Simon Says Stamp Monday Challenge: Lucky

In honour of St Patrick's Day on Monday, Simon Says Stamp ran a challenge with the theme of lucky. I knew for a fact that my stash of supplies had nothing in it to do with St Patrick's Day, Ireland, rainbows and any other lucky iconography, so I  had to do something else! I spent a lot of time wondering what on earth to do but when I'd given up for the night I saw on Facebook that someone felt lucky because of their friends That's when the inspiration struck: to stamp out a large sentiment around the theme of lucky. I remembered seeing a blog post by Laura Bassen at the start of the month, which included stamping out words and then using a circle stamp to add colour for wall art. It took me a while to come up with the sentiment for the card as google was no use! After much careful thought this is the card I made:

Unlike most cards I make, the first step to this card was drawing a grid over the card base to give me a guide. I first drew in the centre line then I worked out that the letter stamps from Kaisercraft Alpha Typewriter Font were half an inch tall, making the lines horizontal on the card three quarters of an inch apart. Once my guide lines were all in place I wrote out my sentiment on a scrap piece of paper and marked where on each line the centre line would fall. I then used Versafine Onyx Black ink to stamp out the sentiment, I found it easier to work from the centre of the lines outward to make it stamp evenly. This stamp set isn't designed with correct spacing in mind so I had to stamp the letters individually, I do prefer it to stamping a row of letters together as each letter comes out perfectly. I did have a problem when I came to the last line as I had marked the centre line without taking into account that the words "in my" had wider letters than "life", because that was the last line I knew it wasn't possible to start the card over, so I looked through my stash for a small icon that would balance up the line, I found the two hearts in the Paper Smooches Needle Little Love set and stamped them out. Just to be extra safe I left the card to dry for an hour to make sure when I erased the pencil marks I wouldn't smudge any black ink (I'd already saved my card once, I didn't think I'd be so lucky to fix it again!).

I returned to the card with eraser in hand and removed all the pencil lines. I was surprised how nice the card looked without any colour on it, but I knew it wasn't finished that way. I pulled out my Simon Says Stamp Lots of Dots stamp set and picked out Soft Pool, Tide Pool, Passion Flower, Lemon Yellow and Lime Green from my Hero Arts Cube inks. I then used two post-it notes to protect the back of the card and stamped five different sized circles in each of the five inks randomly across the card, trying where possible to spread out the same colours.

I must admit that the card was very easy to make and apart from waiting for the Versafine Onyx Black ink it was very quick. This card would be ideal to mass produce with different sentiments, as once you know where the guide lines need to be positioned, you can be stamping out the next card while the previous ones dry. It is also very versatile as the circles can be all sorts of colour combinations, letting you create feminine, masculine, happy, sad, neutral, bright and pastel cards without being restricted by the stamps you own!

Thanks for looking, I hope you feel inspired to use your alphabet stamps. If you are interested in taking part in the challenge too the link is http://www.simonsaysstampblog.com/mondaychallenge/challenge-lucky/, you have until Sunday to enter.