Having a restful Sunday? I did.

Gratitude
I came home for lunch today to the smell of delicious Stuffed Peppers in my oven and I didn't even prepare them! Fresh cranberry sauce was in the refrigerator and green beans on the stove. Wanna guess who did it? Nope it wasn't my super hubby. It was my SWEET mother-in-law.

Don't assume it was for me though. We were celebrating a friend's 60th birthday at my house. She is a past preschool teacher to my daughter, past fellow alto in the church choir to me, swim partner and former teaching companion to my MIL. So it was a family style birthday, we even had THE family birthday cake. I thought I was in some sort of heaven today. Thanks CJ!

Card
Today was a restful day because well it ought to be, but also because I was tired from staying up more than half the night delighting in the creation of this card for the Viva La Verve Sketch with a Twist Challenge. The twist was to use fabric.

The image is the Verve October release free digital stamp, offered only during release week. Did you get it before it was gone? The card base is Stampin Up DSP from the retired Dashing set adhered to a 5 1/4" square card. For the image layer, I cut out the mittens just inside the black line and went around the cut edge with a black PITT pen to get rid of white core effect. I jumped up onto the top of the paper once while doing this. Can you find it? I then traced the cuff onto some tracing paper and then used 2-way glue to turn the tracing paper into a frisket (self-sticking mask) so I could sponge Old Olive around the mittens. Once that was done I pulled off the frisket and out came my Prismacolor markers for the cuffs. (Colors I used were Light Cerulean Blue, Cerulean Blue, Cream and Deco Yellow.)

Afterthought I could have colored the cuffs first and then clear embossed over them before sponging the background. Hmmmm... maybe not because the cuffs would be shiny against the soft flannel mittens.

I put sticky tape on the back around the cutout mittens to secure cream flannel for the fabric twist. I used a finger to make a slight pillow shape through the mitten hole before adhering so there was room for filling. More sticky tape and repositioning of the batting I quickly adhered it to a piece of Brocade Blue cardstock. The Old Olive cardstock is watermarked with the snowflake stamp in Stampin' Up Snow Day set. I created three brads, inspired by Jen Del Muro's Believe Blog Hop card using AC Ocean medium brads, read cardstock and black cardstock to cover up the hole in the brad center.

I used the same words for the sentiment that were included in the digi-set but were too large to put in the tab. The words come from Stampin' Up Everyday Flexible Phrases and Expressive Flexible Phrases. Some AC red pearls on the mittens, Offray Hot Rod red center stitch grosgrain ribbon and the card front was complete.



I resized and duplicated the mittens into a border for the inside of the card. Not wanting to sponge the green I went to my Avocado Prismacolor marker and colorless blender.

Thanks for stopping by.

Card Details:
Stamps: Verve Mittens Digital Stamp, Stampin Up Snow Day, Everyday and Expressive Flexible Phrases
Paper: Mohawk Smooth White, Real Read, Old Olive, Brocade Blue
Ink: Brilliance Graphite Black, Versamark, Prismacolor markers
Accessories: Offray red ribbon, tab punch, circle punch, xacto knife