Homespun Thank You

We're welcoming our March guest designer, Julia Stainton, back to the blog today.  We love this homespun card featuring our Hoop Die and Hand Stitched stamp set!  Here's what Julia has to say about her card:

I seriously cannot think of a sweeter set than the Hand Stitched stamp set from Neat & Tangled. The moment I saw it I knew it would be mine. I love how it adds hand stitched elements to a paper crafting design and those sweet flowers and sentiment…sigh. Today I’m pairing it up with a little watercoloring and texture and yes, real stitching to for a vintage/retro feel. 

The place I usually start off on a design is with the mail image and that’s where I started for this project as well. I wanted to add some texture and fabric texture with this stamp set is absolutely perfect. The main sentiment and flower image were stamped right onto an adhesive backed canvas with black archival ink. This ink is always great on hard to stamp on surfaces and doesn’t bleed. Just to be extra sure though, I heat set the image with a heat gun before watercoloring. 

I’d actually never tried watercolor on canvas but it worked really well! I used some watercolor brush markers and added in the color directly which was great for these fine images. A little water was added on a clean brush to blend the colors.

To create the frame for my image panel, I used the beautiful Hoop Nice & Neat Die. I die cut it four times from kraft cardstock and then adhered them all together in layers to form a thicker hoop that resembles chipboard.

The background of the card was  stamped onto watercolor paper and then watercolored. The colors are actually the same markers as the main image. They are just a little softer because I scribbled the marker onto a palette first and then picked up the color with a wet brush. 

I thought this sweet design needed some actual stitching and a little trim. Some vintage style trim is zig-zag stitched around the edges of the panel to add some extra texture to the design.

Thanks so much to Julia for creating this sweet card!