By now I’m certain you know how much I love playing with Lavinia Stamps. Today I made a card that I’m really happy with. I decided to use it for the October CUTplorations challenge.  I’ve never entered this challenge before, so totally new to me.

Here is the inspiration photo:

I will admit my card strays a bit from this, but I don’t have any fluorescent colours so I was somewhat limited in what I could do.

Part of the challenge is that you must use a die, and at least one STAMPlorations product. It just happens that I recently joined their stamp club, and received my first delivery yesterday.  I chose a fabulously arty stamp set, as well as the “Magical” die. I chose the latter because of all the fairy cards I make.

First off I’ll show you the background I made. It looks pretty ordinary like this, but once you add all the stamps, it’s great. (If I do say so myself.)

This uses four different blue and purple toned distress inks. I just sponged in circles to get this result.

Now for the finished card:

I played around with the die to start with. Cut out the word in black and just sat it on the card. It was way too dark. So I decided to inlay the word. I used three layers, including the top layer. I think it looks fabulous.

I’ve had a bit of a spending spree recently: I also bought myself a StampMaster, which is similar to the MISTI, but is soooo much cheaper! ($40 compared to $125 in Australia.) It also arrived yesterday. A day of happy mail!

I bought it mainly because I find the bigger Lavinia silhouette stamps hard to get a good impression. This one took five goes, but I’d rather that than risk a bad impression after all the work on the background. (I often spend an hour or more on the background of these cards.)

I did all the leaves with the StampMaster as well, which helped to achieve the two-tone effect on the leaves. I did use the rock ‘n roll technique as well.

I’m very happy with the results of this card.

Thanks for looking, and as always, if you want to comment, and the comment box isn’t showing, click the title of this post and it will magically appear!