Me and A DeeTee

Yes, gentle reader, me, on a Design Team!  Ack, get away.  Actually it's a guest spot which is far better for everyone's blood pressure and my general level of terror.
I jumped at the chance to play with some canadian rubber stamps when Robyn and Suzanne of Quietfire Designs asked me if I'd like to guest. And then immediately became stricken by panic and inability.  They are such beautiful stamps; I wanted to do them justice...which of course meant that I couldn't.   

If you pop over to Quietfire's design blog, you'll find this post, but enhanced with a short synopsis of my life so far.  Or something like that - an 'introductory paragraph' I think they called it in the brief. You can skip that and head straight to the card making part..
I was playing about with the Dragonfly from this set; I don't feature them on my cards very often and had an idea to make the wings all irredescent (which you can't see) and to keep it simple, but with a striking background.  Tall order on a 4" square card!

I used good watercolour stock and dripped Distress Stain onto the wetted area.  And then used the heat gun to dry it because I'm too impatient to wait.  Then I die cut it (it's a Joy die) and ran a silver Krylon around the edge.  You can't tell, but the text is embossed - Versacolour Imperial Blue and embossed with clear powder.  Nor can you tell that the Dragonfly is higlighted with the silver Glamour Dust.  As was my face and decolletage....clumsy, moi?

While I was squashing the Distress stain against the corner of an acrylic block to produce enough liquid to drip onto the wet water-colour paper, I had another idea and decided to 'go grand' so that I could use one of my favourite stamps;  it’s from this set. If there's a trick to this, it's to stamp the text and emboss it before you do anything else, so that the plastic surface of the embossing can resist the inks. I used white embossing powder to maintain the contrast. 

Credit of course to Sizzix and T.Holtz Esq for the die, and to Provocraft for the embossing folder. You can see too that I don't know when I've finished and I used a white gel pen to doodle a border top and bottom and then to 'stitch' some of the coloured blobs (technical term) together.  

Quietfire sells stamps through Oyster Stamps here in the UK, but has a mass of cut files for you Silhouette and type users...lucky you, I say.  Please to stay relatively tuned...there's more where this came from..and oh the stamps are so worth seeing!