Coffee Loving Papercrafters

Welcome back for another Caffeine Fueled Paper Play!  Before I get to today’s challenge, I guess I better announce the random winner from the Love Our Sponsors Challenge!  A huge thank you to everyone that played along!!  It was fun to see what your faves are from our various sponsors and I’m pretty sure I saw more than a couple things I’ve decided I need…lol!  Now, without further ado… The winner, chosen by Random.org is … (drumroll):

Meghan Kennihan!

Yay Meghan!  Please message me with your snail mail address so that I can send you your prize!

And now for today’s play!  Did you know that Super Sponsor Unity Stamps has a challenge that is hosted in it’s Unity (show & tell) Facebook Group?  The current challenge is to make a Single Layer Card… um…yeah…me… a Single Layer Card… here is the challenge inspiration photo:

And lets see how this went for me:

Not too bad I think, right??  SO!  My least favorite thing about making a single layer card is the thought of masking… I extremely DISLIKE masking… but then I remembered the lift technique I learned from a Gina K video and thought I’d give it a try here.  I started by die cutting my first layer from Watercolor paper using this awesome Stamplorations Crazy Double Stitched Nesting Die… I love it because the largest one fits the entire front of an A2 card which works great for a one layer card!  Then I stamped this adorable image from the Kitty To Go stamp set from Unity Stamps in Versamark and heat embossed it with some black embossing powder.  I blended some Distress Oxide ink onto the entire panel.  I didn’t worry too much about avoiding the area I stamped because I wanted the ink right to the edge so that it looked like I masked it.

So the trick with the lift is I simply took a paint brush and some water and wet the areas I wanted to lift the ink off of and then dabbed them with a small piece of paper towel to lift off the ink.  If you’d like to check out Gina K’s Distress Oxide Lift video that inspired me you can find it here.  The end result was not totally white, but that (in my opinion) made it even cooler when I re-watercolored it using more distress oxides.  I smooshed my ink pad onto an acrylic block and then used the paint brush and some water to color it back in.  I love how some of the orange shows through and sometimes the colors mix a little and run into each other… it makes me happy!

Then I covered my cup up with some paper… kind of masking, but I just happened to have the right size scrap piece on my desk so I didn’t have to stamp the cup and create an actual mask (besides… I really wouldn’t mind if some of it got onto the cup… it’s just how I am.  I splattered some water and dabbed it with a towel… repeated until I got the right amount of splatter.  Then I used the distress oxides again with a paint brush to create the tiny splatters-again using my scrap paper “mask”.  I heat set everything before I used my Misti to stamp one of the two sentiments from this Kitty To Go Cup set .  Then how to finish it… normally I’d add a few sequins… but that would be another layer, right?  IDK…I was tempted… some participants did, but I decided to take the challenge to heart (literally…lol) and I found this cute tiny heart stamp that matched the hearts on my cup in one of my Paper Sweeties sets.  So I decided to use these instead of sequins!  I colored those in with my zigs and the color was supposed to be pink like the ones on the cup, but I didn’t lift the orange so it came out kind of red… but I’m good with that!

So there you have it!  I did it!  AND it was fun and I’d do it again!  Maybe not all the time… but I will definitely do it again!  Thanks for the challenge Unity!

I hope you’ll play along with this one!  Once you join the Unity (show & tell) Facebook Group here, you can add your creation to the challenge album here and that’s also the place you can go to read the rules for the challenge if you want to check it out first.  The short of it is, you have until July 26th to play along with this challenge.  You must use Unity Stamps as your focus.  The main prize is a $50 prize pack and there are smaller prize packs for a few Honorable Mentions!  Cool, right!?  So be sure to check it out and play along!  If I can do it… YOU can do it!

Hope to see you there!