The Maui Stamper

The tree from Thoughts and Prayers is just right for a masculine card.  It lends itself to earth tones and has such a balanced, solid feeling that makes it so suitable for special occasions:

• Thoughts and Prayers, Woodgrain, Vintage Vogue and Inspired by Nature Stamp sets
• Very Vanilla, Old Olive and Not Quite Navy card stock
• Old Olive, Soft Suede and Not Quite Navy Classic ink pads
• Soft Suede and Not Quite Navy Stampin’ Write markers and Blender pen
• Aquapainter, Stampin’ Sponge, SAMJ and Ribbon Originals Elementary ribbbon

And now the very astute of you are thinking “Ha!  The abundant sea air has finally driven this woman bonkers!  There’s no Vintage Vogue here – she is so obsessed with that stamp set that she’s hallucinating!”  Ah, my friends, behold the inside of the card:

And here you have your Vintage Vogue, ever so slightly crooked despite multiple attempts AND the Stamp-a-ma-jig.  I decided it was meant to be this way.

To create the multiple colored effect with the tree and the border for the inside, I inked the stamp in Old Olive and used a blender pen to selectively remove the Old Olive ink.  It’s very simple to go back and add in the color that you want with a Stampin’ Write marker (Soft Suede for the tree trunk, Not Quite Navy as flowers on the border).  This has the advantage of being faster than inking the entire stamp with markers, and it also helps avoid the dreaded “skipped rubber” when you are using only markers and miss a spot entirely.

This card was made for my son, who was Confirmed over the weekend.  We are quite proud of him, and I thought you might enjoy one final photo:

True confession:  I made him stand on the step below us.  He’s as tall as his dad  (or perhaps even taller, I haven’t measured today).