My First Attempt At An Eclipse Card with Honey Bee

Happy Saturday!  So happy you could stop by today!  I've been working on this one for a couple days (not whole days.. just my mornings before work).  I've got two firsts today... first Eclipse style card and first time coloring on kraft and I've gotta tell you, I love both!

I recently got this pretty Zen Floral stamp set during the birthday celebration over at Honey Bee.  I LOVE it!  The border at the top is all one stamp, but I used some of the separate flowers to create the cluster at the bottom.  I will tell you, I do not care for masking so I made a few mistakes because I rushed through it, but in the end I was happy with how it turned out.

I started by cutting out the hugs part of my sentiment from the Kraft Paper.  Because I had to build my cluster, I wanted to be sure I had the flowers where I wanted them and that they'd overlap my die cut.  Then I used some removable adhesive and put all of the pieces back together so that I could stamp over the hugs diecut and have it be seemless.  I stamped all of my images in Versamark and heat embossed in white.  Once that was done I colored it all in with my Prisma colored pencils.  Then, on these eclipse cards the sentiment is meant to be subtle, but since mine was part of the complete sentiment, to make it stand out just a bit, I decided to remove it before I splattered and dotted with some acrylic paint and then some Nuvo Drops.  I cut 5 or 6 of the hugs word out so that I could stack them easily to pop up rather than trying to fit popup tape and it really makes for a nice, chipboard feeling piece.  Then I attached the hugs back to the card in the space it belonged and again, to make it stand out a bit I applied some liquid glass again to bring a little attention to the word.  I used a small layer, let it dry and then applied another.  (I love my liquid glass, but there are some color formulations that will change color a bit when it's applied... see the rose on the end of the word-I'm not worried about it, but wanted to let you know)

Then I finished my sentiment with a couple stamps from a couple different sets in my stash... white embossing on black.. you know I love it.  Popped it up and added a few sequins.

This is one beautiful stamp set and I'll be using it a lot to add some pretty floral detail to many cards.  I have another one to play with too and I'll share that soon.  For this card, I'm entering it into the Honey Bee Buzzworthy Challenge for April to create a birthday card!  You do need to have Honey Bee products bee the feature on your card, but you can use other products (for instance, I didn't have any birthday sentiments, so I built mine from some other sets) and you could win a $15 gift certificate to the shop!  I guess I know what I need next!

I'm also entering this into the Outlawz Twisted Thursday for this week with a twist of Anything Goes and the Simon Says Stamp Wednesday Challenge which is also Anything Goes!  You should check these out too!