Altenew Paint-a-Flower Hydrangea with Honey Bee Stamps

Hi sweet friends! I am back with a post for Freshly Made Sketches #458:

This is actually a lesson on how to salvage a card that has gone wrong. I had created a card base with gold embossed stamping onto Ranger Inkssential Water Color Paper, my favorite watercolor paper. It is pure white, has a rough and a smooth side, goes through my printer well for digital stamps and handles water just fine! The image was the hydrangea from Altenew's Paint-A-Flower Hydrangea stamp set. 

I colored in the design with Altenew's 36 half pan set and basically used pink and green colors. Next, using Gina K.'s masking paper, I masked the image and then stamped the whole card front with a retired background stamp from MFT called Morrocan Lattice Background using Scrapbook.com's Camel Hybrid Ink. I like this particular color and ink type. It isn't too light, but not too dark and hybrid inks dry right away so no smudging!

At this point, I didn't like the pink I used at all and the background stamp didn't leave enough white space. I just set it aside and felt it was perfect for this card sketch by die cutting it apart! Moral of the story; don't throw out your "mistakes" for awhile. Let them sit and look at them with fresh eyes. They may be salvageable.

I used Honey Bee Stamps, Honey Cuts Bold Alphabet Set and die cut the letters for "friend" where I thought the design was best. Normally you can use the positive & negative pieces when you die cut a word, but I was all over the place with this one.

I wanted a nice soft background for the "Friend" word and ink blended Altenew's Limeade Crisp Dye Ink with their large ink blending tool. It leaves the most beautiful soft edges. 

I took the card panel to my splat box and sprayed & splattered gold shimmer from a Heidi Swapp spray I've had in my stash for a long time. 

The word "sweet", cut from gold card stock and its outlined background, cut from vellum, came from Honey Bee set called Home Sweet Home:

This Honey Bee set can be used in so many ways. If you are a cross-stitcher or embroiderer you'll recognize these tools!

The inside sentiment is from My Favorite Things Sassy Pants Birthday Greetings 2. I know this is hard to read sideways, but if you can, there are some great sentiments here.

I finished with a few gold metallic pearls in my stash. I was really happy with the outcome and I hope my ageless friend will like it, too.

Thank you to Freshly Made Sketches for the inspiration and I hope to see you playing along with them, too! They are a weekly challenge. Stay well, sweet friends!

*Some of the links in this post are affiliate links. This means if you click on the link and purchase the item, I will receive a small affiliate commission at no extra cost to you. All opinions remain my own.