Life's a Beach

Here's my card for this week's challenge at Our Creative Corner, which is to use a beach theme. These colors are really similar to the flap card I posted the other day, but that is coincidental because I actually started this card a few weeks ago and never finished it. Thanks to Jennifer for giving us the perfect challenge for me to pull it out and do something with it!

This started out as a one-layer scene card. I used reverse masking to cover everything but where I wanted the sand to be, then I sponged Crumb Cake onto my white card base using a paper towel - I wanted to get the texture of the towel on my card. (If anyone is wondering, we only use Bounty towels in my house, LOL!) The palm trees come from the Tropical Party stamp set and were colored with Early Espresso and Wild Wasabi markers. Next I used a dry Aqua Painter to add the water, using a drop of ink from my Marina Mist reinker. That's as far as I got with the original card.

Fast forward to this week. I had originally set the card aside because I didn't know how to finish it. It looked too plain as a single-layer card. This time around I added the sentiment using the Rough Type stamp set. I got this set in clear mount so that I could mount the letters onto a single block to stamp them all at the same time. It's a little tricky but it does work - you just have to go slowly and make sure the letters are really stuck down. Tip of the day: Although I usually use the labels that come with the clear-mount stamps, this time I didn't, in order to make them cling to the blocks better. I did the sentiment in two groups since I needed to repeat the "e" and "a", and there isn't an apostrophe in the set so I just left a space and drew in my own.

I wanted to have some kind of sun on my card. There were a couple other attempts but this is what I ended up with: a cog punch topped with a 1" circle punch in Daffodil Delight. I don't know if this was clever or crazy, but it's what I went with. I also ended up trimming the beach scene off the original card. It cut down the amount of white space and that really made a big difference here. I added a strip of Marina Mist designer paper at the top and adhered both to a daffodil card base with a layer of Early Espresso card stock behind the beach scene.

I don't know about you but I'd be pretty happy to be at this or any beach right about now! Be sure you go see what the rest of the OCC team has done for their beachy creations. I'm sure they'll be amazing as always!