team!

  Today I'm sharing with you a card that I think could be for anyone and for almost any occasion.  I started by choosing the papers I wanted for my A2 sized card.  I then cut three of my layers using one of my favorite sets, the Bubble Box Fri Dies... SO many different uses for this set!!  Here it was a great way to ground my layout and add some depth with popup tape.  I distressed the edges of my dark cardstock with a white core and used a cool embossing folder to add some interest to my larger white layer.

 I love this adorable Nate & Friday stamp set... these pups... LOVE them and I had to have the set because my dog Slim has a similar look.  He's not a Boston Terrier like Michele's pups (who inspired her for this set)... in fact... we don't know what he is...lol!  But he's got some browns in him so I added some extra color:

Oh my!  This is such an easy set to stamp and play with because you don't really have to even add any color, but I wanted to play with one of my favorite Copic coloring techniques on this set.  Basically you color in the image the way you wish... you don't worry so much about the perfect blend because when you get done coloring, you take a rag... in this case a loose terry wash cloth and dab some Colorless Blender onto it.

You want to be careful not to get the cloth too wet.  I dab it with the solution, gather it in a bunch and "tickle" the fibers a bit.  Then you hold the cloth down over the colored image for the count of three and lift.  If your cloth is too wet, some of your color will bleed.  Work in small sections and if you feel it needs more texture, let it dry completely and then go in again.  It's such a forgiving technique because you always have the option to add more color and try again!  And sometimes a little bleed can be cool!  "Perfect" isn't always best!

And then my sentiment!  I love to leave my cards open if I'm not making them to be used right away.  And I wanted my sentiment to fit on the smallest Bubble Box Die I used from the set.  So I used masking and a couple different stamp sets (along with my Misti) to build the sentiment I wanted.  Wishing You A Day Filled With is from Peace, Love and Coffee and the Happy is from the Celebrate set!

I added a few of the Jumping Jacks Fri-Dies cut from some pretty shimmery paper and scattered them around as well as a few clear sequins.  And there you have it... I could stamp the inside with a Happy Birthday for one of my boys or my nephew... or I could add some sort of inspirational or thinking of you sentiment for one of my girlfriends who loves dogs as much as I do!

Hope I've inspired you to try out some texturizing if you haven't ever done it before!  It really is fun!

I'm playing along with a couple of challenges with this one!  My colors were inspired by this challenge at Color My Heart Color Dare and I'm also playing along with Anything Goes over at the Outlawz Twisted Thursday!

See you again soon!