Today the tutorial was presented by Laurie Willison.  The premise was to use both the positive and the negative of a sentiment stamp to produce two cards.  The theme of the overall card camp is “2 for 1”, meaning that with little extra effort, you can make two cards with the materials you have decided to use.  Well, I decided to use a very nice little die from Tonic Studios that says, “Hold on to Your Dreams”.  It didn’t take very long before I realized that there will be a vaccine before I could piece together the tiny little positive pieces in this die.  Necessity is the mother of invention, so I came up with a variation that worked very well, I think.

These cards should not have taken very long to do.  The blending through a stencil was easy and even the start/stop/change/redo of the sentiment did not take very long.   What did take forever, was deciding what little doodads I wanted to put on as the final decoration.  I got out every sequin case, bling box, enamel dots boxes and doodad whatnots that I had, in order to decide.  In the end, it was a toss-up between what I did use and putting on nothing extra.  I really need to start thinking about the “law of diminishing returns”  I have an hour of work to do in putting all this stuff back for cards that would probably have looked equally as nice with no extra adornment.  Ah well, it is not as if I have places I need to go to, or even could go to.

I really do like how these cards turned out.  I especially like the raised sentiment card.  I put acetate behind the sentiment so it would be raised up from the white background.  This makes the sentiment cast a shadow on the white background which I liked.  Ok, I know, remember the “law of diminishing returns”.  In this case, the extra time to draw and fussy cut out the acetate was worth it.