Might as Well be Spring

Hooray, hooray~ It's up above freezing today!  The birds are singing and the dog is chasing them all the way to the neighbors farm.  Definitely something Springish in the air, groundhog be darned.  Here's a pretty little card to celebrate:

This is an uber simple card, easily replicated for masses of Valentines or birth announcements, you don't even have any major coloring to do, just stamp the main image (Crafty Secrets) in Versafine Black ink.  Normally I stamp images with Tsukineko's Archival Brillance Graphite so I can color them with Copics and not worry about bleeding, but with really detailed images you need that Versafine or you are going to wind up with a blob.  A very sad blob.

I did this card once using Marvy punches and one with Spellbinder Nestabilities in what I suppose could be called a cardmaking version of the WWF Smackdown.  Guess what? Nesties won, hands down.  They just look way more polished, especially when you are working with vellum, like on the background scallop here.  One other thing you can't do with the punches in that reverse stenciling technique to create a border (you can see a how to on reverse stenciling a couple of posts back, the blog party post).  Nope that's not an extra piece of tan cardstock behind the main image, I just inked up the die itself with a light brown fluid chalk inkpad.