Welcome to the Neighborhood with Koren Wiskman

Hello everyone, Koren here with a cute card using the Neat & Tangled Itty Bitty Welcoming Committee to greet someone new to the neighborhood. With all of the chaos surrounding us, I thought I would concentrate on spreading some kindness instead of germs. This stamp set is currently on sale in the online shop.

I started with a piece of Neenah 110 lb. Solar White cardstock cut to 3 1/2 by 4 3/4. I used one of the cloud building stencils from my stash to ink blend some clouds in the sky. I used my Nuvo Blender Brushes and Distress Oxide ink in Salty Ocean to create them. I then moved on to the bottom portion of my background and used Distress Oxide ink in Mowed Lawn and my drifts and hills stencil to ink blend some ground.

I took another piece of that same white cardstock and loaded it and the Neat & Tangled Delicate Dots Background stamp into my Original MISTI. I stamped the dotted design onto the white cardstock using Simon Says Stamp's Fog ink. I then cut an oval into the center of the panel using a retired Neat & Tangled die set called Card Front Designs but any oval die around this size would do the trick.

I wanted to make the sky and hills slightly more muted in color. Instead of recreating the entire background I cut a piece of heavyweight vellum to the same size and placed it over top of the cloudy sky background. This muted the colors and created almost a haze effect to help the background fall away. I love how this looks.

Now that I had a nice background for my images to live on, I needed some focal images. I stamped the characters from the Neat & Tangled Itty Bitty Welcoming Committee onto the same white cardstock using Simon Says Stamp Intense Black ink. This ink is alcohol marker friendly and I used both Copic and Tombow alcohol markers to color my images. I have created a Color Map to show you each marker used to color the images on this card. I have to say, the NEW Tombow ABT Pro Alcohol Markers are really great. I highly recommend checking them out if you like to color with alcohol markers. These are good!

I wanted to add a little something different to these images after they were colored and cut out. I took some pastel rainbow patterned paper I had in my stash to paper piece the blanket or banner the two critters have stretched across the scene. This is easy to do, just stamp the same image onto the piece of patterned paper of your choice and cut it out using some nice cushioned grip scissors. I then glued all the pieces in place using some liquid glue.

I loaded my paper pieced image into my MISTI and arranged the "welcome" sentiment to be stamped on the banner image using the same black ink as before. For the sub-sentiment "to the neighborhood" I stamped it using embossing ink onto black cardstock and heat embossed it using white embossing powder. I used my Fiskars wire guide paper trimmer to cut it into a strip.

I adhered the cloud panel directly to my Simon Says Stamp Fog card base and then used tear tape adhesive around the outside edge to adhere the vellum piece making sure to hid the adhesive the best I could. I then used foam tape to pop up the oval aperture panel. The images were all popped up using the same foam tape. I used clear foam adhesive to pop up the sub-sentiment because I wanted to make sure it was not seen.

To finish off the card I added Nuvo Crystal Glaze to the crown and tiny white pom poms to the tops of the party hats.

I hope that I've inspired you to create something today and maybe spread some kindness.

Koren